Education powers Boston economy
Patents and licences generate billions in revenue Area hosts 75 post-secondary institutions
The
first thing that strikes this
Yankee- gone- home- forawhile is how “Canadian” this part of the United States is. Or, conversely, how “ American” Canada is. If that’s confusing, join the club.
Boston is, in effect, Toronto with a good baseball franchise. It’s pretty, clean, and safe. It’s filled with people from all over the world. Americans call it the melting pot and Canadians, multiculturalism.
It all amounts to the same thing: great restaurants, great culture and interesting people in all walks of life.
But Boston also resembles Vancouver, or Vansterdam as the potheads call it.
This weekend Boston might have been on Canada’s West Coast as potheads from all over Massachusetts gathered for their annual Freedom in Boston Common … starting at “ high” noon of course. They want marijuana use legalized.
As if that isn’t Canadian enough, consider the fact that last week Massachusetts’ Supreme Court upheld legislation making gay marriages legal.
In other words, Boston is a very Blue or Democrat place, as is Canada where social liberalism reigns, marijuana has been decriminalized and gay marriages blessed with little or no opposition.
However, what distinguishes Boston from every other place in the world is this city’s principal industry, which happens to be higher education.
There are 75 post- secondary institutions, including two of the world’s finest, in close proximity to the city.
Every fall, there’s an influx of 300,000 or so people to the metropolitan area to attend or teach at its top schools, such as Boston University, Wellesley, Tufts, Brandeis, Harvard University and MIT.
A national study estimated that in 2000, the eight research universities in Boston contributed US$ 7.4- billion to its economy and generated 264 patents plus 280 licences to private companies.
By far, the highest educational octane in the world is refined in Boston’s leafy suburb of Cambridge, named by the Puritans in honour of Britain’s great university.
Harvard and MIT were cited this month as the world’s first and fifth- greatest universities respectively by Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University, based on objective criteria such as Nobel Prizes, scientific patents and articles in prestigious journals.
Both universities are staggeringly wealthy, which certainly helps, but they have also earned alumni loyalty and international kudos for decades, even centuries. Harvard is North America’s oldest university and was founded in 1636. ( One guesstimate is that the combined revenues generated by patents or by companies run by alumni from these two would add up to the world’s seventh-largest economy, which is Canada.)
Harvard’s endowment is the world’s largest, at US$45-billion. The Harvard Business School alone has annual revenue that rivals that of many listed Canadian corporations, or US$309million a year. This includes tuition, royalties from the Harvard Business Review
and its publishing arm, as well as receipts from its own endowment of US$2-billion.
Such wealth means that Harvard’s 19,000 students ( which includes those taking extension courses) may mostly live in modest dormitories but thrive intellectually in an enriched, technologically advanced environment.
The whole town is wireless, which means that cafés and park benches alike are populated by students tapping away on their laptops, accessing the world’s greatest university library system.
At every student’s fingertips is an ability to drill down to the most obscure documents, journals, periodicals and 14 million books from all over the world. The only library bigger than this is the Library of Congress in Washington.
Despite such reach and excellence, Harvard has in recent years come under criticism for diluting the quality of the undergrad population by favouring alumni offspring, as well as by inflating grades.
That’s why its controversial president, Lawrence Summers, has gone to war with faculty and some students by removing many tenured deans and revamping admission procedures and reviewing curriculum policies.
He’s also come under fire for dismantling some affirmative action programs but earned praise for imposing a graduated tuition exemption system beginning with students whose family incomes are US$60,000 a year or less. For the wealthier, fees are US$40,000 a year plus living costs.
The result is that the campus population is more varied than ever. This is reflected, for instance, at the Kennedy School of Government, which is a graduate program for 900 students and fellows.
“ Our mix is 50-50 female to male with minorities above the national average and 43% international students,” said Academic Dean Steve Walt in an interview this week.
Of course, Republicans need not apply.
“ There’s no official ideology but this is a liberal place, like most U. S. universities,” he added.
“Some joke we need an affirmative action program for Republicans. But they are here. Four of our faculty are on leave to work in the Bush government right now.”
While Harvard is thoroughly impressive, the facts are that it hasn’t always earned straight As. After all, the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, dropped out of the school after only a year, citing boredom. And Enron’s infamous CFO Jeff Skilling graduated from its business school. There’s also President George W. Bush, who earned a Harvard MBA.
“ That’s not something we like to talk about that,” said an insider.