I often recount the story of UC Irvine–which was born as a new University of California in 1965 and recently was ranked by US News and World Report as one of the very top research universities in the country. Interestingly, the school was initially considered primarily a commuter school, built around a ring with large parking lots surrounding the ring in lieu of dorms and research buildings. Irvine itself is in Orange County–a county with roughly similar demographics to Fairfax County Virginia–about a million people, adjacent to an important city (Los Angeles).
I’ve written a lot of Irvine, here is not perhaps the place to extoll their praises, but as a case study they are quite interesting. One of the themes to that school’s success has to do with being in the right place at the right time. They were born into a County that was, at the time, growing extrordinarily quickly, in a state, California, which if I recall correctly would be the seventh largest economy in the world, were it considered separately from the United States.
We’re in the right place at the right time also. Our area’s economy currently would put it (if it were a country) into the top twenty nations–ahead of Argentina, Austria, Dennmark, Ireland, Israel, Norway, South Africa and Turkey. The median household income here is second only to San Francisco-San Jose, while the annual employment growth as more than double that of any other metropolitan area last year.
In terms of education, our area has the highest percent of the population with an advanced degree. And of course, Northern Virgnia now can boast of having the largest public university and the largest hospital (INOVA Fairfax) in the Commonwealth. Add to that HHMI’s Janelia Farms complex, and I’d argue things are poised to be very fruitful for us at Krasnow.
My own sense is that in the not too distant future, we’ll be reading about Mason in a very similar fashion to the story I just related about a new university on the West Coast.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 