Author Archives: Goldie Blumenstyk

November 8, 2011, 6:09 pm

National Labor College Ends Joint Venture With For-Profit Partner

The National Labor College has ended its five-year distance-education partnership with a subsidiary of the Princeton Review after just 18 months, in an agreement that allows the nonprofit college to keep $15-million of the $25-million in capital investment that the company had promised to the joint venture.

Initially the venture was to be a joint operation of the college, which is affiliated with the A.F.L.- C.I.O. and offers programs for union members, and Penn Foster Education Group. Penn Foster is a career college, owned by the Princeton Review, that once had hopes of expanding into online education. But with the parent company losing money and its stock trading at about 15 cents per share, its executives are no longer pursuing that course.

Backers of the joint venture, which was 51 percent controlled by the college, had once called it a model for future for-profit and…

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October 25, 2011, 12:37 pm

Manhattan’s Silicon Valley Envy

By Goldie Blumenstyk

Even New York City gets Silicon Valley envy. Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the city’s economy is too dependent on finance—and universities from around the world (and a few right in NYC) are jockeying for the chance to build a new graduate “applied sciences” campus in the city to help it attract and keep computer scientists, software engineers, and other techies. The competition has Stanford and Cornell Universities vying for the biggest prize, a choice site on Roosevelt Island, which both say they’ll remake as a sleek model of energy efficiency.

Proposals are due on Friday, and while much of the media focus in New York City has been on the four main contenders and their chances, the not-so-inconsequential issue of whether, and how, New York can develop a truly deep tech economy is an equally important issue. Can it? Will it? And, as Columbia’s president Lee C. Bollinger pointedly…

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February 19, 2009, 12:45 pm

For Academic Inventors, a Way to Trust, but Verify

By Goldie Blumenstyk

Orlando — Sure, it’s an exaggeration to say that all academic inventors think that their university technology-transfer offices don’t do enough pitching to get their inventions into commercial use, or that all tech-transfer folks think academics have an unrealistic (read: inflated) view of how attractive their inventions might be to companies and investors.

But that problem does often hang over such enterprises. And even under the best of circumstances, few would disagree that it would be better all around if researchers were better informed about how their inventions are being handled once they are disclosed to the university.

The backers of a Cornell University Web tool dubbed MyIP could go a long way toward closing that information gap.

The portal allows inventors who have reported inventions to the university to track the status of patenting and licensing activity on their…

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December 8, 2008, 12:43 pm

If Education Is Crucial to the Economic Turnaround, How Does Your Community Stack Up?

By Goldie Blumenstyk

As states and communities begin to look into ways they might engineer an economic turnaround, will regions where people are better educated have a leg up?

It’s an argument many publicly funded colleges may choose to make this year as they press their states for money. And now a new Web site from the Lumina Foundation — showing county-by-county data on the educational levels of adults — could help the institutions make that case.

The site includes state-by-state data on the educational levels of people who are between 25 and 34 years old. And for each state, it breaks the data down by county, which might prove particularly useful for community colleges eager to argue that state governments should invest more heavily in postsecondary education. —Goldie Blumenstyk