(3 of 3)
University of Alberta president
Alberta's natural resources, though abundant, are finite. If we want to remain a "have" province, we need to invest now in in renewable resources with a high payoff: namely, learning, ideas, and discovery.
Vigorous investment in post-secondary education is a sure-fire method to convert our present resource wealth into fully renewable resources that will provide a hundredfold returns for decades to come. We must catch up with and surpass other jurisdictions: only 15% of Alberta high school graduates move on to a post-secondary institutions, compared with a Canada-wide average of 19%. Furthermore, we are well behind dynamic and promising technological countries like Finland when it comes to people with advanced degrees.
We need to build classrooms and labs that are hotbeds of creativity and collaboration across disciplines. Alberta's competitive advantage in the 21st century will rest in talented people who can combine knowledge and ingenuity in radical new ways. These areas will be vital in the knowledge economy. Extracting the utmost value from our remaining non-renewable resources requires both skilled and educated people, and building new industries based on renewable resources will demand exceptional creativity and social ingenuity.
Alberta has been visionary in creating endowments for medical and science research, resulting in dazzling successes like the Edmonton Protocol for diabetes and nanotechnology. Now we need a comparable endowment to spur discovery in the social sciences, humanities and fine arts.
We must promote a highly differentiated, thoroughly networked, completely seamless higher-education system through our Campus Alberta system. We already have a strong foundation for it. Our university is ready to help lead this effort, and our goal is classic Albertan: straightforward and ambitious. We hope to develop one of the world's great universities, to be in the global "Top Twenty by 2020."
This is a great opportunity for Albertans and for our government. Let's inspire great achievement and dare to discover.