{"id":389,"date":"2006-07-13T11:14:13","date_gmt":"2006-07-13T11:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/13\/local-economics-of-higher-educ\/"},"modified":"2006-07-13T11:14:13","modified_gmt":"2006-07-13T11:14:13","slug":"local-economics-of-higher-educ","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/13\/local-economics-of-higher-educ\/","title":{"rendered":"Local Economics of Higher Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dean Dad, spinning off an article in the Chronicle<\/cite>, has some interesting thoughts on the economic benefits of colleges and universities<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Apropos of my minor obsession with the economic conditions in Northern Town, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story<\/a> noting that the University of Rochester is now the largest employer in Rochester. A quick check on the always-reliable Wikipedia (I know, I know…) reveals that SUNY-Buffalo is the largest employer in Buffalo, and Syracuse University the largest employer in Syracuse. Binghamton University (a.k.a. SUNY-Binghamton) is the largest employer in the Greater Binghamton region, which is almost an oxymoron. I’m starting to see a pattern here…<\/p>\n

Higher ed makes an awfully dicey economic engine for a city, especially when it’s just a single institution and a fair-sized city. (Boston succeeds with gazillions of colleges and universities, and Ann Arbor does quite well by being not much bigger than the University of Michigan, but those are exceptional cases.) Colleges and universities (other than proprietaries) are tax-exempt, so unlike other employers, they don’t pay property taxes. (In the Northeast especially, that’s a big deal.) They generally don’t grow very fast, when they grow at all. With the increased reliance on adjunct faculty, they don’t pay as many middle-class salaries as they once did, even as total employee headcount increases. Students come and go, generally supporting a few local pizza places, bars, and slumlords, and not much else.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As noted in his comments, he’s a little unfair to academia, as a college or university necessarily employs a very large number of people, mostly in support roles, so it’s not too surprising to find them among the largest single employers, but the basic point is only changed a little.<\/p>\n

(More thoughts below the fold.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is particularly interesting to me, as a lot of the issues he mentions have direct local applicability. Schenectady is one of those run-down single-industry towns– GE used to dominate the local landscape, but most of their operations have been shut down or moved away, and the state of the town is a constant concern for the college. It’s one of the major hurdles to be cleared in getting students and faculty to come here and stay here.<\/p>\n

Of course, Union is in an odd sort of position, because it’s a very small college– only 2,100 students, give or take. It’s the only school I’ve been at that doesn’t completely dominate the local scene– Williams was the largest employer in the county, the University of Maryland has 40,000 students or so, and Yale is Yale. Here, if you get more than a few blocks away from campus, you really don’t see much sign of the college– there are very few student-oriented businesses, and not even much of a bar scene.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s an institution with a great deal of money plopped down in the middle of a small cash-starved city, and a lot of thought has been put into how to use that the benefit the community. The college has sunk a great deal of money into improving the local area– buying up most of a large neighborhood near campus, and offering incentives to get working families to move in, buying a slightly seedy hotel and turning it into a dorm. Beyond the real estate transactions, the college has made PILOT paymets (payments in lieu of taxes) to the city in the past, and probably will in the future. And I know of at least one partnership between the college and a local company that has brought in state grant money for high-tech development projects.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s a tough problem, and can be frustrating for people on both sides of the town-gown split. And as the Dean Dad point out, it’s not clear how stable this arrangement will be, in the long run. The flight of industry from the North is a relatively recent development, and we haven’t really had time to see how these situations tend to play out. That’s the problem with economics, of course– it’s one gigantic uncontrolled experiment, running at an extremely slow pace, and with the life and death of whole communities riding on the outcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Dean Dad, spinning off an article in the Chronicle, has some interesting thoughts on the economic benefits of colleges and universities: Apropos of my minor obsession with the economic conditions in Northern Town, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story noting that the University of Rochester is now the largest employer in Rochester.… Continue reading Local Economics of Higher Education<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-economics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}