To Attract the Next Google, New York City Seeks to Create an Engineering School | Hacker News Reader

To Attract the Next Google, New York City Seeks to Create an Engineering School

cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com

22 pointslinhir28 comments

Instead of focusing on engineering schools, if NYC wants to attract engineers it should focus on its elementary, middle and high schools. Engineers value education. Engineers usually do not make enough to afford fancy NYC private schools, and most engineers are not going to send their kids to NYC's public schools. So even if NYC succeeds in attracting young engineers, it will lose many of them as they start to raise families and leave looking for better public schools for their kids.

The problem is that people starting to raise families usually move out of NYC and into NJ suburbs with much better private and public schools (and a bigger, better house).

NYC has some of the best public schools in the world. Bronx Science has had more graduates who won Nobel prizes (6) than most countries: http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=print_... These public schools require competitive entry and are open to anyone in NYC who qualifies.

Granted, NYC also has some of the worst public schools in the world, too.

Plan to get good tech school in NYC:

Subsidized rent: Many engineers are smart people who know the value of an engineering education and not spending their 20's and 30's in debt. No where else has that crappy of living conditions per dollar spent where there is a good engineering school.

Low out of state tuition: My alma mater (Georgia Tech) gets tons and tons of out of state students due to the low cost yet good results. Many of those students then STAY there in Atlanta.

Tons of well paying internships/co-op jobs: NYC is addicted to free/low priced interns. I'd say many NYC companies are giant dicks about this policy as well. Make it illegal and harshly punished to offer those in the engineering professions, or setup a huge list of partners pledging to never ever accept unpaid work. In every other part of the country with good engineering schools, you get paid between $12-30 bucks an hour while co-op working (basically an internship you go back to every other semester). This has to happen to keep people in NYC when they get out. Co-op jobs are a great way to basically keep engineers there in town as they almost always get an offer at that position after graduation.

Get nerdy sheik cultural events going on in the city: NYC is too overly status conscious in many ways to appeal to geeky folk. And while not all engineers are geeks, many people assume they are. They act like they're some sort of neckbearded smelly dude in the back of class who's good for nothing other than fixing your computer. You gotta change that perception, and the perception of the perception. Put incredibly dorky installation art in instead of experiemental cultural art. Host events related to hacking things up. Make maker faires, etc.

For what it's worth, here are the top engineering (graduate) schools ranked by US News & World Report in 2010:

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

It seems clear to me that just because an area has a top engineering school nearby, that doesn't necessarily make it a startup hotbed...

As many of the comments on the NYT point out, NYC has good engineering schools. It makes me think there's more going on here if city officials are looking to create a new one from whole cloth rather than trying to improve what's already there.

...New York lacks a top-rated engineering school.

How about Columbia University's Fu School of Engineering, the City College of New York, The Cooper Union, or NYU Poly.

Geez, go back to banking you eejit.

I'm not sure you could call the engineering schools of Columbia, Poly or CUNY "top rated". Cooper Union gets top students (being free), but hardly has top faculty. (Columbia and NYU do have good CS depts, however.)

None of these schools have the Stanford/MIT-like community I believe the plan is designed to create. Throwing money at existing schools is unlikely to create such an environment - the bureaucratic inertia is too large.

[Edit: Didn't mean to imply that Columbia/NYU are in the same league as Stanford/MIT for CS. Their main strengths are physics and math, respectively. ]

Throwing money at existing schools is unlikely to create such an environment - the bureaucratic inertia is too large.

I disagree. It seems it's always easier for a banker turned political appointee to gather some social credibility by proposing starting something from scratch rather than improving what's already there.

I mean which is going to give you more social points at the next fund raiser for the MMA: A) "I want to help these schools expand their campus's no matter what the political opposition" or B) "I have a vision for making NYC the country's next great tech capital".

The idea that a government planned activity is going to cultivate an institution the likes of which happens one or twice a century is pretty preposterous.

I also think you may be dismissing the schools I mentioned too easily. They are all "top rated". I would consider several to be in the top ten engineering schools in the country.

I didn't mean to suggest that I think this project has a significant chance of success. I just assign a much lower success probability to throwing money at one of the existing schools which have already failed.

By the way, the local politicians are already quite willing to take property from other people (by force) in order to help a university expand: http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2010/12/13/us-supreme-court...

existing schools which have already failed.

I'm sorry but how exactly have those schools failed?

the local politicians are already quite willing to take property from other people (by force) in order to help a university expand:

Expansion plans that take a decade to get government approval doesn't imply "quite willing to take property". Everybody involved plays the situation to their own advantage.

I'm sorry but how exactly have those schools failed?

They have failed to become top engineering schools and create a Stanford/MIT-like community.

Expansion plans that take a decade to get government approval doesn't imply "quite willing to take property".

It didn't take 10 years to get government approval, it took 10 years for the government to take property from people against their will. What exactly are you advocating for? Giving our corporate/university overlords the power to steal your land 30 days or less?

There are some great people in the NYU CS dept, but it (and I assume Columbia) are simply not in the same league as Stanford and MIT. Neither of the NYC based schools are top 20 much less top 10 engineering programs.

I agree re: bureaucratic inertia. If you throw money at the same people who built these programs you'll end up with a disaster. Throw some to the people who refused to be part of that nonsense (ie: actual industry leaders) and you'll get much farther.

Well, Columbia is on paper 18th. But I have 2 co-workers who are Columbia grads (1 CS, 1 ME) and when comparing back it sounds like I had a far better experience at a state school for half the money.

If you aren't going to MIT, CMU or Stanford, don't bother going to school to learn CS.

Huh? There are plenty of great programs elsewhere. I know few people who graduated with an undergraduate degree with more experience actually working on robots than people from Georgia Tech.

I don't think youknow enough about degrees, degree programs or the state of education elsewhere in the country to even know how little you know about it.

Sure there are lots of schools that are basically nothing more than basic java training centers, but there are lots of great schools out there with very smart guys.

In the context of what NYC is trying to do, it might be interesting to read PG's thoughts on how to create a Silicon Valley: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

The two main ingredients he identifies in his essay are rich people and nerds. I guess NYC has plenty of rich people and Wall Street capital. What's lacking is the youthful nerds and the universities that would attract them to come to NYC.

An unexplored issue is how geographic constraints will affect the Silicon Valley-ization of NYC. Everyone wants to be in Manhattan but that's an island with limited space. When the other major industries in NYC (like finance) bid up the resources (such as land and labor), can startups become equal or even dominant in NYC?

How about New York City stop worrying about trying to become a tech center every day?

Even Boston grads seem to catch the next flight out West even though Boston has a nice concentration of top schools. The bay area has VCs, schools, concentration of talent and.. momentum.

> the city would seek a “top caliber academic institution” as a partner in building a school for applied science and engineering.

They should definitely partner with RPI. Go Engineers!

What is RPI?

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a good engineering school in upstate NY (technically Troy, NY which is by Albany, so a good 3 hours from Manhattan)

Two things I think of when I think NYC:

1. Frakin' Expensive 2. Not San Francisco

I feel like places like SV and SF can justify high prices because they already have a lot of stuff going on there. If NYC doesn't, how does it make it worth peoples' while by offsetting the financial barrier to entry? I don't immediately see how another engineering school alleviates this, but hey, maybe it will?

If NYC wants to attract the next Google, they should start by repealing the outmoded regulations and firing the bureaucrats (like Kathleen Willey) that ban 23andMe (from the wife of Google) from doing business in the state.

What do you mean by "from the wife of Google"?

One of the two founders is married to Sergey Brin, plus Google has invested in the company

23andMe has a lot of privacy concerns, especially long term (the TLDR is: what happens to all their data if they get acquired?). I don't know much about Kathleen Willey, but NYC is doing a huge amount right now to promote tech in the city (Big Apps competition, open data etc.).

How about trying things like giving startups tax breaks and making the incorporation process less painful?

What's New York's laws like for non-competes? I've always thought that California's laws on non-competes are better for startups.

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