Leverage universities for growth of metro Atlanta

Earlier this summer the Mac–Arthur Foundation awarded $7.6 million in grants to 10 universities around the world, Emory University among them, to establish special master’s degree programs focusing on sustainable development.

We at Emory are fortunate to receive hundreds of grants every year. What the MacArthur Foundation grant and others like it demonstrate is the critical role colleges and universities play in creating the human capital needed to advance the economic, social and cultural lifeblood of a community.

Indeed, work in this one subject area — sustainable development — creates an opportunity for the production of new ideas that can be applied as far away as a remote village in Africa or as close as the crowded corridors of metro Atlanta.

Whether the goal is creating world-class facilities for the research and treatment of cancer in Atlanta or a healthier economic climate through sustainable development on another continent, America’s most successful communities have come to rely heavily on their universities and colleges to sustain economic and social progress.

But while that progress isn’t hard to measure, it can sometimes be undervalued.

Traditionally, economic development focuses on tax breaks and inducements to recruit major employers — like the $109 million package put together by state and local officials to entice NCR to move 2,120 jobs to metro Atlanta from Dayton, Ohio, or the $46. 6 million used to recruit Kia Motors to build a plant in West Point, near LaGrange.

Even as we celebrate the success of such endeavors, we should be careful not to overlook the sustained impact that colleges and universities have on the communities they serve and what role they can play in the future to move the region and state forward.

Emory University, for instance, is among the largest private employers in the 20-county metro Atlanta area. Our Woodruff Health Sciences Center, including Emory Healthcare, has an operating budget of $2.3 billion a year and generates an economic impact of about $5.5 billion annually.

And unlike major corporations — or professional sports franchises, as other cities have learned — there’s no risk that Emory University is going to pack up and leave town for greener pastures elsewhere. Our roots are deeply embedded here. Atlanta is our campus.

We’re here — in green times and economic droughts — for the long haul. That’s also true of Georgia Tech, of Georgia State and Kennesaw State, and Agnes Scott, and Morehouse and Spelman and all the other institutions that contribute so much to metro Atlanta’s vitality.

Sometimes we forget that Atlanta has an enviable higher education base. We are gifted with research universities in medicine, engineering and technology; historic black institutions and classic liberal arts colleges; graduate schools of theology, law, public health and public administration as well as community-level programs that allow opportunities for thousands of Atlantans to get a bachelor’s degree while still working and raising families.

These distinctive institutions share one common goal: Making it possible for men and women to lead better lives by improving their minds and expanding their intellectual frontiers.

We know from research that that makes them more employable and able to earn more money.

But we also know that the expanded knowledge base they acquire makes them better citizens; and better citizens make better communities.

Sociologists and economists say that high concentrations of highly talented and educated people — what we now call human capital — provide metro areas a distinct advantage in competition for economic development.

Places that attract and put into close contact entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, authors, scientists and other smart, creative people, in the words of author Richard Florida, “accelerate the local rate of economic evolution.”

The communities in which these people live, work and interact are vital, interesting places that tend to look forward, adapt to change and value the diversity of ideas and cultures.

In short, they have a huge head start over homogeneous communities stuck in the past looking for new ways to re-create themselves. Universities serve as the incubators for this talent. The benefits these people bring to our campuses flow naturally to the communities we serve.

If Atlanta is to move forward it must recognize the important role these institutions play and put them front and center in public and private economic development plans, the way Raleigh-Durham and Nashville and other Southern cities started using their colleges and universities for economic development years ago.

We hope that by 2012, Emory and the other MacArthur Foundation grantees will produce 250 master’s degree recipients who will be given over to the world to create new forms of sustainable development.

Some of them, no doubt, will use their minds and educations to help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Carter Center, CARE and other Atlanta-based agencies tackle this and other important global missions.

In so doing — and by working and interacting with thousands of others on equally important projects — they’ll also be breathing new life into our community.