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Communities are counting on their local universities to create good-paying jobs that will keep kids from leaving town after graduation. But is that realistic?

You could do worse, much worse, than Blacksburg in the spring. This time of year the rolling landscape in southwest Virginia is popping with purple and green, the mountain air crisp. The campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, more famously known as Virginia Tech, bustles with backpack-bearing students and brisk-walking faculty. Throughout town the streets appear to be recently paved and they are clean.

What a great place to live. If only there were more good jobs.

That’s where Joe Meredith comes in. He is president of the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, which 10 years ago was hardly worth mentioning but today is home to 1,830 high-tech, mostly private-sector workers. The CRC was established in 1985 as a for-profit subsidiary of the Virginia Tech Foundation; its mission is to at once advance technology-transfer operations at Virginia Tech as well as to spur the economy of southwest Virginia. Today it makes its own money and does not draw on university funds.

By Doug Campbell
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

Full Story: http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/economic_research/region_focus/summer_2005/feature4.cfm

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