NBorn in Madrid in a working-class neighborhood, Ángel Cabrera claims his origins and remembers that his parents did not have the opportunity to go to university and “they did not even finish high school.” Instead, he studied Telecommunications at the Madrid Polytechnic and ended up doing a doctorate at a great American university: the one he has chaired since 2019, the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. A leading university in science and technology that has opted for online teaching, offering the largest remote master’s degrees in the world.
XLWeekly. Why did she study in the United States?
Angel Cabrera. I came here on a Fulbright scholarship. If you can afford it, the American university has everything you might like. It has tremendous resources and the best teachers. However, the Spanish has achieved quality at a very low cost. It is very cheap. At Georgia Tech, tuition is $10,000, and that’s public. The private ones cost four times more.
XL. Its online master’s degree in Computer Science is the largest master’s degree in the world.
A.C. We put it out before the pandemic and it was revolutionary. We reduced the price almost to a quarter. You can do the entire Computer Science master’s degree online from Georgia Tech, which is one of the best universities in the country, for $7,000. A very affordable price. Plus, you can do it while you’re working. It is the way of not parking your life to go study a master’s degree. And you get the same title as if you had physically attended.
“The university is for everyone. It is absolutely vital for a democratic society to educate more people and not fewer”
XL. Is that the mission of your university, online education?
A.C. Yes. A great transformation has occurred that many people are not aware of. In the United States it is believed that the great prestigious universities have to be small, very elitist. Here, to access the programs on-line, there are no access limits. If we think the student can finish it, he’s in. We have shown that you can have a prestigious university at the highest level and at the same time give access to many people at the most affordable cost possible.
XL. It is an attempt to democratize education.
A.C. No one has yet given me an example of a society that has failed to educate more people. University is for everyone. It is absolutely vital for a democratic society to educate more people and not fewer.
XL. Who are the students who are left behind, the ones who have to be convinced to enroll?
A.C. In most engineering there are no women. When the first IBM computers were created, the only people who knew how to program them were women. At first, computer science was dominated by them, but it changed very quickly and now it is very difficult to convince girls to study Industrial, Electronic, Telecommunications, Aerospace or Computer Engineering. Hopefully, there are 30 percent women in IT. We need to convince that girl that she is a math freak in high school so that she believes that she can be an engineer.
XL. Education has the power to transform people. Today it is even more vital because of the great challenges we face.
A.C. Definitely. And for various reasons. There was a time when there was a lot of talk about overeducation, alluding to the fact that we educated too many people: a Philosophy graduate who is putting coffee in a bar as if it were something very bad. I have been seeing the correlation for years: the most economically competitive countries are those that invest the most in higher education and have the most advanced universities.
XL. It is also the key to the economy.
A.C. The economy is based on new ideas, on talent, on knowledge, not on who has the most coal under the ground, with the exception of those with a lot of oil, which we will see if it is sustainable or not… From a democratic point of view, it is basic education for society, to be able to have a critical analysis of the information, so that you do not believe the lies that they try to sneak in and have your own critical and analytical judgment of the options that you have before you when voting.
XL. Shouldn’t today’s student be so specialized?
A.C. Whatever your discipline, you must have a much broader education. Ortega y Gasset wrote an essay on the objective of the university that is cited in the United States. He said that one of the functions of the university is not only to prepare the super technician, but also to create culture and transmit it. And that cannot be done if you only teach the engineer differential equations. The university must open the mind.
“Companies need people who know how to think, solve problems, work in teams and communicate. These are not ‘soft’ skills”
XL. How does the teacher have to be? Students are much more distracted by technology.
A.C. Totally agree. Technology opens a thousand doors for you, not having to resort to a probably obsolete physical encyclopedia is impressive, but the competition for attention is tremendous. In fact, we have discovered with covid that face-to-face education is important to maintain attention. And the best teacher is the one who inspires you to keep growing. Not the one that most efficiently taught you Spanish literature, but the one that sparked your interest in literature, the passion for reading… The one that created your passion for learning.
XL. Does the university adapt to the labor market?
A.C. Slowly, but adapts. I think that for this it is not necessary to create a degree per day, which sometimes seems to be the instinct of universities. And you also can’t think that college is going to prepare you for the latest technology that business needs today.
“You cannot think that the university is going to prepare you for the latest technology that the company needs today”
XL. So how are you preparing the student?
A.C. We are giving you the tools to learn, grow and adapt. In the end you can prepare him for the latest technology, but in three years it may be obsolete. The goal is not for the student to know how to program with Phython, but for them to understand how to program a computer or how to build an algorithm. Create thinking skills that can be adapted to a lot of career paths.
XL. What are those skills?
A.C. When we ask the companies that hire our students, they say they need people who know how to think and solve problems, work in teams, lead and communicate. They are not soft skills at all, they are skills that have to be trained. And today there is an additional skill: digital intelligence. It is as important for the engineer as it is for the philologist. The ability to use digital tools to obtain information and synthesize it, to critically consume that barrage of information. Those are skills for any career.
“Today there is an additional skill: digital intelligence. It is as important for the engineer as it is for the philologist”
XL. So, the career you study is not as important as having those skills?
A.C. That’s how it is. When I talk to my nephews who are in Spain, they are obsessed with what career to choose and I tell them that it doesn’t matter. I tell you that your uncle studied ‘Teleco’ and then changed to Psychology and ended up being dean of a business school and now director of an American university… Teaching someone to think is much more important than the specialty.
XL. Since you have arrived at Georgia Tech, how many new careers have been created?
A.C. From time to time a new one is created. But the big innovation is how you teach it, how we get a student to volunteer at a local NGO on the weekends to deal with environmental or poverty issues to understand what she’s learning in class. All these innovations do not require creating new careers, but rather give hard to think about how we teach better.
“You have to be continuously studying because your own career changes and you need to update yourself”
XL. What adjectives would you apply to the education of the future?
A.C. Inclusive, transformative and continuous. You have to always be training. Even if it’s informal. I recently did a short program at Northwestern University and another at Harvard. You have to be continuously studying because your own career changes and you need to update yourself.
XL. Has your PhD in Psychology helped you in your career?
A.C. Very much. In these jobs that involve important leadership, the most complex problems are people. There are people who know more about finance than you or about technical issues, but the most complex part is how to inspire people, decide what positions each one should be in…
XL. What would you recommend to the student who has just entered the university?
A.C. Don’t worry too much about what to study, but worry much more about growing, as a person and intellectually. And don’t forget that education always opens doors, it doesn’t close them.
XL. What do you miss about Spain?
A.C. All! [Risas].
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.