Tags: knowledge industry
Tags: knowledge industry
April 1, 2003
John F. Kennedy said, “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.” This is even more true today than when he spoke those words 40 years ago — particularly for Philadelphia. Our knowledge workers have become a fundamental resource we need to attract jobs, wealth and positive growth to our area. While 13% of Harvard Business School graduates take jobs with Boston-area companies each year, a mere 4.4% of Wharton graduates stay in Philadelphia. To compete within the new knowledge economy we must increase the size of the skilled workforce that we can offer to employers and retain more college graduates who will bring innovation and entrepreneurship to the area.
What can strong universities and large numbers of college students offer our region? First, as we see in Leveraging Colleges and Universities for Urban Economic Revitalization: An Action Agenda, academic institutions can play an important role in urban revitalization, partnering with surrounding communities to bring resources, ideas and leadership needed to turn-around distressed neighborhoods. But it is the students themselves, rather than the institutions that provide the greatest asset to the region. For this reason, the Knowledge Industry Partnership was formed in 2001 to attract and retain more college students. In Greater Philadelphia’s Knowledge Industry: Driving the Region’s Economic Competitiveness, we learn how we compare to other regions in the quantity and quality of our student population and educated workforce; and a new campaign, the One Big Campus initiative, may help more college students find reasons to stay and begin their careers in Philadelphia.
How big is the potential benefit if the Knowledge Industry’s One Big Campus initiative is successful? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one advantage will be an increase in per-capita income for the region. In The Big Payoff: Educational Attainment and Estimates of Work-Life Earnings, the Census Bureau quantifies just how much a college or higher degree affects your earning power. But perhaps the most significant benefit is bringing more jobs to the region. In Signs of Life: The Growth of Biotechnology Centers in the U.S., Joseph Cortright and Heike Mayer look at nine metropolitan areas, including metropolitan Philadelphia, which are biotechnology centers and explore the ingredients that have allowed these areas to dominate this industry. What the IT Revolution Means for Regional Economic Development by Paul Sommers and Daniel Carlson complements this analysis by looking at what regions need to have in place to capitalize on new opportunities offered by information technology and the global economy as industries fragment and globalize their operations.
Finally, an article by Susan Hensen and Leonard Huggins introduces us to the “chicken or the egg” aspect of growing our college educated population in order to attract and create more jobs. In order to bring more jobs to our region, a strong argument can be made, as the articles in this issue show, that we need to expand our educated workforce. Yet, Career and Location Decisions: Recent Pittsburgh Area University Graduates found that the number one reason students gave for leaving the Pittsburgh region was the lack of jobs. We need to bring in new jobs to retain more of our college and graduate students, yet jobs will not relocate here and few will be created here until we increase the number of college and graduate students who choose to make our region their home. Where does that leave us? Working hard to simultaneously increase the number of jobs and the size of our educated workforce to grow our region.
Articles from the issue (PDF format):
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