Knock, knock, knocking

The world is knocking on Finland’s door to discover the secret of high quality secondary level education. What is it that enables Finnish high schools to remain consistently at the top of the international league table in maths, science, languages and virtually everything? Most Finnish parents, students, teachers and educational administrators have some vague hunch about the ingredients in the successful brew and the recipe that combines them so effectively. However, such impressionistic notions are not enough for the policymakers of other countries, such as Germany, which languishes somewhere far down in the second division. Instead, the German regional governments have been sending teams of experts to Finland to collect systematic data as well as anecdotal information, in order to formulate policy changes in their own country that can enable them to emulate our success.

Somewhere in the wafer thin space between high school and university Finland inexplicably tosses away its advantage. Our top ranked university (Helsinki) appears somewhere around number 108 in the international table of research quality and academic excellence. No other university in Finland scores within the top 200 worldwide, nor anywhere near. Indeed, most of them are at such lowly positions that it would be embarrassing to list the institutions that are considered their peers in this global competition. I’ll return in a future column to structural issues (student selection, evaluation, curricula, teaching methods) that contribute to this lamentable outcome.

For now I will focus on one specific issue that somehow underpins any chance of future success, namely our ability to recruit and resource the academic stars of tomorrow. One tool, properly applied, now enables us – or indeed, any country or institution in Europe – to attract and exploit the best brains in the world, and propel us to our rightful place as league leaders. The European Research Council (ERC), established only in 2006, now provides large research grants to individual PIs in the startup phase of their academic careers. Open competition ensures that the funds go to support innovative projects in those institutions that can recruit the best scientists, and to those countries that maintain the best infrastructure for research. Distributing the funds ‘geographically’ or according to any political criteria is excluded.

The lesson is clear: if we can offer enough to a young star to persuade him or her to relocate to a Finnish university, he/she is likely to repay the favour many times over, both in hard cash and in terms of academic success. From the viewpoint of boosting research competitiveness across the continent as a whole this instrument is obviously beneficial: far preferable to a bureaucrat trying to work out what should be funded and where. But to enjoy its benefits, Finnish universities need to be far bolder. Recruiting young scientists from the ‘second tier’ is worse than useless. We would be diverting funds from established projects, yet getting nothing in return. On the other hand, if we don’t make a better offer than is available elsewhere we’ll get nobody to come at all.

The pool of gifted candidates is broad, many of them currently working in North America or Asia as postdocs or junior faculty, but also some based in other European countries. There is absolutely no reason to restrict such recruitment to expat Finns – that would simply exclude 99% of all possible candidates. But we do need to think about all the practical steps needed to make relocation genuinely attractive to non-Finns. Startup and relocation packages must also lead somewhere. A generously resourced five-year position, boosted by the endowment of ERC funding, and crowned with success, but which does not lead to a secure career, is simply not attractive.

Ambitious young scientists also have long-term needs, aspirations and rights which cannot be ignored. Anyone who would relocate on the basis of a time-limited offer, and then succeeds in research, would simply find him/herself on the job market once again after 5 years. In that case, there is absolutely no guarantee – or even likelihood – of the candidate then choosing Finland as a permanent base. We would thus be pouring investment funds into someone else’s academic system. Five-year positions, even if offered to the brightest stars, must therefore be tenure-track to be credible and effective. To moan that Finland does not have a tenure-track system, so it can’t be done, is no answer: this is reason enough to invent one.

I could continue for many pages, outlining concrete steps that I believe are needed to make such an initiative work. However, I have space only to reiterate that it is worth attempting only if we are prepared to resource it properly. To do so in the current climate also means that we must redistribute funds from other areas, such as the useless administration that its proliferating in our universities.

Beyond that, we need to copy the example of those countries that are investigating Finland, in order to learn how to improve their secondary education systems. In other words, we must study what lies behind the success of those countries that already punch far above their weight in the ERC competition, and then implement changes to our own academic system that can enable us to emulate them or do even better. Since ERC publishes full sets of statistics on where the money is going and how this compares with ‘demand’, no guesswork is required to identify the countries which we need to imitate. It is also clear that, over and above national successes, some specific institutions have been incredibly successful in the competition, and not only the ‘obvious’ ones such as Oxford or the Max-Planck Institutes.

Remarkably, even though a few large counties, notably the UK, are doing well, the most notable successes are smaller countries, comparable in size to Finland. This surely gives hope that we ourselves can compete more successfully (currently we are rather average, which must be considered poor given our large nominal investment in R&D). The two most successful countries in comparison with their population, GDP or any other relevant denominator, are Switzerland and Israel. The Netherlands, only a few times the size of Finland, is also doing much better than we are. In the list of individual institutions succeeding way beyond expectation, four or five stand out, two of them in another small country, Belgium (Universities of Ghent and Leuven); others, not surprisingly, from Switzerland (EPF Lausanne, ETH Zurich) and Israel (Hebrew University, Weizmann Institute).

The message is simple: we should be sending out spies to look at what these countries and institutions are doing, which enables them to recruit the very top stars of science, ensure their success in international competition, then get the best out of them as career academics.

Howy Jacobs on akatemiaprofessori ja työskentelee lääketieteellisen teknologian instituutissa (IMT) Tampereen yliopistossa. Professoriliitto valitsi hänet Vuoden Professoriksi 2009.