Home>IN THE MEDIA

University of Washington and Chinese University Unite to Form Technology Institute

University of Washington and Chinese University Unite to Form Technology Institute

By NICK WINGFIELDJUNE 18, 2015

SEATTLE — With hometown companies like Amazon and Microsoft, this bustling region on the Puget Sound easily ranks in the top tier of technology hubs in the United States.

But the area lags behind its peers in one glaring way: It is home to a single major research university, the University of Washington, while nearly every other big technology scene in the country has at least two.

For years, that weakness has stoked local unease about whether the gap between the supply of people with computer-related degrees and the surge in demand for those skills could impede the region’s economy. “We’ve long realized we’re at a relative competitive disadvantage when it comes to higher education,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel.

On Thursday, Seattle’s top academic and business leaders unveiled a plan to create a new institute of learning, with the goal of strengthening the educational foundation of the region’s high-tech economy. The institute, the Global Innovation Exchange, is a partnership between the University of Washington and one of China’s leading research universities, Tsinghua University. It will open in fall 2016 with a master’s degree program in technology innovation.

Microsoft will contribute $40 million to help the institute get started. Some of the money will go toward creating a base for the institute in a large new urban development project in Bellevue, Wash., about 10 miles from the University of Washington’s main campus. Faculty for the school will come from the University of Washington, Tsinghua and, eventually, a couple other international universities the Global Innovation Exchange expects to attract as partners.

It will start with only a few dozen students, but the institute has a goal of more than 3,000 a decade from now. Tsinghua is expected to help recruit Chinese students to the institute, providing an important global aspect, said Ana Mari Cauce, interim president of the University of Washington.

“This will be the first time a Chinese university has a physical spot in the U.S.,” Dr. Cauce said in an interview before the public announcement of the institute. “That’s a big deal.”

The institute will not initially grant undergraduate degrees, which will limit its potential to make a dent in the region’s deficit of technology talent, at least in the near term. But the participants in the project said it was too early to predict what the institute could eventually become. “Fundamentally, it’s about looking ahead a decade and a century,” Mr. Smith said.

A 2013 report by the Washington Student Achievement Council, a state agency focused on education, said the state needed to produce more than 2,700 additional bachelor’s degrees annually in computer science to meet projected employer demand in the region through 2021. The University of Washington currently awards about 300 computer science degrees a year.

Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate company based in Seattle, said he had never seen a region so solely dependent on one research institution. “I was shocked when I got here,” Mr. Kelman said. “Really, it’s Microsoft and Amazon and a dozen other companies our size and hundreds of even smaller ones picking over the same group of graduating computer scientists. It’s an incredibly small group of people.”

 

 

Copyright 2001-2021 news.tsinghua.edu.cn. All rights reserved.