Making Opportunities by Working Together
How Atlanta benefits from Atlanta's colleges and universities being a model of collaboration
by Michael A. Gerber, ARCHE President
Atlanta has long been a place where groups put aside competing interests to come together and make big things happen. Nowhere is that culture more evident than in the region’s colleges and universities, which partner on everything from joint degrees and research to cultural events and library collections. When it comes to harnessing the brain power of higher education, Atlanta colleges, businesses and civic organizations work together for one of the most collaborative environments in the nation.
What’s this mean for Atlanta? A better educated workforce, broader learning opportunities for students, discoveries that wouldn’t happen in isolation, a great city for business, and a place where smart people want to come learn and work with other smart people.
Coming together to share higher ed resources has an extraordinarily long history here. Dating to 1929, the Atlanta University Center is the nation's largest and oldest consortium of historically black colleges and universities. (Its members today are Clark Atlanta, Morehouse, Morehouse School of Medicine and Spelman.) By 1938, Agnes Scott College, the Atlanta College of Art, Columbia Theological Seminary, Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Georgia formed the University Center in Georgia to share resources, avoid duplication, and bring faculty together.
Today, that organization is the Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education, and it brings together 20 colleges and universities, both public and private. Member presidents meet regularly as the ARCHE board to think about collaborative ventures. Through ARCHE, students can broaden their learning experiences with cross registration, taking courses not offered at their home institutions. Students and faculty also share library books and journals through ARCHE, enjoying access to specialized collections at other members and allowing institutions to better focus their library collection budgets.
But collaboration is not just about efficiency. It’s about creating the environment for opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist – in learning, in funding, and in discoveries. Academic cooperation in Atlanta now includes formal joint degree programs built on the separate strengths of individual colleges. Just a few of many examples of bringing together two specialties to create something new.
- To help train theology students for public leadership, Columbia Theological Seminary and the Interdenominational Theological Center offer dual masters in divinity in partnership with a master’s in public policy from Georgia State University.
- Georgia State’s law school teams up with Georgia Tech’s architecture program for a joint JD-master of city and regional planning.
- Georgia Tech and SCAD-Atlanta bring together their strengths in engineering and art to move electronic gaming into the future.
All of this makes Atlanta a great place to go to college, and local businesses profit from the abundant talent graduating from the campuses and entering the workforce. The Atlanta region ranks 7th nationally in both college students enrolled and degrees awarded annually– and is a national leader in degrees that support key industries in fields such as the biosciences, engineering, health professions, business and foreign languages.
This higher ed strength was key in recruiting companies such as NCR, First Data and Wipro. These wins are an outgrowth of targeted and close collaboration between economic development organizations and higher ed. This month, ARCHE and the Metro Atlanta Chamber brought together colleges and universities to discuss the Chamber's “new economy” report. This new plan focuses on building high-paying jobs in strategically targeted niche areas of broad industries. As the chamber implements the plan, collaboration between industry and higher education will help align academic programs with target industries and help local businesses hire employees from Atlanta's talent pool of ARCHE college and university graduates.
University researchers often drive to know all they can about a specific subject so they can create new knowledge in that field. When specialists like this come together from different disciplines and different universities, great things can happen. The Georgia Research Alliance, which has become a national model for research collaboration, was formed in 1990 to bring together universities, government and the private sector for economic development. Most recently, GRA is marshaling the strengths of several universities into a focused effort to position Georgia as a world leader in developing new vaccines and therapeutics.
To bring university discoveries to market, GRA’s VentureLab has evaluated the commercial potential of more than 260 university inventions or discoveries in the past 5 years and awarded grants to develop 165 of the most promising. Seventy early-stage companies have been formed. They employ more than 450 people and have attracted $350 million in private equity investment.
Perhaps Atlanta’s crowning example of collaboration is the partnership between Emory and Georgia Tech – pairing a private university and teaching hospital with one of the nation’s leading engineering schools. Emory’s med school and Tech’s engineering college partner on research as wide ranging as vaccines, nanotechnology, regenerative medicine and pediatric health. In a rare move, the two formed a joint academic department -- the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering – that now ranks No. 2 in the nation.
Decades of practice in working together across broad communities of interest has created here in Atlanta a uniquely collaborative culture. In higher ed, this is yielding expanded research and learning opportunities on the campuses – and provides a strong base for business and industry to partner with the region’s many colleges and universities.