Sunday thoughts: Can the UK's announcement on maths and science scholarships shift the dial on how we nurture global talent?

This week’s AI summit seems to have been something of a success for the PM. Much like the Windsor agreement, this type of detail heavy, multi-lateral, negotiation appears to have played to his strengths.

Alongside the summit, government predictably announced a whole swathe of policies in the AI space, many of which then were swallowed up into the broader communiques and commitments from the event itself. Which is something of a shame, because the DSIT package around AI skills in particular I think deserves a full look.

It commits to 12 UKRI funded Doctoral Research Centres around the country, each specialising in an area of AI research; grants for existing AI researchers and practitioners to relocate to the UK; and, most excitingly, two different scholarship schemes to bring talented undergraduates from around the world to come to the UK and study.

It’s these scholarships that I like the most – and in particular, the scheme known as BIG (Backing Invisible Geniuses) from a research institute called the Global Talent Lab, which focusses on bringing to the UK the most prodigiously talented young people from around the world, who have excelled in the competitions in maths and science known as International Olympiads [full disclosure: I was involved, in a very small way, with some of the communications around this plan, though not its development].

I’ve long been an advocate of these type of frontier talent schemes. In early 2015, I was one of the co-authors of the Policy Exchange education manifesto that advocated for a similar scheme, albeit this one was based on preventing outflows. We called for a scheme whereby highly talented UK students in a range of STEM areas would commit to study at a top UK university and remain in this country for three years after graduation in exchange for a scholarship – to prevent drain to other countries, particularly the US.

This was based on evidence from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, which studies the performance of highly gifted students in mathematical sciences, and concluded in a paper in 2013 that

“Their awards and creative accomplishments by age 38, in combination with specific details about their occupational responsibilities, illuminate the magnitude of their contribution and professional stature. Many have been entrusted with obligations and resources for making critical decisions about individual and organizational well-being. Their leadership positions in business, health care, law, the professoriate, and STEM suggest that many are outstanding creators of modern culture, constituting a precious human-capital resource”.

Since then, the Global Talent Lab have published much further research on the performance of frontier talent. They find that, in particular, the International Olympiad competitions in maths and science are a reliable indicator of talent among high school students, who compete from all over the world, and success there is highly predictive of later excellence. For example, gold medallists at the International Mathematical Olympiad are 50 times more likely to later win the Fields Medal (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for maths) than even the median MIT or Cambridge Ph.D. holder. These talented students are also highly likely to go on and form companies, some of whom fundamentally advance our understanding and create new products and services we use: tech organisations such as Ethereum, Deep Mind and Telegram all have former medallists among their founders.

These students therefore represent something incredibly potent, which is the chance to advance not just disciplinary knowledge, but also economic growth as well. Given that many of the Olympiad students want to come and study in the UK (second only as a destination of choice to the US) as undergraduates, and given we have a disproportionately excellent university base to receive them, it seems something of a no brainer that the UK should be straining every sinew to bring as many of these people here as possible.

But we don’t. While one in five International Mathematics Olympiad students would pick the UK over any other destination to study as undergraduates, less than one in ten actually make it here. This is partly because until recently, UK efforts to target visas on global talent were misplaced – either because they aimed at more senior people (i.e. people already in their careers), or because, inexplicably, the list of eligible countries, or universities, that the UK would grant Talent Visas to, missed out some huge opportunities (for example, India is excluded).  The current visa scheme attracted, wait for it, one applicant in its first year. High international tuition fee costs can also put off some would-be students, especially from less developed countries.

The scholarship scheme announced by DSIT ahead of the summit therefore takes forward the Global Talent Lab model, which will match around 30 students a year from all over the world with world leading universities in the UK including Cambridge and Imperial College. At the moment, it’s wholly privately funded – the universities agree to waive a proportion of their fees, and Global Talent Lab, supported by a donation from XTX Markets, funds the rest, plus a living stipend for students. But there is no good reason why this type of scheme shouldn’t become a fundamental part of the UK talent architecture not just for AI, but for frontier maths and science more broadly.

The UK isn’t the only place making these efforts. Also in advance of the AI Summit, the US announced a similarly wide ranging package which includes a commitment to “expand the ability of highly skilled immigrants and non-immigrants with expertise in critical areas to study, stay, and work in the United States by modernizing and streamlining visa criteria, interviews, and reviews.”

So Britain needs to continue to compete for talent, and take advantage of its natural assets – our universities, the English language, our flourishing tech sector, and our ability to turn university IP into successful spin out companies.

But the real beauty is this type of talent has spillover benefits globally – whether that is through remittance flows from migrants back to their home country, or a signalling effect of the benefits of greater education to school aged students around the world, or simply the benefits of technological discovery and advancement that flow across borders. In a truly open world, we need to take advantage of talent, wherever it can be found.