Saturday, December 15, 2007

IOWA CITY!

from the Yahoo homepage today...
...4. College Town
Colleges and universities are great white-collar employers. In fact, there is a big connection between research-oriented universities and healthy economies. Two historic examples are Stanford University's boost to the growth of Silicon Valley high-tech enterprises in San Jose and the Bay Area, and MIT's faculty and alumni, who started electronics firms along Route 128 outside Boston.
Any place can be a college town if it has at least one institution of higher education.But if you weight each person attending local colleges by the number of years needed to get the highest degree offered (that is, associate of arts enrollment is weighted by two, bachelor degree enrollment by four, master's degree enrollment by six and doctoral enrollment by nine), you come up with a wide range of numbers.
Places like College Station-Bryan, Texas; Iowa City, Iowa; Lawrence, Kan.; and Columbia, Mo., come out very high on this criterion. Alas, there's only one game in town in Ames, Iowa (Iowa State University), in College Station-Bryan (Texas A&M), in Lawrence (University of Kansas) and in Columbia (University of Missouri). Something else is needed to reward higher-education variety.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I couldn't agree more with your comments about the link between universities and healthy economies.
Trouble is in the UK we tend to buy into this drivel about dis-investing into higher education unless we already have a strong economy.
British employers tend to be the most conservative, never acknowledging this link.

I hope that this changes. It would be more helpful in job mobility, as British employers seem reluctant to recruit people from outside their previous career paths.