NYC Seeks Partner to Open Graduate School of Engineering

[Andy Nguyen]

Interesting development for New York City. If this comes to fruition, it will make the city more competitive to attract startups, students, business.

Worried that New York City is not spawning enough technology-based start-up companies with the potential to become big employers like Google, city officials are inviting universities around the world to create an engineering campus on city-owned land.

Despite being home to more college students than any other city in the country, New York does not have a top-rated graduate school of engineering on a par with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Stanford University. Without one, the city has fallen far behind San Francisco, Boston and other metropolitan areas in the competition to attract new technology companies and the jobs they create, city officials said.

On Thursday, Robert K. Steel, the deputy mayor for economic development, announced that the city would seek a “top caliber academic institution” as a partner in building a school for applied science and engineering. Hinting that there might be more interest among institutions based in other cities or countries, Mr. Steel cited the establishment of Cornell University’s medical school in Manhattan as a precedent.

New York City Seeks Engineering Campus on City Land - NYTimes.com

 

[DominiConnor]

I kind of admire it...
The same way I admire the Jamaican bob sleigh team, it's an insanely difficult thing to do with no possible useful outcome.
To me it seems that this "school of engineering" is actually a work of art, it serves no functional pupose other than to communicate the futility and demise of US manufacturing

What is next for this bizarro group of fuckwit arts grads ?
Growing grain in Central Park ?

This die has already been cast, and the demographics are fatal.
For more than 30 years manufacturing has been a second best career, and is now sloping into third.
Anyone smart enough to do real engineering is far too often smart enough to dodge that career option.
Within 10 years the last generation of smart American engineers will be all retired, and there simply won't be any way to even pretend that it's an 'industry' --defined as something that puts out more wealth than it consumes.
To be sure there will still be pockets, where people who enjoy this stuff do it because that's what they want to do, but it's gone now.
Here's some more news for the evangelicals in charge of this project, Marilyn Monroe is more than slightly unwell, the Roman Empire is no longer a major force in European politics, and the Egyptian market for Pyramids is not what it was.
Trust me on this.

 

[bigbadwolf]

They're aiming for tech-based start-ups (rather than manufacturing set-ups); maybe they'll have some limited success, though I hardly think it'll lead to many job openings. Manufacturing has been going down in NYC since, well, 1945. First the jobs drifted to the the south -- Carolinas, the Sunbelt, where wages were lower and the workforce non-unionised and more docile. Then the jobs left the country altogether. It has to be said that without a manufacturing base a country will sink to third-world status.

 

[Stuart Truax]

It is true that engineering skills are utilized in the economy mostly in the realm of manufacturing. I will also posit that manufacturing industries in the U.S. will eventually resemble those of Switzerland: specialized in making high-quality, niche products. This future situation will still require highly trained engineers, just fewer of them.

A statistic from early last decade stated that China graduated 300,000 engineers a year, while the U.S. graduated just 60,000/year. We still have higher quality engineering education than China, but manufacturing commoditized products doesn't require the best-trained engineers. Hence the world will converge to the following situation: the developed world will manufacture specialized products, the developing world will manufacture commodity products.

With respect to the New York initiative: building a startup/VC culture takes decades. San Francisco has Stanford, Boston has MIT. These two startup centers flourished under the postwar investment boom during the Cold War. This gave these two cities a huge head start relative to other locations in the U.S., and to this day they account for the lion's share of VC investment in the U.S.

The established character of a city also plays a huge role. San Francisco will be a semiconductor/computer/software hub for the foreseeable future. Boston is more a center for hard science-based startups. Looking at a city like Atlanta, which is a consumer products hub, and evaluating its startup community, it has a tough time incubating technology startups. I have spoken to several central figures in the VC and startup community in Atlanta, and they anticipate still several decades of hard work before they can even compete with places like San Francisco or Boston.

All told, New York, being a finance and marketing hub, will have a long road ahead of it.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

How is manufacturing even got in here?

Silicon Valley draws lot of its talents from nearby tech universities like Caltech, Stanford. Talents attract business. Business generates jobs.
That's the simple idea behind this plan and if people click on the link to read the whole article, it makes sense for NYC to do this.

College graduates the world over flock to New York to work on Wall Street. There is no reason to not believe if NYC does this right, people will flock to NYC to work for future tech startups.

I don't know how long this will take. Maybe 10, 20 years, but if you want to do it, you have to start it at some point. And that point is now.

 

[alain]

I agree with Andy. If they want to build a center of technology startups in NY, they have to start at some point. If the effort fails, well, at least they tried.