Education
From a UBC engineering degree to three degrees at Harvard: MBA, MA, and PhD in Economics.
Ralph's education carried him from the surveyor schools of UBC to the theoretical lecture halls of Harvard. Along the way, he worked as a tree faller and electrical lineman, sold industrial gases to manufacturing companies in Ontario, and learned hard-rock drilling in a tunnel 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 his report on the Kitimat-Kemano high-voltage transmission line. He was elected President of the rabble-rousing Engineering Undergraduate Society. Between studies he worked as a soil technician, assuring the integrity of construction projects of the provincial utility: the BC Electric Company.
Between Degrees
After graduating from UBC, Ralph worked as a technical sales representative for Union Carbide Corporation of New York, where his projects included the Avro Arrow and the Rolls-Royce Dart turboprop engine. He later trained as a machine shop apprentice at Atlas Copco, rebuilding compressed-air rock drills and testing them in a granite tunnel beneath the company's head office in Stockholm. 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 an unprecedented 144 K of memory, housed in a two-story special-purpose building in Harvard Yard, staffed with over a dozen operators, keypunch staff, and schedulers.