Where do billionaires go to university?

 By Sean Coughlan

BBC News education correspondent

Are the super-rich more likely to be better educated? Or have they spurned scholarship and dedicated themselves to the serious business of being seriously rich?

According to a global census of dollar billionaires, almost two-thirds have a university degree. That means that even for countries with a high level of graduates, billionaires are disproportionately likely to have gone to university.

In the UK, more than four out of five billionaires were in higher education - not so much rags to riches as rag week to riches.

The educational insights are from an annual profile of the uber-rich, the Wealth-X and UBS Billionaire Census, produced by the Swiss banking group and a Singapore-based financial intelligence firm.

It examines the wealth and background of more than 2,300 billionaires - and the findings undermine the image of the wealthy as being self-taught self-starters trained on the market stall.

As well as being much more likely to be graduates, a quarter have postgraduate degrees and more than one in 10 has a doctorate.

This map of wealth also shows that these dollar billionaires - worth at least £620m and typically more than three times this amount - are likely to have attended some of the traditionally most prestigious universities.

The top 20 for universities producing billionaires is dominated by blue-chip, elite US institutions, which take 16 of the places.

Elite institutions

The University of Pennsylvania has produced more than any other institution, followed by Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California, Princeton, Cornell and Stanford.

And the most likely way of making money is by dealing in money, with billionaires mostly making their fortunes through finance, banking and investment.

But there are also some indications that the geography of the super rich is changing. Reflecting India's growing economy, the University of Mumbai is in ninth place in the league table.

The only UK university in this wealth list is the London School of Economics, in 10th place, with no place for Oxford or Cambridge.

The rise of Russia's wealthy is reflected in the 11th place for Lomonosov Moscow State University.

But the dominance of the US universities is not simply about the US producing more billionaires. More than a quarter of the billionaires who attended US universities to take undergraduate degrees were from other countries.

This was even more the case for postgraduate courses in the US, where 39% came from overseas.

There could also be something of a time-lag, because the average age of this group is 63, attending the university systems of four decades ago.

University donations

The connection with university carries into later life. More than half of billionaires are involved in philanthropic projects and the biggest single cause they support is education - and within this category, it is particularly higher education that gets their backing.

It helps to explain how Harvard's fundraising drive could set an eye-watering target of $6.5bn (£4bn).

The study shows a pattern of wealth being concentrated in a small number of places. More than 40% of billionaires in Europe live in just 10 cities, headed by Moscow and London. Globally the biggest city for billionaires is New York.

It also creates some jarring contrasts. Nigeria has become the country with the most number of children without access to any education - while this report shows that Nigeria is on course to have the most billionaires in Africa.

There have been repeated international studies from organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showing that going to university remains a strong investment in terms of improving the chance of a higher-income job.

Such studies have rejected the idea that not going to university could be a smarter move or that the value of a degree will fall below the cost of tuition.

But Frank Furedi, author, social commentator and former professor of sociology, says that one of the "big secrets" of the expansion of higher education has been a growing gap between the most prestigious universities and the rest.

"The hierarchy has become more fixed," says Prof Furedi.

These top universities have become the place where "global players gather".

He says there has always been a tension between universities promoting social mobility and being the route for handing on advantage to the next generation.

"Education has always been contradictory, it's the way that some people make their way up and it's the way of consolidating privilege."

Most billionaire graduates
1. University of Pennsylvania
2. Harvard University
3. Yale University
4. University of Southern California
5. Princeton University
6. Cornell University
7. Stanford University
8. University of California, Berkeley
9. University of Mumbai
10. London School of Economics
11. Lomonosov Moscow State University
12. University of Texas
13. Dartmouth College
14. University of Michigan
15. New York University
16. Duke University
17. Columbia University
18. Brown University
19. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
20. ETH Zurich

Universities should ditch the talk of investing in the future

Instead of research academics need to focus on giving students what they want for their money: that is, a well-rounded education

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 23 October 2013

Illustration by Belle Mellor

Money talks. After two years of tuition fees at £7,000-£9,000 universities are apparently rolling in cash, and their students are demanding value for it. Universities are expected to deliver not just education but jobs. Courses are being tailored to "employability". Research is concentrated in the elite Russell institutions. Now the universities minister, David Willetts, is calling for a "cultural change" to reverse the trend of too much time going on scholarship and not enough on teaching. Is this a new dawn in higher education, or a new darkness?

Willetts has celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Robbins report with a pamphlet questioning one aspect of the expansion it stimulated. Pre-Robbins, British universities devoted 60% of their time to teaching and 40% to research. Now those percentages are reversed, so that universities are "lopsided away from teaching". Only in the former polytechnics does teaching predominate.

Today's students may not realise how far this has gone, but their graduate parents might. Contact time has declined. Essay writing has halved. Fifty years ago two-thirds of students received oral (as well as written) feedback, now two-thirds get none. Willetts wonders how this was ever allowed to happen.

The answer is easy. Willetts and his Whitehall predecessors made it happen. Universities have become creatures of government, paid to do what government says. Ever since Thatcher abolished the arms-length university grants committee and eventually"nationalised" higher education in 1988, universities have followed the money.

Many academics prefer research, writing and conferencing to the hard tutorial grind. I know, as I was briefly one myself. But the price was to allow government to "assess" their work and demand ever more. They sweated over papers, often of staggering obscurity. Civil servants totted up pages and citations, and tested for "impact and translational value". Willetts may complain that students suffered, but whose fault is that?

The surge in student fees has led universities to a new accountability, not to government but to their customers. For the first time they have had to look out to their market place rather than back to their founders and traditions or up to their government. In this change in accountability research is bound to take a knock. The student market cares little about it. Students want an education that stimulates them for three years and gets them a job. Universities such as Bath are popular because they emphasise job-finding. With 40% of new graduates going into "non-graduate" initial careers, the league tables that matter are those indicating successful job placements.

To outsiders, universities remain extraordinarily conservative enclaves. They stick to the medieval three-term, three-year courses. Specialism is almost obligatory: a Briton wanting to study arts and science together had better go abroad. People at the peak of their vigour are thought unable to absorb teaching for more than six months a year, and are still sent home to help with the harvest each summer. Any business run with so little concern for new techniques of operating or delivering a service would collapse.

When research was the activity of an autonomous minority of scholars it could look after itself. Today it costs the taxpayer millions of pounds and is spread over three dozen Russell and 1994 Group institutions. Such spending has to be justified. And here universities sold the pass. In the years following Robbins, the economists Mark Blaug and John Vaizey debated whether higher education was a consumer service or an investment. Blaug advocated the former and won the argument – but he lost the war. Academics loved to think of themselves as "investing in the nation's future". But in claiming so, they conceded the field to the Treasury. If universities were an investment, where was the return?

The argument continued. Even as new undergraduates rushed to arts subjects, government became obsessed with "the nation's manpower needs" and believed this meant driving universities towards science and technology. Still today the science budget remains "ringfenced", as if it were a branch of national security – and despite decades of market evidence that Britain's prosperity was demanding more financiers, lawyers and designers.

The return from teaching that universities most often cite is graduate lifetime earnings. But this is personal rather than collective. Besides, such a validation has consequences. Three years ago 600 Bristol students staged a revolt over receiving too little teaching, fearing it would jeopardise their careers. When Surrey revealed (improbably) that all its drama graduates had jobs, it was inundated with 50 applicants per drama place.

The Institute for Public Policy Research recently advocated a return of the polytechnics as specialised vocational academies. University College London is introducing a "liberal arts" course that marries arts and science. Where universities appear to be ailing, Willetts is talking of sub-contracting them to private companies, bringing the free-school principle to state higher education. In America this mercantilist approach went to extremes when some graduates sued their old law school for training too many of them, and thus wrecking the jobs market.

There is a backlash to all this. Conservatives such as Cambridge's Stefan Collini inveigh against rate-of-return education, suggesting it means death to the humanities and reduces academics to "door-to-door salesmen for vulgarised versions of their market-oriented product". The vice-chancellor of Reading, Sir David Bell, warns against having to "put a premium on employability … on preparing students for what is to follow", as if that were some sort of betrayal. When a student has £30,000 in prospective debt round his or her neck, employability is bound to apply.

If I were an academic I would stop pretending I was "investing in the nation's future". I would stop using such language. I would try to give students what they want for their money, usually a well-rounded education and a mild sense of obligation to society, and tuck my research into my spare time. That would be my "rate of return". As long as universities play the investment game, they will find students and taxpayers alike asking to scrutinise their accounts.

Degree classifications are extremely crude - and pretty useless

When they graduate, students should simply be given a transcript of their marks as a record their study, says Jonathan Wolff

• 
• • Jonathan Wolff
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 July 2012 18.45 BST

Universities themselves do not find the classifications useful. Any student applying for further study will be asked for a transcript of all their marks, in addition to their degree result. Photograph: tomas del amo /Alamy

In Geneva a few weeks ago, as the American and European participants were discussing which insect repellent to use on their post-conference hikes, I had to leave in order to attend yet another meeting of an exam board. This year, I've been chair of several of our boards, "faculty observer" on others, and external examiner elsewhere, and so my desk has been littered with exam scripts and spreadsheets. My head is full of rules for dealing with classification and borderline cases. Degree schemes are like snowflakes: no two are alike.

North Americans rarely understand the expression "exam board" unless they have worked or studied in the UK. Of course, they grade their papers, often with substantial help from their teaching assistants. But once the marks are settled, that is it as far as the department is concerned. Marks go off to the university administration, and in due course find their way on to student transcripts.

Here, by contrast, at least two academics assess or moderate each paper. The mark then exists in a form of limbo until ratified by the exam board, the external examiner and the university examinations section. In some cases, a single essay will be read by three different people, and the mark adjusted twice, although this is rare. Marking in the UK is a process of handicraft, not mass production.

And what do we do with these finally tuned judgments? We put them into a computer that weights them for year of study, ignores some of the bad ones, and produces a number through some form of averaging process. That number will assign the candidate either to a clear degree class, or to a twilight borderline zone. If borderline, we then use another set of rules, apparently too complex for any computer, taking account of such things as "exit velocity", "spread of marks" and any extenuating conditions, in turn graded A, B, C, and X. In such discussions a score of academics can spend a couple of happy hours for each degree programme trying to detect whiffs of high-class performance. Inevitably, and tragically, some students will be consigned to a lower classification by a hair's breadth.

And after all of this, what do we end up with? Given that many students now regard a 2:2 as hugely disappointing, the great majority find a way to do what they need to achieve at least an upper second. Some, with talent and hard work, will do even better and will be awarded a first. Those who in the old days would have performed weakly are likely to have failed at an earlier stage, and so just won't be there in the graduating class. I haven't seen a third in years. Averaging between a 2:2 and a fail is a real challenge. Hence after all this work, we assign perhaps 20% of students to the first-class category and most of the rest to the upper second-class group, with a sprinkling of lower seconds.

In other words, the job of an exam board is to spend a huge amount of effort taking a rich profile of information – how students have done over a wide range of assessments – and turn it into extremely crude classification. And it is classification that we find useless for our own purposes. Any student who applies for further study will be asked for a transcript of all their marks, in addition to their degree result. Universities apparently don't think the degree classification conveys very much useful information, and so why should anyone else?

I'm coming to the conclusion that we should simply issue students with transcripts to record their study, and leave it at that. There are proposals to replace degree classifications with grade point averages, as in the US. That's a move in the right direction, but why have a summary measure at all? School achievement isn't summarised into a single number, and why should it be any different at university? If a student on a German and geography degree did brilliantly in German and miserably in geography what purpose is served by reducing it all to a single score? And so my plea: No more classifications. No more algorithms. No more borderlines. And, most heartfelt of all, no more exam boards.

• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London

A degree in life, not just cricket

The MCC university cricket system provides a chance to prepare for life after the game while pursuing a county contract

George Dobell

June 22, 2012

If the last few days have taught us anything, it is that there is far more to life than cricket. So while the outcome of the final of the British Universities and Colleges Cricket (BUCS) competition might not, in itself, seem particularly important in the grand scheme of things, such encounters actually carry much deeper significance. Indeed, you could make a strong case to suggest that the introduction of MCC University cricket (MCCU) is, alongside Chance to Shine, central contracts, four-day cricket and the adoption of promotion and relegation, one of the most positive developments in domestic cricket in the last 20 years.

Professional sport is a seductive beast. It sucks you in with whispered promises of glory and glamour and spits you out with broken dreams and an aching body. For every cricketing career that ends in a raised bat and warm ovation, there are a thousand that end on a physio's treatment table or in an uncomfortable meeting in a director of cricket's office. Many, many more stall well before that level.

And that's where the trouble starts. Young men trained for little other than sport can suddenly find themselves in a world for which they have little training and little preparation. Without status, salary or support, the world can seem an inhospitable place. It is relevant, surely, that the suicide rate of former cricketers is three times the national average.

The Professional Cricketers' Association does sterling work trying to help former players who have fallen on hard times, but prevention must be better than the cure, and a huge step on the road of progress has been taken in the form of the MCCU.

It has had different names along the way but the MCCU scheme was set up in the mid-1990s by former England opening batsman Graeme Fowler. Confronted with a choice between university and full-time cricket when he was 18, Fowler opted for university. It was a decision that provided the foundations for financial stability that extended far beyond his playing days. As Fowler puts it while watching the Durham MCCU team he coaches play Cambridge MCCU in the BUCS final: "Even a cricketer as successful as Alec Stewart had more of his working life to come after he finished playing. And not everyone can be a coach or a commentator."

The fundamental aim of the MCCUs is to allow talented young cricketers to continue their education while also pursuing their dream of playing professional cricket. It is to prevent a situation where they have to choose between the two. It should mean that young players gain the qualifications and skills for a life beyond cricket while still giving themselves every opportunity to progress in the game. Graduates will have enjoyed good-quality facilities and coaching while also maturing as people. It should be no surprise that several counties actively encourage their young players into the scheme as they know they will return, three years later and still in their early 20s, far better prepared for the rigours of professional sport and life beyond it.

It works, too. Just under 25% of England-qualified cricketers currently playing in the county game graduated through the system. Durham MCCU alone has helped develop more than 50 county players, six county captains, three England players and, most obviously, England's Test captain, Andrew Strauss, who credits the initiative as vital to his success. "It was at Durham University that I went through the transition of being a recreational cricketer to one who had the ambition to play the game for a living," he has said. The MCCUs have a mightily impressive record.

And, these days, it costs the ECB nothing. Not a penny. Instead the six MCCUs (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Cardiff, Leeds/Bradford and Loughborough) have, since 2005, been funded by the MCC. Each institution receives £80,000 a year and hopes to cobble together enough extra funding from sponsorship and other smaller grants to meet their annual running costs of around £130,000. You might well ask why the ECB - despite its annual income of around £110 million and rising - cannot find some more money for such an admirable scheme.

Indeed, it is interesting to reflect on the roots of the MCCUs. In the mid-1990s, the ECB (or the TCCB as it was known at the time) lost its Lottery funding as the Lottery Commission was concerned that the sport did not possess a complete development programme that incorporated higher education. The board, in panic, embraced Fowler's plans and appointed a couple of dozen regional development officers. Had the Lottery Commission not intervened, it is debatable whether the ECB would have had the foresight to act at all.

	Fowler never actually wanted the games to carry first-class status but worries that if such status is stripped the funding may disappear too. He also worries that the matches against the counties - key factors in the development of his young players - might go

There are detractors. When, in April, Durham MCCU were bowled out for 18 by a Durham attack that contained Graham Onions, among others, it provided fresh ammunition for those who say that such games should not hold first-class status.

It is a fair point. Fowler never actually wanted the games to carry first-class status but worries that if such status is stripped, the funding may disappear too. He also worries that the matches against the counties - key factors in the development of his young players - might go. Without those two facets, the system loses its attraction and the safety net disappears. The odd aberration in the first-class record might well prove to be a price worth paying for the benefits of MCCUs.

As it was, Cambridge MCCU, boosted by an innings of 129 by Ben Ackland, defeated Durham MCCU by 24 runs in the BUCS final in the scenic surrounds of Wormsley. Perhaps only four or five of the players on show have realistic hopes of enjoying a career in cricket - Surrey's Zafar Ansari is currently with Cambridge MCCU, though he missed the BUCS game, while Paul Best (Cambridge MCCU and Warwickshire), Chris Jones (Durham MCCU and Somerset) and Freddie van den Bergh (Durham MCCU and Surrey) are among those already affiliated with counties - but it was noticeable that at least one first-class county sent a scout to the match.

"I spent my whole professional playing career on a one- or two-year contract," Chris Scott, the Cambridge MCCU coach, says. "It probably made me a more insecure, selfish cricketer than I should have been. The MCCU scheme provides a safety net for players and helps them grow up and improve as players as people. It helps prepare them for life, whether that is in cricket or not."

"And it's not just about playing," Fowler adds. "Some of our graduates have gone to be coaches or analysts at counties. Some might have become solicitors, but set up junior coaching schemes at their local clubs. There is a cascade effect that people sometimes don't appreciate."

The quality of the head coaches is a vital factor. Scott, for example, is a philosophical fellow well suited to preparing his charges for the inevitable slings and arrows. He has needed to be. As Durham wicketkeeper he was, after all, responsible for the most expensive dropped catch in first-class history. Playing at Edgbaston in 1994, he put down Brian Lara on 18 and moaned to the slip cordon, "I bet he goes on and gets a hundred now." Lara went on to score an unbeaten 501.

Cambridge are the standout side among current MCCUs, and Scott's record in aiding the development of the likes of Chris Wright and Tony Palladino should not be underestimated.

The graduates of Durham MCCU are also lucky to have Fowler. Not just for his playing experience - anyone who scored a Test double-century in India and a Test century against the West Indies of 1984 knows a thing or two about batting - but also his life experience. For his easygoing good humour and mellow wisdom. He enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a player, but the formation of the MCCUs is surely his biggest contribution to the game.

George Dobell is a senior correspondent at ESPNcricinfo

Graduates in Science, Engineering and Maths are more versatile than others

The versatility of science graduates should be celebrated not criticised. What's the problem if science graduates end up in alternative careers? If anything, we need more of it.

Imran Khan guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 September 2011 13.33 BST larger

'If you study engineering, physics or chemistry as your first degree, you're almost 90% likely to be in either full-time employment or further study three years later.' Photograph: Martin Shields/Alamy

The Guardian reported that "only about half of all science graduates find work that requires their scientific knowledge" – a fact that "casts doubt on the government's drive to encourage teenagers to study [science]". Yet year on year, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) reports that its members are finding it difficult to get enough staff with science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) skills. This year more than two in five employers had trouble. The Science Council has just released a report showing that a fifth our workforce is employed in a scientific role. So what's going on?



The concerns come from the paper, Is there a shortage of scientists? A re-analysis of supply for the UK. Its author suggests there is no shortage of scientists and engineers in the UK, despite what the CBI says and contrary to the messages of successive governments. However, both the paper and the Guardian's reporting are based on some pretty odd assumptions. While it's true that about half of Stem graduates end up in careers outside science, that's not an argument to say that too many young people are studying science.



For a start, a Stem degree is a fantastic preparation for a huge range of careers. We should celebrate that fact, not mourn it. Statistics show (table 7) that if you study engineering, physics or chemistry as your first degree, you're almost 90% likely to be in either full-time employment or further study three years later. Those figures compare with 73% for the creative arts, and 78% for languages and historical or philosophical studies. The average across all graduates is just above 80%. That's because a Stem degree gives you a huge range of skills that are in demand in wide variety of jobs, not just in science. Isn't that a good thing? We could "fix" it by training science graduates to be useless in the wider economy, but at the moment we have a higher education sector that is successfully producing young people equipped with highly transferable skills.



Moreover, what's the problem if Stem graduates end up in careers outside science and engineering? If anything, we need more of it. We're crying out for more scientists and engineers to teach in schools, get into politics and the civil service, and become involved in running companies. The scientific method should be more embedded in society, not less. In the UK, we have only two MPs with a PhD. China, the most populous country and fastest growing economy in the world, has been led for the past eight years by two men who are professional engineers. I'm not saying it's better – but wouldn't it be nice to have some diversity among all the lawyers and economists?



We don't worry when law graduates don't become lawyers, history graduates don't become historians, or English graduates don't become … er … So why be concerned about the versatile engineer or chemist? True, we do need more people going into research and development if the UK is to successfully rebalance its economy. To achieve that we must increase investment in research and skills so that employers have a reason to come here, and in turn attract our science and engineering graduates into science and engineering jobs. Yes, each company and lab leader will be looking for the very best staff, so with the best will in the world you're not going to get every single engineering graduate into their first-choice profession. But how is that different from any other type of graduate?



It's a shame that the Guardian's report focused on the misleading figures when there was much else of value in the study. We see that there is far too much social and gender stratification in the people who actually go into science and engineering. This is unacceptable, given the benefits that those subjects give to their students. It's 2011, and yet we still only have around one in 10 female graduate engineers. You're more likely to take science and maths A-levels if you attend an independent school, with pupils at state-maintained schools over-represented in arts and humanities subjects instead.



There is emphatically still a need for more scientists and engineers – and, far from retrenching support for science and engineering, we should be concentrating on making these subjects more accessible to everyone.

The Fringe Benefits Of Failure and the Importance of Imagination

Text of the Harvard University Commencement Address by the author of the Harry Potter novels delivered on June 5, 2008.

J.K. ROWLING

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention. Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard. You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement. Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this. I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination. These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me. Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me. I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor. I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom. I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools. What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure. At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers. I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment. However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically. Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies. The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned. Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes. You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared. One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London. There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes. Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind. I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness. And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed. Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone. Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power.I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read. And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life. Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy. One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing. But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden. If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better. I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21.The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister. So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters. I wish you all very good lives.

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