TASSA represented at Fletcher School Conference on Turkey

On April 11 TASSA President Professor Haluk Unal and Fletcher School Associate Dean Bhaskar Chakravorti had a Fireside Chat on "The State of Human Capital: Turkey's Intellectual Contributions" at the Fletcher School Conference, Turkey’s Turn: Perennial Linchpin or emerging hub? Excerpts from that conversation is as follows:

Chakravorti: Are there indeed two or more Turkeys in operation? Especially with approach to education?

Unal: I should start raising a question: Why nations gain respect (as opposed to Acemoglu’s “why nations fail”). Respect is correlated to the contributions you make to human life; this could happen through sports, fine arts, literature, and the intellectual contribution you make.

In terms of intellectual contribution, there is indeed a black and white issue. There is one intellectual contribution generated in Turkey and one by the Turkish Science Diaspora. Let’s talk about the black first. In Turkey, in 2000, there were 100 universities. In 2012, there are about 180 universities. Is this good or bad? The answer depends on what you’re looking for, but I will submit that it is debatable how many of the 180 are universities as we all understand. I talk to the presidents of these universities. They tell me in state universities the teaching load of an assistant professor is 35 – 40 hours per week; if you try to teach that many hours, I can gurantee you your brain will be dead. How is this physically done? And why? Because academicians are paid in pennies and they need to make up the difference by teaching overlad. Such heavy teaching load takes serious time away from research.

In 2012, I looked at the number of patents received in the U.S. by researchers from Turkey. US Patent office publishes the distribution of the patents received by country of origin. When we look at the distribution of these patents in EU, Germany is number one with 15,000 patents, and UK and France are in the 5000 club. In contrast, Turkey has only 55 patents. I know individuals who live in the US and have more than 55. You have to give this number some perspective. Greece has 93 patents. Worldwide, Japan has 52,000 patents, South Korea has 14,000 patents received in one year. Saudi Arabia passes us by a margin, 172.

Chakravorti: how closely does the patent count reflect the quality of education that the students receive, or do they have to be retrained by employees?

Unal: There is a two-tier quality of education. One of them is the foundation universities and the other state universities. State universities are at a great disadvantage because of the sheer size of numbers, lack of faculty, quality of faculty, and lack of funding. YOK and TUBITAK is trying hard to support research but the needs of state universities are so great they can’t help in a meaningful manner.

Chakravorti: if you now talk about the Turkish Diaspora… what’s the profile there?

Unal: The only study on the Science Diaspora is the one done by TASSA. Our database shows about 1500 - 1600 faculty in the US, and then about 800 scientists in addition.

These researchers are doing amazing work and their creativity and hard work is also recognized by the awards they receive. For example, between 2009 and 2012 five scientists received Presidential Early Career Award from US presidents (Ahmet Yildiz, Nihal Altan-Bonnet, Hatice Altug, Aydogan Ozcan and İlke Arslan). We have 17 faculty members in Ivy League schools. Recently TASSA awarded to 8 scintists Young Scolar Award. Their research is breath taking. I could go on and on..

Also, I want to talk about the number of Turkish students in the US. Yesterday, it was mentioned that Turkey has about 12,000 students in the United States (tenth largest) during the 2010-2011 academic year. However, would you be surprised if I said that Saudi Arabia had about 22,000 students in the US during 2010-11? And of course China is leading the pack and they are hugely subsidizing the higher education system in the US.

People are talking about the success of South Korea but rarely brought up is the fact that large numbers of students come to US for education. At the end of 2011, they had 73,000 students in US. So, proportional to its population, South Korea sends .15% to US for education. Turkey, which has similar population size to Korea, has only 0.016% of its population being educated in the US. We should really increase the number of students that study here.

In terms of who gets what kind of education in the US, Chinese come more for graduate work and mostly study mangement, students from India comes for engineering and computer science. Korea is really not concentrated any one subject. And Turks are coming to study engineering and social sciences. It is really the engineering that drives the results.

For further information about the Conference visit http://fletcher.tufts.edu/IBGC/turkeys-turn