Communications of the ACM

Vviewpoints

I M A G E B Y K R E A T I V K O L O R S

What’s Wrong?

Done right, engineering and computer science teach technological craft, but all too often without complementary instruction in how to implement solutions in the real world of institutions. In fact, engineering is too often taught without regard for cultural, social, and political context. 3 Internships, while useful, are no substitute for acquiring the formal skills of problem solving.

For law students, too, we give them too limited a toolkit. Whereas public interest litigation, strategic use of contracts, and knowledge of how to craft legislation and regulation are vital mechanisms for public problem solving, the agile and flexible tools of technology, data, and innovation have been woefully absent from the curriculum.

Our public policy schools are simi-
larly out of date. For example, of the
top 25 public policy schools as ranked
by U.S. News and World Report in 2019,
none required studentsa to take even
basic coursework in data science. For-
mer Woodrow Wilson School Dean and
head of New America Foundation Anne-
Marie Slaughterb writes that our public
policy schools are teaching a method of
problem solving that is “built in a dif-
ferent time and for a different time—
an era with fewer citizens, a slower
pace of information dissemination,
and a data capacity that is a fraction
of what we have today.” 8 In a recent
a http://www.naspaa.org
b http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/anne-marie_
slaughter

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY have progressed exponen- tially, making it possible for humans to live longer, healthier,morecreativelives. The explosion of Internet and mobile phone technologies have increased trade, literacy, and mobility. 11 At the same time, life expectancy for the poor has not increased and is declining. 9

As science fiction writer William Gibson famously quipped, the future is here, but unevenly distributed. With urgent problems from inequality to climate change, we must train more passionate and innovative people— what I call public entrepreneurs—to learn how to leverage new technology to tackle public problems. Public problems are those compelling and important challenges where neither the problem is well understood nor the solution agreed upon, yet we must devise and implement approaches, often from different disciplines, in an effort to improve people’s lives.

Problem solving has been identified as one of the most important skills a graduate of engineering and computer science, as well as graduates of other professional schools, must have in the 21st century. Yet, as someone who has been tenured in both law and engineering and taught in a public policy school, I can report that our universities are failing to teach future professionals how to tackle complex problems in a rapidly changing world.

The primacy of technology in our
daily lives combined with the urgent
need to design and implement solu-
tions to public problems require a new
curriculum of public entrepreneurship.

Public entrepreneurship teaches students to tackle public problems in the public interest. First, it demands working together in teams and with real-world partners across disciplinary silos. Second, it teaches participants to go beyond vague issues to define actionable problems. Third, public entrepreneurs learn to use the tools of both data and collective intelligence to get smarter about both problems and solutions. Fourth, they learn to design solutions together with those they are trying to help by adopting more participatory and democratic ways of working and, finally, they learn how to implement measurable solutions in the real world that improve people’s lives.