NEW YORK — The city’s quest to make itself a legitimate rival to Silicon Valley as a high-tech hub has long bumped up against some harsh realities, among them the fact it hasn’t had a top-tier technology school pumping out the next generation of entrepreneurs and engineers.
A potential answer to that problem, a new technology-oriented graduate school called Cornell Tech, cuts the ribbon Wednesday on the first phase of its new campus on an island in the East River.
The collaboration between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, built with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars from philanthropies and from the city, has just 250 master’s degree students and 50 doctoral students taking classes this fall. But officials hope to ramp up to 2,000 students by the time the campus is fully developed.
Part of the concept is to promote close ties between academia and the startup economy, officials said.
“Cornell Tech presented an opportunity that is almost unheard of today, to build a new type of academic program and a new type of campus from scratch,” Martha Pollack, the computer scientist who was named the 14th president of Cornell University this year, said in a speech to a business group.
She called the school “the first of its kind campus, built for the digital age.”
The first three buildings of a 12-acre campus on Roosevelt Island are opening Wednesday after a fledgling Cornell Tech program spent the past four years as a rent-free tenant at a Google office building in Manhattan.
