Can the Minerva Model of Learning disrupt higher Education...04-14

Traditional universities — including Ivy League schools — fail to deliver the kind of learning that ensures employability. That perspective inspired Ben Nelson, founder and CEO of the six-year-old Minerva Schools in San Francisco. His goal is to reinvent higher education and to provide students with high-quality learning opportunities at a fraction of the cost of an undergraduate degree at an elite school. While tuition at top-tier universities in the U.S. can run more than $40,000 a year, Minerva charges $12,950 a year, according to its website. In a recent test, its students showed superior results compared to traditional universities while also attracting a large number of applicants.

Minerva is a disruptor and the traditional university establishment needs to adapt to its model and perhaps improve on it, according to Jerry (Yoram) Wind, emeritus marketing professor at Wharton. Nelson, who was previously president of Snapfish, an online photo hosting and printing service, and Wind spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about why the higher education model needs to change, and how the Minerva model could help.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: Jerry, where is the future of education headed?

Jerry Wind: The future is now. It has been here for a while, and with Minerva, Ben has recreated the university of the future. Ben, describe briefly the Minerva concept, and then go into the recent findings of the CLA report (Minerva’s Collegiate Learning Assessment test).

Ben Nelson: We refer to Minerva as having been built as an “intentional university.” Everything about the design of the institution, what we teach, how we teach and where we teach it is based on what we know, and through empirical evidence, is effective.

In what we teach, we are classical in our approach, even though we’re [also] modern and progressive in the way we teach. For example, if you think about the purpose of a liberal arts education, or what the great American universities purport to teach, they will say ‘We teach you how to think critically, how to problem-solve, how to think about the way the world works and to be global, and how to communicate effectively.

“Universities … basically teach you academic subject matter and they hope you pick up all of the other stuff by accident.”
–Ben Nelson

When you actually look at how universities attempt to do it, they basically teach you academic subject matter and they hope you pick up all of the other stuff by accident.

We decided to have a curriculum that teaches these things, that breaks down critical thinking, creative thinking, effective interactions, and effective communications into component parts. [We wanted to make] sure that we don’t just teach them conceptually, and don’t just teach them in a context, but actually explain the concept and then have our students apply them actively from context to context to context.

Knowledge@Wharton: Could you share an example of how you do that?

Nelson: One aspect of critical thinking, for example, is evaluating claims. There are various ways of evaluating claims. Sometimes you use logic, sometimes you use reasoning, which is different than logic, sometimes you do statistical analysis which is different than the other two, and sometimes you just think of a counter example.

Now there are different [types] of critical thinking. One example: making a decision tradeoff. Should we go down Path A or Path B? The technique for making a decision tradeoff is perhaps thinking through the cost-benefit analysis, which is a type of critical thinking.

If you say ‘I’m going to teach you critical thinking’ and you just try to teach it as a thing you will never succeed. [It is important to] go through it systemically and do the component parts – that’s the first aspect.

The second aspect is if you teach a person an idea, say evaluation of claims, the mind gets trained in a particular context. When somebody makes a claim, let’s say on an investment opportunity, or a political claim, the mind doesn’t really transfer those skills from one field to another. This is one of the fundamental problems of transferrable education. The way that you teach that is to provide exercise and applications in multiple fields.

How we teach is also radically different. The science of learning shows that the dissemination of information [through] lectures and test-based methodology simply doesn’t work. Six months after the end of a traditional lecture and test-based class, 90% of the material you were supposed to have learned is gone from your mind. In an active learning environment you struggle through information, and two years after the end of the class you retain 70%.

All of our classes, despite [being] small seminars with 15 to 19 students at a time, are done via live video online where there’s a camera pointed at every student’s face. The students are actively engaged with the materials, [and it is] not the professor lecturing — professors are not allowed to talk for more than four minutes at a time. The students get feedback on how they apply what they [learn].
“Six months after the end of a traditional lecture and test-based class, 90% of the material you were supposed to have learned is gone from your mind.”
–Ben Nelson

Lastly [it is about] where we teach. We have created a university that takes advantage of the best the world has to offer. Being a Penn graduate, I always gravitated towards the idea of the urban campus. Our students live in the heart of cities in residence halls together, and have a very strong community. They spend their first year in the heart of San Francisco, but over the next three years across six semesters, as a cohort, as a group, they will travel and live in six different countries. So in their second year they go to Seoul and Hyderabad, and then to Berlin and Buenos Aires, then London and Taipei, and come back to San Francisco for a month to manifest their education and graduate.
Wind: While the concept is appealing, does it work? Describe the CLA test, and then talk about the implications of [your approach].

Nelson: The Collegiate Learning Assessment is provided by a third party nonprofit that has been testing and assessing students’ progress on critical thinking, problem-solving, scientific reasoning and effective communication skills for many years. It’s been administered to hundreds of thousands of students across hundreds of universities. It is administered to students at the beginning of their first year and at the end of their fourth year, and so you can measure [the] progress of students.

We provided [our students] the first-year test just before they started the first class at the beginning of the year. But rather than waiting four years, we gave our students the fourth-year test at the end of their first year, Eight months later, the results shocked us. Not only did our students after eight months have the highest composite score in the country compared to any other university that was assessing their students, the delta improvement they accomplished was higher than what the CLA has seen any university accomplish over four years.

Knowledge@Wharton: What drove those results?

Nelson: The silly answer would be to say, ‘Oh we’re brilliant and we’re great, and look at how amazing what we do is.’ The fact of the matter is we’ve got a lot of room to grow and improve. These results in many ways are much more damning of the existing system than they are generating praise for our brilliance.

We have taken publicly available scientifically published data on how the mind works. We’ve broken down the things that every university says that they teach or that they want to teach, and merely spent time putting together a curriculum that does that, and we’ve offered it to students. We’ve just done what anybody who would rationally approach trying to create a solution to a problem do.

I would bet you that if you had 100 institutions or 100 groups of people that were to do the same thing we would have done from scratch, we would have probably been better than some of them, maybe most of them, but not all of them. There would be some that on their first try would be even better than [us].

Wind: This is the value of idealized design. As opposed to trying to fix the current educational system by adding another course or trying to create a cross-disciplinary course, [Minerva] reexamines the whole purpose of education.

They didn’t go far enough, which is they are still within an academic context, and probably they will relax the academic context that is [with] semesters and the like, and get even better results. But even within this academic context and constraints, what they have done is amazing  –  the curriculum, the concept, and the way it’s developed for the benefit of the learner, and not the benefit of the faculty.

The [first] implication is, if you had a choice and you wanted to go to a university now, where would you go? If you want really great education, go to Minerva; [but if] you want to network, go to one of the top five schools — Penn, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and MIT. Minerva offers probably a different network than the traditional ones because it is a network of people who are willing to do it.

Nelson: Last year, for our third class ever, we received 20,400 applications. That is more applicants than MIT or Dartmouth got. The network you get in a Wharton or Harvard or Yale or what-have-you is [of] a certain kind. It is overwhelmingly American, [with] 80% or 90% from the U.S., and usually from particular socioeconomic backgrounds. Even though there is some diversity, it’s heavily weighted [in favor of that profile].

The Minerva network is radically different because 80% of our students are not from the U.S. — they come from 61 countries. We received these 20,000 applications from 179 countries. The experience and the network you build as you travel and live as a resident in these seven countries is unparalleled. If you want a global footprint, that’s what we provide.

Wind: The current educational system does not work. Implication two is that [universities] have to realize that they are being disrupted. At this stage [it is on a] small scale, but if other universities start adopting it, it can [become] large scale. [Minerva is] the disruptor here, and the signal to the legacy universities is, our model does not work. Stop trying to fix it by adding another Band-Aid, but try to rethink the educational system. And here you have a wonderful blueprint that works.

Nelson: We just wrote a book called Building the Intentional University, which is a blueprint for how other universities can create their own Minervas or reform in that sense. We are a residential university that grants undergraduate degrees with 120 credit hours, with majors and minors and electives and a general education curriculum. We are plug-and-play for universities. We offer potential salvation from disruption.

“The future is now. It has been here for a while, and with Minerva, Ben has recreated the university of the future.”
–Jerry (Yoram) Wind

What I have worried about is the other kind of disruptive force that can attack universities [and be] destructive, in the sense that in six months you get a high school degree, go to a boot camp and then get a six-figure job being a software programmer. We have put together an educational experience that enables university graduates to be better prepared than [with that] six-month boot camp. Because they are able to do higher level problem solving, they are going to be [software] architects as opposed to the programmers. They’re going to the ones that in a world of Watson and artificial intelligence and outsourcing are going to be much more future-proof.

Wind: An increasing number of people view employability as being critical, and a traditional university degree does not guarantee employability, [but] the new non-degree programs guarantee you a [job] position.

Knowledge@Wharton: Three or four years ago, a big potential disruptor was the so-called MOOC, or the Massive Open Online Course. A number of platforms came up [such as] Coursera, Udacity and EdX. It seemed like they were going to be disruptive, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. What happened with that so-called disruption and why did it fail?

Nelson: The jury is still somewhat out on that, and let me give you an example of what I think is happening on the surface. MIT had a master’s program in supply chain logistics, and it cost $60,000 for a two-semester program. As an experiment, [they put the] first semester on MOOCs, and rather than charging $30,000 for it, [gave] it away for free. If you want to get credit for it pay $250, [write] an exam, and then if you score well you [go] to campus, do a one-semester supplement, pay $30,000 and get a master’s degree.

This [halves] the cost of higher education for a master’s degree. Imagine if the Ivy League – or any university – [extended that to] all the courses they give academic credit for. Of the $250,000 that they are used to collecting and are reliant on [for each degree course, they] can only collect $100,000 because $150,000 is effectively given away for free. So far no university has an incentive to rock the boat too much on this. [However,] just because the disruption does not happen immediately doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Wind: The concern is that especially for the leading universities, it’s an excuse not to innovate. They are saying, ‘Look how innovative we are; we have MOOCs, or we offer classes on Coursera,’ and basically the rest of the education stays exactly the same way as it was before. Some of the findings suggest that less than 5% of the people who start ever finish the courses on Coursera or EdX. But there are some encouraging signs that if you add to the traditional Coursera course or EdX interaction, and if you provide some more gamification principles in terms of getting involved, you can increase the numbers significantly.

The advantage of this — with MIT, Stanford, Penn and other universities putting all of these courses online — is that the role of the faculty becomes easier as a curator. This is the fundamental change that we have to see in education.

Knowledge@Wharton: [In addition to] a network, one other factor that the Ivy League universities offer is the brand. When you have this innovative model like Minerva, how do you establish a brand that is acceptable to students as well as employers?

Nelson: Minerva was built as a positive brand. When you meet somebody at Minerva you know that they have … been given systematic frameworks of analysis that they can apply effectively to the rest of the world. Our challenge is to propagate that brand, to get people aware of it. The good news is that the internet is a very good way of disseminating information. Brand building in today’s world doesn’t take centuries; it doesn’t even take decades.

Wind: The final word on branding is always [from] the consumer. One, the best carrier of the brand, and especially on the positive side, would be the alumni. So the value of the degree, the value of the Minerva experience is a function of how good the alumni are. Two, a lot [depends] of the employability and demand for the Minerva students.

Nelson: It’s too early to tell.

How Diversity Powers Team Performance 01-07

The topic of workplace diversity has vexed businesses and employees for decades. Increasing diversity has long been promoted as the right thing to do, but that notion could be viewed as simplistic and ignoring the deep benefits that inclusion can bring to an organization. Scott Page, a professor of complex systems at the University of Michigan, tackles the issue in his new book, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off In The Knowledge Economy. He discussed why diversity must be more than “feel-good metaphorical statements” on the Knowledge@Wharton show, which airs on SiriusXM channel 111.

Knowledge@Wharton: What drove you to research this topic?

Page: It’s a little bit of a C.P. Snow moment. He was the British academic who said there are two academies: science and arts. Within the University of Michigan or almost any university, you’ve got people in the humanities and in the arts and philosophy departments talking about the need for inclusion on normative grounds, a sort of moral case for a more integrated society. Over in computer science and ecology and business, there are all these people showing in a knowledge economy this incredible value from people who have different perspectives, different ways of looking at problems, different tools.

On one side of campus, there’s a whole bunch of people talking about the pragmatic benefits of diversity. On the other side, people are talking about the normative benefits. They weren’t communicating with one another. I saw this as a real opportunity for a fruitful conversation.

Knowledge@Wharton: Don’t you think this “right thing to do” mindset about diversity feels a little patronizing?

Scott Page: It does in a way. We want our firm to look like America or have people that come from all these different categories, as opposed to asking whether we are bringing in people who can help us fulfill our mission or be better at whatever it is that we do as an organization.

Knowledge@Wharton: Are we seeing a significant shift in companies thinking more deeply about diversity in the workplace?

“The talent of the team depends on having diverse people on that team.”

Page: I think you’re seeing a real shift as the nature of work changes. One of the tropes I use in the book is: Think about a firm that’s hiring people to do physical labor like chopping down trees. In that world, you can figure out someone’s ability, which is how many trees they can chop down. If you’re hiring 10 people, you should hire the 10 best people, and to not hire someone because of their race or religion or gender would be discrimination. Going back to the civil rights movement, that’s how a lot of this was framed. You shouldn’t discriminate. You should hire the person who has the most ability.

Think about Apple: That company generates $2 million in revenue per person. No one in Apple is chopping down any trees; they’re working on really hard problems. As evidence begins to accumulate, it’s becoming clear that you want smart people who think differently, who have been trained differently, went to different schools, have different knowledge bases. The talent of the team depends on having diverse people on that team. This has become something that everyone has started to recognize as more and more data rolls in showing that to be true. You end up with firms recognizing that cognitive diversity is a strategic asset.

Knowledge@Wharton: There are concerns that Silicon Valley is not diverse enough in terms of women working at these companies. Diversity isn’t just people of different backgrounds. There’s also gender diversity as well.

Page: Right. Identity diversity is a difference in who we are. Cognitive diversity is the difference in how we think. If you’re Apple, if you’re Google, if you’re Amazon, the question is, does identity diversity matter? The evidence shows it matters in four ways. The first is syllogism. If you and I come from different identify groups, we have different knowledge bases. You search different things on the web than I search. We read different books. We have different interests.

On some problems, identity diversity correlates with cognitive diversity. It’s also true that if I’m sitting in a room of people who are all trained like me and look like me, I don’t think as hard and don’t feel the need to explain as deeply. Imagine you’re designing a building and put a blind person on your team. You’re going to think about the building entirely differently just because that person is in the room. Or if you put a physically disabled person in the room. Just being around difference, that’s the second thing.

The third one is the things we see as problems vary depending on our identity. Where we want to devote our energies is a function. Having more people from different identity groups in the room just leads to more possibilities, and that is well-documented.

The fourth thing, and I think this is the one that people miss, is that all these women who are not in tech because they just don’t feel comfortable there, or people of color who are not in tech because the culture just doesn’t fit, you’re not only missing out on talent, but you’re also missing out on diversity. Because when you make the pool bigger, you’re just going to get more diversity. Even if women work differently than men, just by having a larger pool, you’d have more diversity.

Knowledge@Wharton: You’re looking at the benefits, but diversity can backfire on companies that don’t commit to a meaningful policy.

“If you don’t bring a lot of diverse lenses to bear, you’re likely to have blind spots and make mistakes.”

Page: Absolutely. If you think of how a consulting company comes in and does an evaluation, they’ll ask, how does this affect people? How does it affect process in terms of the organization? Is there risk? How are competitors responding on a list of dimensions with which you evaluate a business decision? If you don’t bring a lot of diverse lenses to bear, you’re likely to have blind spots and make mistakes.

What I’m trying to do with the book is speak math and logic to metaphor. You know how people say, “Oh, diverse perspectives are useful,” and that sounds like a reasonable thing? You want to ask, what do you mean by diverse perspectives? And what types of perspective are useful? You want this to move in the direction of science and away from feel-good metaphorical statements about different people being in the room.

Knowledge@Wharton: There is a trend of companies wanting to build teams. The days of giving a project to one person and having it done a month later are going away, so the need to have different ideas is more important than ever.

Page: That’s exactly right, and the reason why is because everything is so connected now. When I think about any sort of business policy, there’s an environmental effect, there’s an energy effect, there’s a personnel effect. No one’s going to have the bandwidth to think of all the dimensions to a problem. What you see within universities and within organizations is this rise of team-based work. The effective teams have to be diverse when the problem is hard.

One of the things I play within the book is what I call the opposite proverbs problem. It’s like anything your grandfather said, your grandmother said the opposite. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Two heads are better than one.

It’s not the case that you always want a team. But firms are figuring out that where you need teams are on high-dimensional, complex problems. I’m a professor of complex systems. When I look at complexity, whether I look at ecosystems or engineered systems, I realize the way to cope with complexity is through diversity. The right way to harness that complexity is through diversity. Not all diversity. Don’t turn that dial all the way to 11. There’s an appropriate amount and an appropriate type. I think firms have seized the new challenge: Who should be in the room and how do we get the right people in the room, interacting in the right ways, to lead us to innovative, new ideas and products?

Knowledge@Wharton: You could take this philosophy well beyond the company and put it into society.

Page: Absolutely. The reason the book is called The Diversity Bonus is that it’s not a marketing ploy, it literally is a bonus. One of the most amazing pieces of research that I talk about in the book is a study that looked at 28,000 predictions by economists over a 40-year period. The best economist is 10% better than a random economist. If you average the best economist with the second-best economist, who is 9% better, you get 18% better. Bringing somebody in who is demonstrably worse makes you better because of the fact that they’re different. There literally is a bonus. It’s not marketing. It’s math.

Knowledge@Wharton: That’s why the more perspectives you can bring to a problem, the greater the potential benefit.

Page: With one caveat: They’ve got to be good. This is the challenge, the deep paradox that lies in this sort of logic. If it were possible to create 100 ways of looking at a problem that were all good and diverse, we could nail everything. Therefore, it’s got to be impossible to do because these things are just not predictable. But the point is, typically two is better than one, and three is probably better than two. You may not want to have 15 different ways because you might not be able to provide fuel for 15 reasonable ways of looking at a problem.

“You want diversity to move in the direction of science and away from feel-good metaphorical statements about different people being in the room.”

Knowledge@Wharton: How does all this apply specifically to the knowledge economy?

Page: First, I see increased reliance on teams. I also see firms casting a much wider net in terms of who they hire. A third thing you see when organizations go into a 360 on errors, they’ll ask, “Why did we make this mistake? Is it because we didn’t have someone in the room who would have seen this?”

Sometimes you place your bets, you take your chances, and things are going to work out or not work out. Other times, you just completely forget to look at a particular dimension and realize next time we make this decision, we’re going to have someone from the unions in the room. Or next time we make this decision, we’re going to have someone who knows logistics in the room. You want to make sure that you’ve got the right level of diversity to cover all the bases.

Knowledge@Wharton: Workplace culture is also a factor in the success of diversity, correct?

Page: Ten years ago, I wrote a book called The Difference, which is kind of a mathematical book about the role of diversity in complex systems. Because of that book, I got invited to a lot of high tech firms, including Boeing, Yahoo, Google, Ford and NASA, to talk about the mathematics of diversity and things like random forced algorithms — really geeky stuff.

You go into those places, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, every one of them is so different.” There’s the famous David Foster Wallace quote where there’s two goldfish swimming in the water and an older goldfish comes up and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” They’re kind of confused. He swims off. Then one says to the other, “What the hell is water?” You go into these firms, and it’s like the water is different in every place. One of the things that’s so important is making sure that you have a culture where people feel comfortable sharing their diverse ways of thinking. If you look back at the O-ring disaster with NASA, that’s a case of a culture where people didn’t share what they know.

Knowledge@Wharton: In the book, you link diversity to the U.S. Supreme Court and some of the decisions by Justice Antonin Scalia.

Page: There was a famous Supreme Court case, Grutter vs. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan, where Scalia says Michigan has a choice. You can be diverse or you can be excellent. I think “super-duper” is the phrasing that he used. So, it’s a choice between super-duperness or diversity. If we were admitting students and they were going to go chop wood, he’d be exactly right. My point is not that Scalia is wrong. My point is that there are places where Scalia is right, namely chopping wood, but there are other cases where Scalia is not right, and that involves almost anything that’s complex. The fact is, if we really want to be super-duper on complex problems, we have to be diverse. There’s no trade-off.

I think Scalia was kind of pernicious about it. We get back to your earlier comment that it seems patronizing. Well, we’re including some diverse people because we want to do the right thing here. If I really wanted to figure out obesity or the opioid epidemic or inequality, or write a health care plan, the idea that I wouldn’t be bringing people of every race and both genders from different reaches of the country just doesn’t pass the sniff test.

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How a Student Competition Led to a New Cyber Security Approach 11-19

Cybersecurity is a big concern for nearly every industry. But for the banking sector, that concern is paramount and the arms race to stay ahead of digital criminals requires innovative thinking. That’s why the London-based SWIFT Institute, set up by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications to enable cross-learning between academics and bankers,  issued a challenge to teams of Canadian university students to come up with new ideas.

The winner, Team Pulse OS, devised a process that allows for reliable early detection by analyzing the unique power-use signatures on mobile devices. Team leader Nataliya Mykhaylova, who is pursuing a doctorate in chemical engineering at the University of Toronto, discussed her project with Knowledge@Wharton following her win at the October 2017 competition. Peter Ware, director of the SWIFT Institute also joined the conversation about cybersecurity.

An edited version of the transcript follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: What prompted the SWIFT Institute to devise this competition?

Peter Ware: We launched the SWIFT Institute Student Challenge last year primarily to engage with students. Part of what the institute does is give research grants to academics. We’ve been dealing with academics for about five years now, so we wanted to go beyond that and try and tap into some young, upcoming, engaging minds.

We linked this specific challenge to a conference that we held in Toronto called Sibos. We thought that we would focus primarily on students at Canadian universities. Before the challenge started, we went to the Canadian banking community and asked, “what is at the forefront of your minds? What is keeping you awake at night that we can try and help you solve?” Unsurprisingly, it was cyber. They helped to find the idea of trying to protect a bank’s channels to its customers from cyber attacks. That’s the challenge that we put to students.

Knowledge@Wharton: Nataliya, why did you want to be a part of this competition?

Nataliya Mykhaylova: I was excited to hear about this competition because cybersecurity was something that is really big on everybody’s mind. A lot of the attacks right now are undetected. I have been kind of researching this field from the hardware side. Doing my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, I was testing different devices and got lots of ideas about how this could be prevented on a hardware level. I was really excited by this competition and thought I would submit my ideas.

Knowledge@Wharton: Tell us more about your winning idea.

Mykhaylova: You hear on the news all of these companies that have an issue with cybersecurity. What I noticed when looking through those cases is that there is a lot of effort being put into preventing the attacks, which is understandable. But I noticed there is not quite as much attention being spent on detecting those things early. In fact, only 30% of the cyber security attacks are detected in-house. This is a huge problem. There are lots of creative ways in which those attacks happen, and we need better systems to detect them at the edge or before they have a chance to spread.

“There are lots of creative ways in which cyber attacks happen, and we need better systems to detect them at the edge or before they have a chance to spread” –Nataliya Mykhaylova

When I was doing my Ph.D., I was assembling and testing different devices, different sensors. I discovered there is this pattern that you can detect and correct through artificial intelligence models. And you can actually detect the changes in those patterns very early. For example, if the system is compromised even in the early stages, those performance signatures — like heat, CPU, other patterns — change very quickly. You are able to differentiate them from the normal operations of the system. Basically, an attack would leave a series of breadcrumbs as they are compromising the system, so you can detect them before it has really a chance to spread. This was an interesting discovery. This is something that inspired this idea going forward.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you give consideration to the fact that so much banking is done on mobile devices?

Mykhaylova: Yes. The interesting aspect of the system is that it can work across different types of devices. We are checking up on our accounts on our mobile devices all the time — our  laptops, our desktops. You have to have a system that works effectively throughout interfaces so we can detect things before they have a chance to spread through the banking channels. Part of this system is going down to the very low level, to the hardware level.

With each new version of these devices, they have better and better ICs, the integrated circuits that go into those devices. A lot of them are now able to use features that allow us to run machine-learning models in real time to be able to detect changes in the operation of the systems.

This is a very interesting area, and I feel that it’s been unexplored. This is something that we have been doing, and realizing that there is a lot of opportunity to explore those parts of the system. Because this is something that is much harder for the cyber attackers to fake, they cannot really change the hardware patterns as easily as they would be able to change the software that is running on the system and to hide their traces.

Again, this is something that can be deployed running across the devices, so this makes it very powerful to be able to run the script on your cellphone, on your tablet, on your laptops.

Knowledge@Wharton: Peter, what is the significance of what she is describing?

Ware: It’s something that is very useful, and quite advanced and different from what I think a lot of banks have been looking at. A lot of the ideas that came from other teams in the challenge were all very good ideas. They were dealing with things such as four-factor authentication, voice and facial recognition. But this was a very unique approach from Nataliya, the idea of looking at pattern or usage recognition on our devices. It’s a novel approach. It’s something that, hopefully, banks can take forward and try to implement.

Knowledge@Wharton: Has there already been a reaction from banking institutions to the ideas generated by this contest?

Ware: It was actually the banks that voted on Nataliya to be the winner. We had a panel of four judges, which included some bankers from within Canada and some fintech experts, and we did audience voting online as well. It was the banking community itself that voted on the winner. There was also a lot of engagement among the banks and Nataliya and the other team members. A lot of these ideas are going to be taken forward, I am sure.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is there any possibility that some of those institutions will get involved in developing this idea?

Ware: That is something that would happen directly between the banks and Nataliya, so it is something that we are trying to foster. We are trying to foster that engagement and contact between the banks and the students. What happens next is something that is on a direct relationship between the two of them.

Knowledge@Wharton: Nataliya, can your idea be adapted and applied to sectors beyond banking?

Mykhaylova: I am really interested in potentially scaling this solution. I am passionate about cybersecurity, and I think banking is a great place to start. But I feel like every day we have new channels through which we interact with the world, and we have new devices in our homes through which we interact. We have IoT devices [internet of things], we talk to Alexa and so on. They are really easy channels for attackers to get into our system. I think we can make pretty much any channel more secure.

We have already started conversations with some banks in Canada as well as internationally, so I am very fortunate to have been part of the Sibos competition. But there is a lot of interest I received from the IoT technology sector, which is developing these devices that we all have in our homes now. I am quite excited about the interest and potential scalability of this.

Knowledge@Wharton: The SWIFT Institute will have its 2018 conference in Sydney, Australia. Do you plan to stick with cybersecurity as the theme?

“I am passionate about cybersecurity, and I think banking is a great place to start.” –Nataliya Mykhaylova

Ware: We are going to run the Student Challenge again, but we will come up with a different idea. We’ve gone to the Australian banking community and explained the concept of the challenge to them. There is a great deal of excitement there. They are in the midst of coming up with the idea that is relevant to their community. At this point, we don’t know what the idea is. We have already contacted 43 universities across Australia to explain what Sibos is, what the SWIFT Institute is and the idea behind the challenge. There is a great deal of interest from universities.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are the next steps for you, Nataliya?

Mykhaylova: Our goal right now is to test this system on all of the possible use cases, finalize the models and launch it through a few partner banking institutions to really showcase the benefits that it could provide.

As I mentioned, it can be run on any system, it’s fairly low cost and fast to set up, it’s an easy solution to implement, and it could have a higher return on investments for banks. We are looking to finalize the model and launch it by next year.

Knowledge@Wharton: Banks operate on different systems. Was that a challenge for you in the process of developing this concept?

Mykhaylova: Yes. Banks have all of the infrastructure right now for various types of divisions and for most internal interactions between the employees as well as with the customers. That was one of the biggest aspects that we wanted to incorporate into this solution so that we could deploy a system at scale to detect issues before they have a chance to spread through the network, which I think is one of the biggest concerns with the recent cases of companies being compromised.

Ware: Even within a single bank, they have multiple systems. There are so many different mergers and takeovers that have happened over the decades, and they all have these legacy systems that they try and put together. The idea of Nataliya having something that could be relatively easy to implement is going to be music to the banks’ ears. It’s a great initiative.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you have to consult with, in this case, the Canadian government for implementation?

Mykhaylova: To some extent. Currently, this system can be operated across a number of different devices and trained on a number of different systems. Right now we are starting kind of small, really validating on very focused case scenarios. But later as it expands, I do feel that it would be important to involve the government because cybersecurity is going to be key for all of our operations. It would be important to think about it on a larger scale.

Knowledge@Wharton: As banks have retreated from some places, a vast number of areas are becoming unbanked, and there is a tremendous increase in financial inclusion with some of the fintechs entering the spaces. Is the cybersecurity solution that Nataliya has proposed relevant to those kinds of entities as well?

Ware: I think it is. You’re absolutely right that the more fintechs open up their systems and create new systems to provide banking services to anyone and everyone around the world, it’s creating more opportunities for cyber attacks. A lot of those smaller fintech companies are not as well regulated, if they’re regulated at all, compared to the banks.

The security they put in place might not be as good as what the banks have in place. Nataliya’s idea could be very relevant to them, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that a lot of those fintech companies try to adopt as stringent security measures as possible.

“The people perpetuating cyberattacks actually operate as a business. They buy and sell information from and to each other.” –Peter Ware

Knowledge@Wharton: Financial institutions may be hesitant to partner with each other, but sharing information would help ensure everyone has a high level of cybersecurity. Do you agree?
Ware: Absolutely. Looking at how banks can share information is something that we have explored from a research perspective. Banks do share cyber-threat information with each other anyway, but we’re always looking for ways on how that can be improved.

The people perpetuating cyber attacks actually operate as a business. They buy and sell information from and to each other. From a protection point of view, the banks are increasingly starting to think along those lines as well. The same would be true for any other industry.

Knowledge@Wharton: Another concern for consumers is the speed in which the information from a breach is relayed to the public. Many within the IT community say time is needed to understand what happened. From that perspective, maybe Nataliya’s solution would speed up this process.

Ware: Exactly. The earlier that those threats can be detected, the more time that banks and anyone else would have to be able to react to it.

Mykhaylova: It takes an average of 98 days to detect an attack, sometimes after years. This is very crazy that we still have to spend so much time detecting those things. Part of the reason is that it is also becoming harder and harder to detect. There are new types of malware, new types of zero-day attacks and other threats that are becoming more and more common. So, it’s important to have systems that don’t need to be signature-based, that can detect those kinds of attacks without any prior knowledge of the threat. This is where our system excels, and it can detect patterns in an unsupervised manner. You don’t need to build up those signature libraries ahead of time.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you think we will get to a point where potential break-ins are done and figured out in real time?

Mykhaylova: Yes, so that is the goal. Our system runs in real time, continuously tracking things, categorizing them and evaluating how risky they are. I think that is key to be able to do that in real time.

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How to find Happiness at work 10-15

Image: Shyam's Imagination Library

Happiness is in short supply at work these days. Deadlines, staff shortages, productivity pressures and crazy stress push even the most talented and temperate people to want to quit their jobs. But that’s not a realistic option, even for folks in the C-suite. Annie McKee, director of the Penn CLO and Medical Education programs at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches leadership and emotional intelligence, has a better idea. In her book, How To Be Happy At Work, she outlines three requirements that workers need to feel more fulfilled on the job. McKee spoke about the concepts in her book on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

 The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Knowledge@Wharton: How many people do you think are not happy at work?

Annie McKee: I don’t think we even have to guess. Gallup has been studying people for years, and upwards of two-thirds of us are either neutral, which means we don’t care, or we’re actively disengaged. Disengagement and happiness go hand in hand, so an awful lot of people are not happy at work. Unhappy people don’t perform as well as they could. When we’re negative, cynical, pessimistic, we simply don’t give our all, and our brains don’t work that well just when we need people’s brains to be working beautifully.

Knowledge@Wharton: Has this problem ramped up in the last two decades or so? As much as digital is phenomenal for us, a lot of people feel under pressure because of what digital does to accelerate change.

McKee: The world is changing at a rapid pace, obviously. As much as we love our always-connected world, it can mean that we work all of the time. We’re always one minute away from that next email that’s going to bring tragedy or crisis to our working lives. Some of us never turn it off, and that’s not good for us.

Knowledge@Wharton: Where did your idea for the book come from?

McKee: I’ve worked in organizations all over the world for decades now. I’ve looked at leadership practices, emotional intelligence, culture and all of those things that impact the bottom line and people’s individual effectiveness. I decided to take another look and see what people were trying to tell us. All of these studies that we did around the world were practical studies. People were telling us, “I want to be happy, I want to be fulfilled, I want to love my job, I’m not as happy or as fulfilled as I could be, and here is what I need.” And then they went on to tell us what they need.

Knowledge@Wharton: Are executives aware of their employees’ problems? Are they also aware that they may susceptible to this?

“Unhappy people don’t perform as well as they could.”

McKee: It doesn’t matter where you sit in the organization, you are susceptible to disengagement and unhappiness even at the very top. We think if you’re making all of that money and you’ve got all of that power and that great job, it’s going to be perfect. The best leaders in our organizations, at the very top and all the way down to the shop floor, understand that people matter, feelings matter, and it’s job number one to create a climate where people feel good about what they’re doing where they’re happy, engaged and ready to share their talents.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are the key ingredients to finding that happiness?

McKee: From my work, I’ve discovered three things. Number one, people feel that they need to have impact on something that is important to them, whether it’s people or a cause or the bottom line. They need to feel that their work is purposeful, and it’s tied to values that they care about.
Number two, we need to feel optimistic that our work is tied to a personal vision of the future. The organization’s vision isn’t enough. As good as it may be, we have to know that what we’re doing ties to a personal vision of our future.

Number three, we need friends at work. We’ve learned over the course of our lives you shouldn’t be friends with people at work, that it’s dangerous somehow, that it will cloud your judgment. I don’t agree. I think we need to feel that we are with our tribe in the workplace, that we belong, that we’re with people that we respect and who respect us in return. We need warmth, we need caring, and we need to feel supported.

Knowledge@Wharton: I would think most people looking for a job, whether they are coming out of college or shifting careers mid-life, are looking for that area that would make them happy. When you have that expectation of being in the right sector to begin with, you hope that you have the happiness to go along with it.

McKee: We do hope that we get into the right organization and there’s a good fit between our values and the organization’s values. We really try hard. But we get in there and the pressures of everyday life, and the crises and the stress can really tamp down our enthusiasm and our happiness.

Also, a lot of us are susceptible to what I call happiness traps. We end up doing what we think we should do. We take that job with that fancy consulting firm or that wonderful organization not because we love it and not because it’s a fit, but because we think we should. Frankly, some of us have ambition that goes into overdrive. Ambition is a great thing, until it’s not.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is that part of the reason why we see more people who have been with a company for 20 years, 25 years and suddenly pivot? They may be going to work for a nonprofit. You see these stories popping up, especially with people in the C-suite.

McKee: You do see that. You see senior leaders all of a sudden saying, “Enough is enough, I [want to do] something different.” But I really want to be clear, you don’t always have to run away. In fact, you want to run towards something. If you feel you’re not happy in the workplace, quitting your job is probably not the first answer, and some of us can’t. What we need to do is figure out what we need, what we want, how to have impact, what will make us feel hopeful about our future, what kind of people we want to work with and for, and then go find that either in our organization or elsewhere.

Happiness starts inside each of us. It’s tempting to blame that toxic boss or that horrible organizational culture, and those things may be true. But if you want to be happy at work, you first have to look inside and ask what is it that you want? What will make you feel fulfilled? Which happiness traps have you fallen prey to? And get yourself out.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are the happiness traps?

McKee: There’s what I call the “should” trap. We do what we think we should do. We show up to work acting like someone we’re not. That is soul-destroying, and it’s fairly common. [There’s also] the “ambition” trap. When our ambition drives us from goal to goal and we don’t even stop to celebrate the accomplishment of those goals, something is wrong.

Some of us feel helpless, stuck. The “helplessness” trap may be the most serious of all. It’s really hard to get out of because we don’t feel we have any power. My message is we have a lot more power and control over not only our attitude but what we do and how we approach our work on a daily basis and in the long term than maybe we think we do.

“Ambition is a great thing, until it’s not.”

Knowledge@Wharton: Earlier in your life, you found yourself fitting into these patterns as well.
McKee: I did. Early in my life I wasn’t teaching in a wonderful institution like Penn. I didn’t even have what you would call a professional career. I had jobs like waiting tables and cleaning houses and taking care of elderly people. I was making ends meet. And it wasn’t easy.

I had two choices, I could either say to myself this is miserable and I hate it, or I could look for something that was fulfilling in what I did. I tried to do that. I did find aspects of my job, whether it was cleaning houses and feeling like I was doing a good job or finding a mentor in some of these workplaces, that really made it worthwhile to me.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you have to be 100% happy all of the time? I think if you can find areas of happiness, it can make your job or your life so much easier to go through.
McKee: Happiness isn’t just about feeling good every moment of the day, and it’s not just about pleasure. That’s hedonism, and we’re not seeking that. Frankly, a little bit of stress is a good thing. It pushes us to be innovative and to do things differently and to push harder. So, it’s not about just feeling good. But we do need a foundation of purpose, hope and friendships. We do need to know that what we do matters at work, that we are doing something that is tied to our future, and that the people we work with are great.

Knowledge@Wharton: You mentioned taking the time to recognize your accomplishments, but there are companies that want you to push on to the next project. They don’t give you the opportunity to slow down even for an hour to enjoy it.

McKee: Most of our organizations are really hard-driving, especially publicly traded organizations. I’m not even sure they’re that different than other institutions these days. The pressure is on everywhere, and the reality is we do move from project to project, goal to goal. What choices can we make in the middle of that culture? We don’t have to be victims of our organizational culture, and we don’t have to be victims of that bad boss you might have or maybe you’ve had in the past. We can make choices about what we do with our time, our energy and our emotional stance.

Knowledge@Wharton: Going back to the friends component in the workplace, does it matter where those friends come from within the structure of the company? A lot of people say you have to be careful if you want to try to be friends with the boss.

McKee: It doesn’t matter where your friends are, but it does matter whether or not you have your eyes open and recognize what people are thinking about how you are behaving and who you are friends with. You’ve got to be aware of your organization’s culture and the rules of the road.
If you’re violating some of those rules — for example, going up the hierarchy and building friendships with people who are a couple levels above you or maybe in another division — you need to understand what the implications of that are. And you need to be maybe a little bit careful.

Knowledge@Wharton: How does the middle manager deal with this?

McKee: Middle managers get it from all sides. They are pulled in every direction, and it is probably the hardest job in any organization. They, more than anybody, need to hear this message. Life is too short to be unhappy at work. Middle managers have a tremendous impact on the people who work for them, and recognizing that you more than anybody are the creator and the curator of the culture in the organization is an important place to start.

Knowledge@Wharton: Sometimes managers forget about the life people have outside of work.
McKee: We’re here at the Wharton School, and we’ve been studying management now for over 100 years. Some of the early approaches to managing organizations are really destructive, and one of the aspects of that early research has been the attitude that people don’t matter and that private lives ought to be left at the door of the office. It’s impossible to leave our private lives at the door of the office. It doesn’t mean that we talk about it all of the time, but we bring our experiences with us and we bring our feelings with us. Managers need to recognize that.

It’s also hard to find what is commonly called work-life balance. By the way, I don’t like that phrase. I think it’s a myth. I don’t think there is any magic formula that says if we get it just right we’re going to be happy at work and happy at home. It’s more about understanding that the lines are blurred between work and home now, and we need to learn how to manage our choices and our attention.

Knowledge@Wharton: What about those who work remotely and can feel very isolated and disconnected?

McKee: I understand the isolation and feeling kind of left out. The reality is that it takes a lot more effort to build relationships when we work remotely. We need to take time. When we’re working remotely, we get on the phone, we do the work that needs to be done, we talk about the project, and we get off the phone. That leaves us feeling kind of empty. We need to take that extra five minutes to have a chat, have a laugh, feel like we are in a relationship with somebody. It takes effort and self-management because the temptation is to just do the work. You talk about the gig economy, right? We’re all sort of working in a portfolio manner these days. We take on this bit of work and that bit of work, and much of it is virtual.

“Life is too short to be unhappy at work.”

I think we need to figure this out because the bottom line is that we have not changed as human beings. We still need to feel like we belong, we need to feel that we’re cared for, and we need to be able to care for others in return. If we’re working far away, we’ve got to take extra time and make a concerted effort to build those relationships in a different kind of way than if we’re in person.
I’m a big proponent of working from home or working remotely. I think it’s really helpful to individuals and companies. People who are able to work at home feel trusted, and when you feel trusted you are more committed to your organization. A lot of people report being able to get more done away from the office because you don’t have the interruptions. The downside is that you have to find a way to keep the relationships fresh and alive because that’s as important as getting that project done.

Knowledge@Wharton: Companies seem to be more aware of employee happiness than they used to be, which is a good thing. Do you think we’re going to continue down that path?

McKee: Companies are more aware, so are enlightened CEOs and enlightened leaders. I think we will continue down the path for the following reasons. It’s not just nice-to-have, and it’s not just about feeling good. We’ve got solid research coming out of positive psychology, neuroscience and management that tells us that feelings matter. When we feel good, we’re smarter. And we need smart employees now. We need people who are committed, who are engaged. The research is pretty clear. Happiness before success. If we want our employees to be at their best, we need to care about their emotional well-being as well as their physical well-being.

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How America Can Bring Back Manufacturing 10-15

Smokestacks belching hazardous gases, rivers so polluted they catch fire, workers in identical overalls turning bolts with wrenches: For many Americans, the word “manufacturing” conjures up negative, old-fashioned images. Or, we think of it as something that takes place in less-developed nations, as has increasingly been the case. Many have said that factories will continue to locate wherever the work can be done most cheaply, despite political messaging about bringing back manufacturing jobs.

Manufacturing accounts for about 13% of the U.S. economy. Should we even focus on trying to “bring it back,” now that information and services — the “knowledge economy” — seems a more promising path? Andrew Liveris firmly believes we should. In fact, he said in a recent talk at the University of Pennsylvania that manufacturing is essential to our knowledge economy, and to America’s competitiveness on the global stage.

Liveris is the executive chairman of DowDuPont, a $73 billion holding company (the two giant chemical companies merged in September), and Chairman and CEO of The Dow Chemical Company. He has advised both the Obama and Trump administrations on manufacturing issues. (Liveris was head of Trump’s now-defunct American Manufacturing Council.)

The author of Make It in America: The Case for Reinventing the Economy, in which he writes that America’s economic growth and prosperity depends upon a strong manufacturing sector, Liveris was interviewed at Penn’s Perry World House during Penn Global Week by Wharton School Dean Geoffrey Garrett. Garrett referred to Liveris “the cheerleader of advanced manufacturing.”

A Key Difference

Garrett stated that President Trump has been talking about bringing U.S. economic growth back up to the level it was before the 2008 Great Recession. Since World War II the economy has typically increased about 4% a year, but in 2016, the economy grew just 1.6%. What would it take to see those higher numbers again, he asked?

Liveris commented that the very nature of growth has changed dramatically because human civilization is going through “one of its every-few-hundred-years massive tipping point,” due to digitization. He said this phenomenon was as disruptive as Ford’s introduction of mass-produced cars in the horse-and-carriage era. This tipping point is causing enormous dislocation, including the elimination of jobs and the loss of meaningful work. Moreover, he said, “the job of 20 or 30 years ago is paying less — wage rates are down and all of that — so there are a lot of unhappy and angry people out there.”

And America is under-prepared, including from a policy point of view, he said. Liveris talked about the profound implications for business leaders as the forces of globalization collide with the forces of digitization. He said most corporations are not yet nimble enough to re-design themselves to accommodate these trends.

Yet, he said, substantial economic expansion is possible. “In the immediate term, can we get 3.5% growth in this country? You bet we can,” said Liveris. He noted that instituting policies to spur foreign direct investment would help as they did in the Clinton and Reagan eras. He also cited tax reform, infrastructure spending and business deregulation as important factors. He added, though, that the U.S. currently has “a massive, massive issue in how our government is functioning,” so change is not likely to happen overnight.

According to Liveris, there is a widespread lack of understanding among the public of what today’s manufacturing — which he referred to as advanced manufacturing — actually consists of. (Definitions vary, but the OECD defines advanced manufacturing technology as computer-controlled or micro-electronics-based equipment used to make products.) Liveris stated, “We are generating a new wave of technology to generate a knowledge economy. And a knowledge economy will need things made. They’ll just be made differently.”

Advanced manufacturing might include making smartphones, solar cells for roofs, batteries for hybrid cars, or innovative wind turbines. Liveris said he had visited a DowDuPont factory the previous week that is working on advanced compasses to enable wind turbines with blades the size of football fields. The goal is to produce blades light and efficient enough to make wind power a viable reality. “That’s technology. That’s advanced manufacturing,” he said.

“In the immediate term, can we get 3.5% growth in this country? You bet we can.”

He asked the audience to envision “a knowledge economy based on the collision and intersection of the sciences.” Those who think the tech revolution is only about “the Facebooks and the Googles, connectivity and all that,” are dead wrong, he said.

Not Enough Work, or Not Enough Workers?

Doesn’t the use of more robotics and automation lead to job loss? Garrett asked. Or, is the problem that workers aren’t appropriately skilled to fill new kinds of jobs? Liveris said he was firmly in the second camp. “I have job openings now at Dow and at DuPont that I can’t get the skills for. And engineering jobs open.”

He elaborated that the way machines provide insights is changing, and noted, “We humans will have to read those insights. I can’t [find] enough of those humans. That’s the issue we’re dealing with in this country.”

Liveris said that 7.5 million technology jobs left America between 2008 and 2016 because the country wasn’t supplying appropriate candidates. The reaction of many businesses was to re-locate to “the Chinas, the Indias, the places that were supplying that sort of skill.” In the United States right now, he said, there are half a million technology jobs open, but American educational institutions are only graduating roughly between 50,000 and 70,000 candidates per year, so there’s a “massive under-supply.” In the next three years, there will be 3.5 million jobs created, and Liveris said the U.S. might only be able to fill about 1.5 million of them through a combination of graduation and immigration. “Unless immigration is fooled with, which is a whole other issue.”

According to Liveris, a critical reason for America to revive its manufacturing sector is to promote innovation. “Something that we at Dow and many of us in manufacturing know: If you have the shop floor, if you make things, you have the prototype for the next thing, so you can innovate.” Conversely, if you stop making those things, your R&D diminishes dramatically, he said.

Liveris said that 7.5 million technology jobs left America between 2008 and 2016 because the country wasn’t supplying appropriate candidates.

The U.S. should be incentivizing the technologies that America is good at, said Liveris. Everybody knows about Silicon Valley, Liveris noted, but fewer know that the U.S. is prominent in advanced sensors, which are critical to the progress of the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Other areas in which America stands out are lightweight compasses and 3D printing. He noted that technologies like these have been developed at various institutions “in a somewhat haphazard way, which is very American. That’s great. That’s creativity.” But, he said, shouldn’t we as a country double down on the things we do best and become the world leader?

Liveris called advanced manufacturing “the best path for the United States” and said, “We’re so naturally suited for it if we’d just get the policies to help us.” He believes that the U.S. should already be at the most advanced layer of economic development based on technology. “We have cheap money, we’ve got skills, we’ve got low-cost energy. We should be having an investment boom in this country,” he said.

He noted, though, that we have created barriers to investment that are preventing this from happening. Borrowing an expression from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Liveris said that there were two kinds of countries in the world: red tape countries (hampered by bureaucracy and over-regulation) and red carpet countries (welcoming to investors). The U.S. has unfortunately become a red tape country, he said.

He called investment “the biggest job creator out there,” and stated that Germany for example has figured out how to do this. “It’s the poster child of investment in Europe.” China, too, has mastered it, and “other countries who want to trade with the United States are mastering it because they incentivize it.”

“If you have the shop floor, if you make things, you have the prototype for the next thing, so you can innovate.”

Closing America’s Education Gap

A big proponent of STEM education, Liveris said that American schools are not graduating the workers we need. “We have convinced ourselves that a four-year college degree of the skills we used to have in the last century is what we should still keep producing.” He said that re-tooling American education needs to happen immediately, with STEM education incorporated at every level including elementary school.

Liveris said DowDuPont is funding a STEM-dedicated school, in conjunction with Michigan State University, in Dow Chemical’s home base of Midland, Michigan. The school will offer curricula for kindergarten through 12^th grade, with MSU course offerings for college students, according to the Michigan news site MLive.

The pilot school will also provide teacher enrichment programs. Liveris said that American teachers need to be better trained and rewarded. “We do something very bad in this country, which is we don’t celebrate teachers at the elementary, middle and high school level. We should be putting them on pedestals. And giving them the skills to teach STEM.”

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