The Bloomberg administration is wooing a big time engineering campus to the city in order to beef up the amount of home grown tech talent here in New York.
18 proposals came in from top flight schools like Stanford and Cornell and from as far away as Korea and Switzerland. New York University, Carnegie Mellon, the City University of New York, the University of Toronto and IBM handed in a joint proposal.
“We were waiting to see what kind of response we got before laying out what we wanted,” says a City Hall source. With the two step process, the city will now give the interested school a sense of what they need to bring to the table in order to win the deal. “With all the interest we can definitely push them for something big.”
There are five city owned locations under consideration for the new campus, although the WSJ reports that some schools are already considering private locations.
One of the keys will be bringing in a school that understands how to move students from the classroom to the business world. “I would very much like to see more computer science students, and I’d like to see more technology transfer from the university into the marketplace,” Brad Burnham, a founding partner at Union Square Ventures, told Crains. “That’s something Stanford has been fantastic at.”
