An evening with the Dean Alleyne and Neel Kashkari

University of Minnesota Science and Engineering Dean Andrew Alleyne enjoyed a wide-ranging conversation this spring with Neel Kashkari, his former student—who leads the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Here are the edited excerpts.

Dean Alleyne (DA): How did you go from mechanical engineer to where you are today?

Neel Kashkari (NK): I was working for a NASA contractor in California, running basement experiments of these little latches for what became part of the James Webb Space Telescope. It was very exciting for a young engineer—and my managers were encouraging me to get a Ph.D. I decided to explore the business world instead. I got my MBA, then went into banking and government. There are a lot of parallels between public policy and engineering. 

DA: How do you see science and engineering contributing to macroscale economic growth?

NK: Economic growth comes from two things: population growth—more people producing things and more people consuming things—and productivity growth—we can do more with the same resources that we have. 

If you just add more people, the pie will get bigger but the pie per capita won’t necessarily get any bigger. But if you have productivity growth—that’s science and engineering, and knowledge development—then we become more productive and the pie gets bigger, and each of our share of the pie, hopefully, gets bigger, too. 

Economic strength comes from innovation. If you think about it over the course of world history—which economies have been the most competitive, which countries have been strongest—it’s those that have the biggest sources of innovation. 

When they were looking for a replacement for whale oil, electricity was not on anybody’s list, right? That’s just the nature of scientific breakthroughs. You need to plant a thousand flowers and hope that a few of them bloom. You can’t predict which one’s going to bloom. 

DA: What’s your perspective on the value of higher education, particularly in the STEM fields? 

NK: It has never been higher, especially in technical-related fields. I think the challenge from a public policy perspective is how do we give that world-class education to more of our young people without just saying, “well, the answer is more debt.” That is not a scalable solution.