Ræðismannaráðstefna: Guðfinna S. Bjarnadóttir

Ráðstefna fyrir kjörræðismenn Íslands erlendis
Reykjavík, 2.-5. September 2001

Ræður og erindi

Dr. Guðfinna S. Bjarnadóttir, Rector of the Reykjavik University
"Higher education in Iceland and future opportunities"

3. september 2001

Skýringamyndir


Dear honorary council members, ladies and gentlemen,

It is an honour to be able to speak here today and I will share in my fellow citizens appreciation of your work for us. Thank you so much.

I will talk about higher education in Iceland and some future opportunities that I see. I think these are exciting times for Iceland. I think there is a lot of energy and not only hydroelectricity and geothermal energy, but we also have a lot of energy in our people. And of course as a university person I will talk about our people and what we are doing in the university education. My outline this morning or afternoon actually is a little bit of introduction. Just some data about the universities here and then introducing to you the ones that are operating. In your views they may be small, in our views they are growing a lot. Thirdly I would like to speak on behalf of my university which we call Reykjavik University, just an introduction, and some opportunities at the end.

We have in Iceland the average number of years a student goes to school is 17,7 years. It's higher than most of other countries, and it's higher than the average in the OECD which is 16,4 years. Also, in terms of number of students in Iceland, we have got 12.000 students, studying in the different universities throughout the country, most of them here in Reykjavik, but also we have 2.000 plus students abroad. We don't know exactly the number but we fund over 1.700 with student loans, so there probably are some more. So I}m just saying 2.000 plus.

With regard to how old they are when they enter higher university, the average age of a person entering on the first year, in my university last year, was 24 years of age. And what these students have done, is that they have worked during summers most of them so they got acquainted with our industries, if you will. They also have probably one or two years of work experience. Of course there are a few older students, the 50 year olds that eschew the average. I think the real average is about 22, to be quite honest, but they normally have studied until they are 20 years old when they can get into a university, because we have this college degree or a college years from 16 years of age until about 20, and then they can enter universities.

Also I want to point out one interesting data that about 20 percent of our students now study abroad, and like myself I was so fortunate to study in the United States and I am forever grateful for that. I spent about 12 years in the US, studying and then working, but so many of us have gone abroad so I look at people in my school. There is a gentleman who has been in Britain for the longest time, he is a real gentleman. And then we have got people from Denmark, they know how to "hygge sig". And then we have got people from Singapore, we have got people from different areas of the world and they all come together and we can examine best practises, from the Danes, from the Swedes, from the Canadians, from the United States, from Singapore, where we want to listen and see what are the best practises. We've been there, the 20 percent of the students, and we tend to come back to Iceland, which is interesting, so you have got a little bit of what you have here in this room.

The gentleman that I work with among the most comes from Denmark and we have so different views on how to do things, but that makes us very rich. It is to be able to mix those different things.

With regard to the predicted number of university students in the coming years, this is from a gentleman, dr. Jón Torfi Jónasson, who has studied a lot the trend in terms of the number of students, so we are expecting like so many other nations to get more and more students to go to higher education. Many of these people who are maybe my age, they did'nt go to university, they want to come back. They want to study because there is a thinking I think in Iceland, and many other countries as well, that there is so much value in education, that your best investment or among your best investments is to invest in yourselves.

So, we all see this trend and this predicted line is topping at a sigmoid curve topping at 500%, we don't know if that is a true prediction but what we are seeing is a steady increase in the number of students.

Now I would like to introduce to you a little bit, just to give a glimpse, and I am sorry to say that many of you know probably more about these schools than I do, but fortunately this may be some information, good information, for the rest of you.

University of Iceland is THE university in Iceland, even I have to say that. They are based from 1911 on some different schools that got together at that time, and they are a university with different degrees that they award, and they have a lot of international correspondance, students coming abroad; I was a student there myself earlier, so I am very grateful for this school. They have about 7.000 students.

University of Akureyri, very special to us also. Probably most of you know where Akureyri is. It is in the northern part of Iceland, some people say it is the capital of the north of Iceland. Akureyri is a beautiful town, if you haven't been there, please; this is where my ancestors were born. No, it is a beautiful town. But, University of Akureyri; interestingly Akureyri is about 15.000 people, if I recall correctly, but the school has a thousand students almost. Very interesting. And they have been thinking of a strategy where they go into villages and towns throughout Iceland and they open up little camps, so this is a very good university as well.

Now, Icelandic University of Education is also a growing university. They have now about 1.800 students, and a half of them are distance learning students from all over the country and the other half go to the university stationed here in Reykjavik.

The Icelandic College of Engineering and Technology has about 750 students and they have close relationships with some of the universities in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries.

Icelandic University of Art is a new one, 230 people, and wonderful artists studying there.

Hvanneyri Agricultural School, very small, 35 people.

And then we have Reykjavik University, which I represent here, and we have about 950 students. Actually to be correct it is 956 students.

I would like to tell you a little bit about Reykjavik University. It was established in 1998, September 4th 1998. We got the building September 3rd 1998 so we are talking three years. It has three departments and 956 students.

The departments are: School of Computer Science, School of Business, and then School of Executive Education. And we are chartered by the Chamber of Commerce, and they gave us a mission in the charter to increase the competitiveness of Icelandic businesses.

We have three guiding principles, and again remember I am from America partly, so what I had seen in so many of the progressive schools there is a larger emphasis on the word globalisation, a larger emphasis on the concept of entrepreneurship and of course technology development. So I had seen the trend in the universities that were a kind of outstanding in my opinion but I am also seeing this in other countries as well.

So these three guiding principles is what we founded the university on. We set entrepreneurship, technology development and globalisation. And whenever we make decisions we funnel them through these three principles, and we say: Are we true to our course here? Are we doing what we were going to do? Our goal is of course to help students become analytical. I want them very much to be able to analyze, to shape, to create, to be strong in their analysis. But I also want them to be practical doers.

Many scholars today say: Ah, ah you are mixing too much here, but I say: go to the middle ages, go to the thirteen hundreds in Iceland, where we raised the highest, when we did the Njáls saga. We were of course very broadly minded when we were studying there, and I say to myself, the students, yes, we want them to be analytical and doers but we also want them to help build a character for the crazy life out there. Sorry to speak it that way, but crazy in the sense that there is so much beat, so many things to absorb, so many different paths, so you young student be strong, and we'll help you build character and by the way, we emphasise that all the teachers learn all the names of all the students, so we address them by names. And they know, when they take a seat in the Reykjavik University, there were thousand, for example that applied for our school of business, that for every one that entered we had to say no to two people. So 33% got in and we tell them, you have got a seat and you better keep that seat and you better be strong, so we do care for them as individuals, because I believe if we care for them as individuals, they will bring to the society a stronger society with a lot of creative doers so I am hoping that this will work. I know, and I should be humble, give me ten years, but listen, I think it's going to work, I'm sure it is going to work.

We also have an approach that's called problem based learning approach, and what we do, instead of emphasising for example heavy mathematics in the very, very start we emphasise something really, really fun so that they really want to educate themselves and then when they get to the blockage where, because they don't know more math, for example, they beg for math.

In the first year and the second semester they can't rotate things, for example, on the computer in the computer school and so they really want to learn that. So what I'm saying problem based learning, yes in every class they have to do practical projects, they have to test out a theory. And this is an important part of what we are, but also we want them to be academics, so it's a kind of an interesting mixture.

I want to talk about the guiding principles of the school a little bit. We teach entrepreneurship in the first year. I was talking to some friends from Belfast earlier about teaching entrepreneurship, and I know because we did it the first year, second year, third year of operating the school that it can be taught. And instead of thinking, yes, how to teach entrepreneurship, we said, who teaches it the best and then we bought them a ticket to Iceland to help us build that course. And it has been a fantastic course for us, and when they learn it in the first year, in the second year and the third year they can apply what they learn. And they do outstanding business plans. It's a very entrepreneurial school. We do look at the Internet every now and then and we look for best practises. It's a very important part of our philosophy, it's to look who else has solved that problem.

So, also we are participating in an annual competition on entrepreneurship. And this new venture fund in Iceland, it's the Morgunblaðið, the biggest newspaper, it's some of the banks and some KP&G. We are partners in bringing about this competition and we get tens more likely than hundreds of business plans every year, and now we are entering a European competition on entrepreneurship.

Now I want to tell you, Iceland is an entrepreneurial nation. Some of you may have heard about GEM, in the sense it's called a Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, GEM. It's a study done by many nations led by Babson School in, I think it's near Boston, United States, Babson College, and London Business School, they run these measures on entrepreneurial activities in countries. In a GEM research that was done in 1999 the highest level of participation in entrepreneurship among countries in the world was in the United States; 8,4% of the population were participating in entrepreneurial activities. In Finland it was 1,4%.

We ran this study in Iceland. Seperately I had a Gallup poll just ask these kind of questions that the GEM study had done and I got so high numbers that I hid them because I thought I am probably asking the wrong questions, because my number was 21, but it was so much higher than USA and so much higher than the other countries that were participating, all the G7 countries were participating, so I just put it into some corner and I did'nt share it with many people but then a new study came out just about a few months ago. The new venture fund and Deloitte & Touche and some other companies examined the same questions from the GEM and they got 19%. So now I can publish this and tell you that 19% of people in the age 18 to 75 say that they have been establishing or participating in establishing a new company in the past year. It's a very, very high percentage.

Now, in this GEM report, it is an outstanding research this GEM Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. You will find it on a web called entreworld.org. And the Kaufmann Center for Creative Leadership in the US is sponsoring this as well as many governments throughout the world.

But anyway, I just wanted to let you know that entrepreneurial concepts are in Iceland and we are entrepreneurial people. Technology development, of course this new school has an electronic library and all of the courses have hlm-pages. On the homepages you have visuals, you have sounds, you have discussion threads, news of a course and different things like that, so it is very, very interesting to be a student in this kind of a new world, if you will, and our students are enjoying this a lot. But they are coming to class, also, most of them, but we have distance learning, about 150 of our students are distance learning students.

Now, I'm not sure you know this number but in the year 2000 Price, Waterhouse, Cooper's did a research and they said, 80% of people age 16 – 75 use the Internet. Now, 80% is a lot but I think it's even higher today, and they said it is rated by World Economic Forum as number 2 or 3 in the world as to how many people are accessing the Internet. And the average number of hours was 5 hours.

In terms of Internet servers and using that we are of course also rated very high by the World Economic Forum. Also, interestingly, our high-tech export has grown a lot in the past years, so since 1985 it has increased five times so if you look at export in Iceland it's very disappointing to see that it's a flat-liner, if you will. But bear in mind that from 1995 to 2000 the economy grew 25% so my number of percentage of export is based on percentage of GNP. So of course if it was actual kronas it would be a lot higher.

Interestingly, it is high-tech, this number actually includes fishery equipment, and high-tech. So medical equipment, equipment for the fisheries, different things like that, and that's on the increase with us. Also I'm happy to say that pharmaceuticals, different other companies are doing quite well in export, but we need to do so much better in export, this is disappointing.

Going back to another guiding principle is globalisation. We have now joined, remember we are three years old, we have joined some of the finest universities in providing an MBA degree. Together, we call it global e-management. I'll show you a little later. We have benchmarked globally best practises. I believe, just like Einstein said once, and just like Newton said once, I saw in America a public television show, that showed Einstein in an interview. It was in his office, I will never forget! And the young man who interviewed him he was so humble and so respectful and he asked him something like: "How come you are so smart!" Not in these exact words but why could you do what we mere humans could'nt. And he said: "Listen, I had heard it from Newton and I'd seen it before that if you are humble enough to climb upon the shoulders of the giants who stood before you, you can see so far!"

Benchmarking best practises, just stand on these shoulders and be humble enough to know that you cannot yourself solve the problems, so you'll find some of the best practises, you'll find some of the best schools and then you'll join some kind of a partnership. We have now a partnership with a unicon, university consortium, with Harvard, MIT, and various other good schools throughout the world. We are the second Scandinavian university to participate with this so our executive program is very, very good. We get Harvard professors, we get all kinds of folks to come teach our folks and also we have Management Center Europe which is a counterpart of AMA in the United States, American Management Association, we bring these lecturers in, and also there is a faculty exchange this weekend. We had a teacher from Atlanta, Georgia teaching economics, we had one Icelandic teacher and I think there was a teacher from Italy as well. So it's interesting to understand that it's all about people working together and thinking not that you can find it yourself but somebody else may help you.

20% of Icelanders, like I said earlier, of Icelandic students now, are educated abroad and then they get together to build a great variety of groups like we are here today. And so we together can see a broader view. Many of these turn back and become professors at this school so it's very nice.

We have a joint declaration of European ministers of education; some people refer to this as the Bologna declaration where we have more standardised description of courses, number of credit hours that we give per unit of work and all that, and we want to increase mobility between students of Europe so we are participating in that of course.

The United Nations university is here. We have two programs, the geothermal training program and also the fisheries training program that the minister mentioned earlier. And then there are various programs at the University of Iceland teaching to foreigners who would like to learn more about Nordic sagas or arctic situations and different things like that so there is a lot of interchange in the university setting. This is our GEM program, it's our global e-commerce program and it's a really good concept. We found them on the Internet and we decided to meet with them and since one of the most prominent person in this program is a Dane we sent the Danish guy, I mean the Icelandic guy who learnt in Denmark and they could speak the same language and we could introduce to them: this is Copenhagen Business School, this is University of Denver, we have the university of Cologne, 600 year old university working with a 3 year old, so we have a lot to learn.

We have ESSADE in Barcelona, we have Erasmus in Rotterdam and different, wonderful schools that are teaching us a lot. But we are also exporting knowledge, our teachers go teach them also. It's an interchange. And when the students go through the MBA program they get a joint degree from everybody.

I think Icelanders, like most peoples, should emphasise knowledge even more than before. The energy in the people and the knowledge in the people that can be transported and exported and really I think it's the biggest opportunity for us, is to emphasise education, and it is so interesting to think that the education comes from everywhere. We get our Phd's somewhere and we bring the knowledge back home. And then I think increasing access to knowledge; I had learned about Singapore, that they had tried to make or maybe are making an intellectual island connecting everybody; all the social services, all the different ministries all the different banking, all the different homes, we Icelanders need more of the access through that media of knowledge.

We also would like to increase cooperation with universities and with companies with research. In my little university there is a world class, cutting edge research being done on some Internet aspects and it's a system approach in computer science. Very, very interesting.

We would like to have more global knowledge transfer for knowledge expertise to be taught and sold and services and products to be exchanged. I would like to bring some programs abroad from our universities; bring the Harvard people, bring the different folks that are working with us maybe to some of the universities elsewhere; courses, programs, distance learning, I think there are great opportunities for our schools to be exporters of knowledge. And I would like to one day do this on a larger scale. We would like to export international executive education and I Iook forward to the day where we are exporting this kind of knowledge, and people know of it.

I'll give you one example. ESE in Barcelona, McKenzie the consulting group, and the university I represent, Reykjavik University, we did a joint program last winter. It was a great program. We had here in Reykjavik 17 nationalities of people coming to study e-commerce, and we had a gentleman from Taiwan, we had a person from America, we had two Danes, we had two people from S-Africa, so we had different kinds of people joining together, and then we took them out to the glaciers, and they loved it. And there are a lot of opportunities, both to import people here from abroad to give them a great experience of best learning and then of a great nation or a country that we would like to share with them as well.

But I think the opportunities are there for higher education, I think we are not necessarily the best in the world but we are very interesting in terms of our varied background and our willingness to explore different things.

I'm very grateful to be able to tell you this. One day in the future maybe this will all have happened but for now we are really making our marks. We took some of the first steps to visit our embassy in Peking and then we would like to go further on. But thank you again.