Kiska: Third of Universities Should Be Closed; Money Given Only to Best

San Francisco/Bratislava, September 22 (TASR-correspondent) – Slovak President Andrej Kiska as part of his working visit to the USA has met representatives of the Volkswagen Research Lab centre to discuss how research centres are created and what should be done in Slovakia so that such centres could be set up in the country as well.

“The answer isn’t easy, but it’s always related to one thing – all research centres need high-quality people. High-quality people … are mainly concentrated around top-notch universities … At least one third of [Slovak] universities should be closed down. From among those that we close, we should select only the top faculties and give money only to the best institutions. That is probably a way that could help us to create top [research] centres like this one,” said Kiska after his visit to the Volkswagen Research Lab.

The Slovak head of state also met Slovak born Andrej Karpathy, who’s in charge of managing the development of artificial intelligence at American company Tesla. Karpathy showed the president the world’s fastest car, which can accelerate from zero to 100 kilometres in 2.3 seconds.

“We’re still talking about the fact that Slovakia should be proud of its creative young people, and I’m very glad that one of them is now standing next to me. People like this spread a fantastic name for Slovakia all over the world, and we just have to find out what we can do to bring them home,” said the president.

As part of his working trip Kiska is set to visit Facebook and LinkedIn. In addition to a delegation of Slovak entrepreneurs, the president is being accompanied by Vice-premier for Investments and Informatisation Peter Pellegrini (Smer-SD).