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The Paradox of Prosperity at America’s Universities [citylab.com]

 

Leading research universities have played a central role in America’s dominance of high-tech sector after high-tech sector. From software to biotech, the technology and talent streaming out of these universities have been crucial to the startups that have powered innovation and local economic growth in many regions.

Silicon Valley is unimaginable without Stanford University. The innovation ecosystem of Boston and Cambridge turns on MIT. And research universities have played a key role in reviving cities and neighborhoods hollowed out by crime and deindustrialization. Pittsburgh’s revival, for instance, has been spurred by technologies pioneered at Carnegie Mellon, such as robotics and autonomous vehicles.

But even as universities have driven so much innovation and economic growth, they have also played a role in increasing urban inequality and economic segregation. It’s not just happening in the expensive bedroom communities surrounding universities like Stanford or the gentrifying neighborhoods near New York University, either. As I point out in The New Urban Crisis, college towns like Austin and Boulder also have extraordinarily high levels of inequality and economic segregation.

[For more on this story by Richard Florida, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...universities/562103/]

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