New York City wants to be the next American tech powerhouse. To get there, the city is tripling its investment in programs for computer science students and encouraging more women to launch a high-tech career.
Cornell Tech — a new research and graduate-level institution affiliated with Cornell University and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology — is being built in the middle of the East River, on Roosevelt Island. Planners say that over the next 30 years, it will:
- generate 48,000 new jobs.
- double the number of full-time graduate engineering students and faculty in New York.
- add $33 billion to the economy.
- narrow the existing gender gap in the technology field.
“It’s a game changer,” New York Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul said in July. “I can’t tell you how many tech businesses I visited over the last year since I was at the groundbreaking. They’re just waiting for the graduates to come out of Cornell Tech. I hear it everywhere.”
To achieve this, Cornell Tech has partnered with the City University of New York and other tech leaders to launch Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in New York to prepare young women for careers in technology.
Accenture is committed to hiring women into at least 40 percent of its open positions. Other industry partners expanding training and job opportunities for women include Kickstarter, Viacom, Genome, LearnVest, Bloomberg and Google.
By 2024, the U.S. Labor Department figures there will be 1.1 million computing-related job openings in the U.S.
ShareAmerica contributed to this article.
