Quote:
Originally Posted by Bigstilt
Truly I'm filled with glee when looking at this development by Drexel University. If we continue to keep both Penn and Drexel students after they graduate this is the start of new horizons. By time this development is completed our population will have grown enough til Philadelphia will have more than 2 million people living here. Image that!
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Imagine that! It'll be like 1960! Just joshin'. But what the ****, let's shoot for four million, right?
But honestly you're absolutely right, and Drexel is doing what it needs to do to keep their graduates in town. And why wouldn't they want to do that? They foster the talent, then employ it. The thing I love about Drexel is that it simply
understands innovation in a way you rarely find outside Cupertino.
An innovative school doesn't start on an isolated campus, it's integrated into the working fabric of a city and with the people who will
use those innovations.
In a lot of ways, I think Drexel's innovative aspirations not only match those in technology corridors, it supersedes them by planting it firmly in a centralized urban environment. Instead of wooing talent to the suburbs in places like Redmond or the Silicon Valley, Drexel is planted smack in the middle of a city...a city in the middle of the northeast corridor. People can crap all over the city all they want for being in the shadows of NY and DC, but a time will come when that centralized proximity will be a true asset.
Thirty years ago, no one knew San Francisco and Seattle would be turning out the latest and greatest gadgets. Ten years from now, no one knows where those gadgets will come from, or even what they'll be.
Drexel's doing what it needs to do for Philadelphia to be a contender in an unknown future, and doing it a lot better than most. We're on a path where we could easily reclaim the name the "Workshop of the World" while San Francisco and Seattle struggle to fill their lofts. The shift "back east" makes sense, and it looks like Drexel wants to own it.