Cornell NYC Tech Campus gets $133 Million from co-founder of Qualcomm

http://cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2013/04/22/two-cornell-alumni-donate-133-million-tech-campus-bloomberg-announce

by pGrabber • 13 years ago

36 12 13 years ago

cornellsun.com

rollo_tommasi• 13 years ago

It'd be better for this money to go to strengthen technical education (and more importantly, re-educution) in the CUNY system rather than to burnish yet another elites-only institution, but training and re-training ordinary workers isn't quite as flashy or sexy a cause.

spindritf2• 13 years ago

> It'd be better for this money to go to strengthen technical education (and more importantly, re-educution) in the CUNY system

It's very difficult to say that with any level of certainty -- The Null Hypothesis in Education is Hard to Disprove http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-null-hypothesis-in-educa...

gu2• 13 years ago

There is no correlation between the blog comment you linked to and the statement you're quoting. Your comment boils down to little more than saying "Not true!"

If you want to make the point that bolstering public education is a wasted effort, then think of countries like Finland or Norway who have an excellent public educational system. Go on vacation there, and you'll be surprised, for instance, how well the average person there speaks English. Now compare this to the US or the UK where people usually don't bother learning a second language, and your average shop clerk has a hard enough time communicating in his mother tongue.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

>Cornell NYC Tech has received “an incredibly generous,” $133-million gift from two Cornell alumni

Well when the donor is an alum from said elites-only institution, we can't realistically expect this kind of money to go anywhere else.

arh68• 13 years ago

I disagree that Cornell is an elites-only institution. Besides, how would you have spent the money within the CUNY system? According to [1], their FY14 budget is $2.154B, so $133M would be a 6% bump for FY14. Any ideas?

[1] http://www.cuny.edu/about/administration/offices/bf/fy2014-s...

cm2012• 13 years ago

Having spoken to administration who work for CUNY Baruch (which is a great school) who formerly worked at NYU, that money could make a huge difference. For instance, $40,000 was apparently practically a rounding error at NYU, while at Baruch the only way to free that up would be to fire someone, essentially.

waitwhatwhoa• 13 years ago

This is not the only school that Joan and Irwin Jacobs have given to:

And in 1997, the School went through a final name change when QUALCOMM founder and former UCSD engineering professor Irwin Jacobs and his wife Joan Jacobs provided a $15 million endowment for the [UC San Diego School of Engineering], leading to the current name in their honor. The couple later added to the endowment in 2003 with a $110 million gift for scholarships, fellowships, and faculty support.[1]

UC San Diego is certainly not an elites-only institution. The Jacobs family has been very generous to many institutions, and I'm glad to see them helping Cornell NYC get off the ground.

1. http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/about/about_hx/

davidf18• 13 years ago

In 2010 the Jacobs donated $26 million to Israel's public school Technion (Technion is also the co-sponsor with Cornell of the NYC initiative).

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/breaking-news/technion-cor...

"[Technion President] Lavie noted that both Irwin and Joan Jacobs are Cornell alumni and major Technion donors. In 2010, the couple donated $26 million to found the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Graduate School at the university’s Haifa campus."

Cornell NYC Tech Campus gets $133 Million from co-founder of Qualcomm

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