SEATTLE
— With hometown companies like Amazon and Microsoft,
this bustling region on the Puget Sound easily ranks in the top tier of
technology hubs in the United States.But the area lags its peers in one glaring
way: It is home to a single major research university, the University
of Washington, while nearly every other big technology scene in the
country has at least two.
For
years, that weakness has stoked local unease about whether the gap between the
supply of people with computer-related degrees and the surge in demand for
those skills could impede the region’s economy. “We’ve long realized we’re at a
relative competitive disadvantage when it comes to higher education,” said
Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel.
On
Thursday, Seattle’s top academic and business leaders unveiled a plan to create
a new institute of learning, with the goal of strengthening the educational
foundation of the region’s high-tech economy. The institute, the Global
Innovation Exchange, is a partnership between the University of Washington and
one of China’s leading research universities, Tsinghua University. It will open
in fall 2016 with a master’s degree program in technology innovation.
Microsoft
will contribute $40 million to help the institute get started. Some of the
money will go toward creating a base for the institute in a large new urban
development project in Bellevue, Wash., about 10 miles from the University of
Washington’s main campus. Faculty for the school will come from the University
of Washington, Tsinghua and, eventually, a couple other international
universities the Global Innovation Exchange expects to attract as partners.
It will
start with only a few dozen students, but the institute has a goal of more than
3,000 a decade from now. Tsinghua is expected to help recruit Chinese students
to the institute, providing an important global aspect, said Ana Mari Cauce,
interim president of the University of Washington.
“This
will be the first time a Chinese university has a physical spot in the U.S.,”
Dr. Cauce said in an interview before the public announcement of the institute.
“That’s a big deal.”
The
institute will not initially grant undergraduate degrees, which will limit its
potential to make a dent in the region’s deficit of technology talent, at least
in the near term. But the participants in the project said it was too early to
predict what the institute could eventually become. “Fundamentally, it’s about
looking ahead a decade and a century,” Mr. Smith said.
A 2013
report by the Washington Student Achievement Council, a state agency focused on
education, said the state needed to produce more than 2,700 additional
bachelor’s degrees annually in computer science to meet projected employer
demand in the region through 2021. The University of Washington currently
awards about 300 computer science degrees a year.
Glenn
Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate company based in
Seattle, said he had never seen a region so solely dependent on one research
institution. “I was shocked when I got here,” Mr. Kelman said. “Really, it’s
Microsoft and Amazon and a dozen other companies our size and hundreds of even
smaller ones picking over the same group of graduating computer scientists.
It’s an incredibly small group of people.”
Silicon
Valley’s development is closely linked to the strength of two institutes of
higher education, one public and the other private, the University of
California, Berkeley and Stanford. The University of Washington, a public
university, has one of the top computer science programs in the country. But it
turns away a significant number of students applying for computer science
because it has not had enough money to increase capacity.
The
university is seeking to graduate more computer science students through an
effort separate from the Global Innovation Exchange. Last week, it announced
that Microsoft was the lead donor, with a $10 million gift, for a $110 million
effort to build a new 130,000-square-foot computer science building, one that
will allow the university to double, to 600, the number of degrees it awards
annually in the field.
The
institute will not concentrate on long-term research at first, focusing instead
on “project-based learning,” in which students work on intensive, short-term
undertakings. The first students will work on projects related to wearable
technology and the Internet of things.
“China
and the United States are two leading economies with enormous strengths in
technological innovation,” said Qiu Yong, president of Tsinghua University.
“The higher educational collaboration between them facilitates the scientific
and technological progress and social development around the world.”
The
Global Innovation Exchange was inspired partly by Cornell Tech, an effort to
create a major new computer science-focused campus on Roosevelt Island in New
York. That project, which had its groundbreaking this week, also has an
international partner in Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The Cornell
project will involve close collaborations with technology companies, partly to
make it more responsive to industry trends.
Daniel
P. Huttenlocher, the dean of Cornell Tech, said he was excited to see the
institute in the Seattle area get off the ground.
“These
are leading-edge experiments in how to educate students for a new kind of
world,” said Dr. Huttenlocher, who spoke with the University of Washington
educators as they were planning the project.
In a
nod to one of the top technical universities in the country, M.I.T., the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the founders of the Global Innovation
Exchange have already taken to referring to it by the initials G.I.X. They even
occasionally pronounce the name as “geeks.”
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