Educational Institutions Are Partners in Creating Intellectual Capital for the Region

In many other regions of the world, universities may perceive their role as bastions of knowledge divorced from economic applications, with little responsibility for their graduates entering the knowledge-based work force. Here, as in other emergent regions in India, Taiwan, and Ireland, higher education institutions are more likely to see themselves as active partners in the creation of regional wealth and in preparing their students for good employment opportunities. The role of higher educational institutions has been critical to the success of Silicon Valley. Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley are well known as research incubators and generate many of the skilled scientists, engineers , and entrepreneurs who founded the leading high-tech companies that Silicon Valley was built on, such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Intel, Yahoo and many more.

If you want to buy tickets for any Stanford athletic event just dial 1-800-BEAT-CAL. That tells you where the Stanford community's priorities are relative to Berkeley in their intense , but amicable relationship. The football rivalry of the red and white uniformed Stanford Cardinals and blue and gold uniformed Berkeley Bears on the athletic field is long-standing. Far less appreciated is the high level of cooperation between the two educational behemoths in the laboratory and in scientific endeavors. This cooperation combined with the multilevel coordination (informal, but still regionally complementary) with the State University schools of San Francisco, San Jose, and Hayward; other local universities such as the University of Santa Clara and UC Santa Cruz; and the community colleges such as De Anza and Foothill, all enable Silicon Valley to have one of the most comprehensive and vertically integrated educational systems of any region in the world. This higher educational consortium produces the continuing supply of knowledge workers of all levels of talent and skill sets necessary to keep the Silicon Valley's regional advantage.