My thanks to the Center for an Urban Future for publishing my analysis of the implications of the on-again proposed merger of NYU and Polytechnic University. This piece appeared first as an “Off the CUF” policy brief on the CUF website and is linked to by permission. Crain’s covered it here, The New York Sun here, National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship here, The Brooklyn Paper here, and Metro here. The article appears in a frame after the break.

More on NYU, Poly, and engineering in NYC: my take

It now seems de rigueur for academic institutions to commission economic-impact reports.

A quick Google search of the .edu domain shows what I mean (click on the image for a snapshot of a search I did recently or do your own in real time at Google). I don’t know exactly how many have been done, but I think it’s a certainty that a solid majority of the top research universities both public and private have commissioned one in the last 10 years. In fact, I believe I will build a collection of them and post it [UPDATE - I just have. Check out this page on the sidebar.]

(Disclosure: I don’t do impact analyses and neither does the practice I belong to at Battelle, at least in isolation. These are typically projects that demand a lot of attention to detail, but apart from any broader strategic analysis, and the client doesn’t want to pay very much for what seems like a simple exercise. A few firms like Appleseed do a lot of them, particularly in my own region, and there are some excellent examples from all sorts of organizations, including a real-estate giant’s consulting subsidiary that did UC Berkeley’s, which shows up high in that Google search. In general, universities like an independent analyst who cannot be accused of direct conflict.)

Sometimes I wonder what goes through administrators’ minds when they commission these.

More on A word about university economic-impact reports