Education
From a UBC engineering degree to three degrees at Harvard: MBA, MA, and PhD in Economics.
Ralph's education carried him from the machine shops of UBC to the lecture halls of Harvard. Along the way he worked as a tree faller and a lineman, sold industrial gases in Ontario, and trained in a granite mine beneath Stockholm. It was an unlikely path to three Harvard degrees.
University of British Columbia (1951–1956)
Ralph enrolled at UBC in 1951 and graduated in 1956 with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Mechanical Engineering. He won the Cayley Prize in English and an Engineering Institute of Canada prize for an essay on the Kitimat-Kemano high-voltage transmission line. He was elected President of the rabble-rousing Engineering Undergraduate Society. Before and between his studies he worked as a tree faller, a lineman on the Kemano-Kitimat line, a surveyor's helper, and a soil technician on construction projects of the province’s vast BC Electric Company.
Between Degrees
After UBC, Ralph worked as a technical sales representative for Union Carbide in New York, where his projects included the Avro Arrow and the Rolls-Royce Dart turboprop engine. He later trained as an apprentice at Atlas Copco in Stockholm, working in a compressed-air drilling facility built into a granite mine beneath the company's head office. It was the beginning of a lifelong connection to Sweden.
Harvard MBA
(1958–1960)
Ralph enrolled at Harvard Business School in 1958 and graduated in 1960 with an MBA with High Distinction. He was named a Baker Scholar, the designation given to the top students in the graduating class.
Harvard PhD in Economics (1960–1964)
Ralph went on to Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences on a Ford Foundation Fellowship, earning his PhD in economics in 1964. His fields were money and banking, econometrics, and mathematical economics, and his doctoral thesis was based on large-scale data analysis of consumer demand, for which purpose he learned how to program Harvard’s first computer, the IBM 7090, which had 144 K of memory housed in a three-story building and operated by a staff of four people.