I’ve noticed a pasttern among three cities in upstate New York. They were originally home to major manufacturers, but in recent decades the big companies (usually only a couple of firms were the economic engines of each city) have failed or moved out, and now the biggest employers in each city are the local universities.
Rochester, NY was home to Kodak and Bausch and Lomb, with Xerox (which had a big building downtown) in nearby Webster. Bausch and Lomb switched over to contact lenses, then got bought by a foreign company, and now even the contact lens headquarters has moved out of town. Kodak famously went bankrupt. It emerged from that, but shed much of its original business, and its old factories have been razed. It’s a shadow of its older self, which basically ran Rochester. The biggest employers in the city now are the University of Rochester and its associated Strong Memorial Hospital.
Binghamton NY (and the associated cities of Endicott and Johnson City) was the home of Endicott Johnson Shoes and the home of IBM. It also had a huge building owned by the Air Force that has been leased to various aerospace companies, including GE and BAE. But Endicott Johnson is shuttered now, IBM has mostly moved out of town, and the Air Force building (and lot of other businesses) was flooded out in a record-breaking flood in 2011, and the building is to be torn down. The biggest empl,oyer in town is now Binghamton University, the former SUNY Binghamton. The students generally stick to the campus, and tend to avoid downtown.
Syracuse NY was home to some big GE plants, was the world headquarters of Carrier air conditioners, and the home of Crouse-Hinds, which made traffic signals. They all folded or moved operations out of town, and sometimes out of the country. The big employers in Syracuse are now Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical College. The next biggest is Wegman’s, which is a long way third.
Do any other cities (especially in other states, particularly those in the Rust Belt) have the same experience? I’m not talking about places in which the colleges and universities have always been the big players, like Princeton NJ or Cambridge MA, but places where one or two manufacturing industries dominated, but where the overall decline in manufacturing since WWII combined with more recent outsourcing have essentially removed the big industries, leaving the educational institutions as the big employers?
I am not an economist, but it seems to me that is the pattern everywhere today. America has moved away from manufacturing and we are now becoming a service economy.
I agree, but that doesn’t answer my question – In which other cities have educational institutions become the major employers, displacing traditional manufacturing? It’s not the case in Hartford, CT, for instance, or New York City.
Rochester has been steadily dropping in population since sometime in the 1950’s:
So has Binghamton:
So has Syracuse:
Also, look in those entries how low the average income is. What’s happened to all of them is that many but not all industries have closed. They each had a university in them and that has remained there. The people who would have been working in those industries have moved elsewhere (or are unemployed). They have each become a city with a smaller number of jobs for blue collar workers but the same number for university faculty and staff.
You say “Colleges In” in the thread title. No colleges have moved in, nor have the local colleges increased in size. Further examples - um, a large portion of the U.S.?
Doesn’t Iberdrola have a major presence in Rochester? I did some work for Central Maine Power, which is owned by Iberdrola, and the bosses for my project were all in Rochester.
In Rochester, at least, it really isn’t education that’s growing…it is health care. To say “manufacturing out, health care in” would be more accurate.
My impression is that quite a few cities are trying to turn to a health care model now that the manufacturing model is no longer so effective. Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland would all be examples, I think.
“X in, Y out” is common parlance for X taking over or becoming more important while Y becomes less important.
I’m obviously not saying that colleges physically moved in where they didn’t exist before. And they don’t have to change size physically in order to become more important economically.
The University is by far the biggest employer, but most sources don’t break it down into U of R proper and Strong University Medical Center.
I wasn’t talking about growing, in any case, but about which is the most important economically. The two aren’t necessarily opposed to each other, but they’re not the same thing, either.
I think the proper question is to find cities in which this isn’t true, because that would be a much shorter list.
New York is a terrible example. Before WWII it had more manufacturing jobs than any other city in the country. Today all the leading employers are service industries, with the top four being government. Hartford was never a center of manufacturing. Its leading employer was insurance, and that was already a service industry. If we all agree that manufacturing in the Rust Belt has been replaced by service industries, then that’s not a real change.
Boston? Not a single large manufacturer in the top ten. Philadelphia? All colleges and hospitals except for UPS. Baltimore? Colleges, hospitals and the government, except for McCormick. Pittsburgh? All service industries. Bridgeport? Banks and hospitals. Providence and New Haven? The Ivies have always had a large influence but they once were manufacturing centers. Today it’s all service. Chicago? All service, if you include United. Detroit? Chrysler is #10.
I defy you to come up with a single large or medium-sized city in the Rust Belt for which this isn’t true. So the proper answer to your question, “Do any other cities (especially in other states, particularly those in the Rust Belt) have the same experience?” is: freakin’ all of them.
Kenosha, Wisconsin is an extreme example, even for the Rust Belt. For the entire 20th century it was an automobile manufacturer (Nash/AMC/Chrysler). With the auto plants gone, the area’s largest employers are now the public schools, a branch of the University of Wisconsin, and a vocational school.
But importantly, 49% of the workforce now works outside the area, a lot of them commuting to Milwaukee or Chicago. And more than 2/3 of the residents are under 45, which means they probably had little or no involvement in the auto industry at all.
That’s easy to assert. Can you give me an example?
Like Youngstown Ohio used to be home to Grelb industries, but it’s main industryt now is Youngstown University?
Remember – I’m not asking “Which Rust Belt Cities have seen a decline in manufacturing?” Or “Which Rust Belt Cities are economically depressed?”
I’m specifically asking if anyone can name another city where the University has displaced a former big manufacturer as the most important economic power in town. Or employs the most people, or some other measure.
This is the question I asked in the OP. Everyone’s dancing around it or talkiing about something else altogether.
That’s a boring question, which is a little harder to answer, because it requires knowing the affiliations of hospitals. If you weren’t from Rochester, would you know that Strong Hospital is part of the UofR?
I’m not going through it again, but all I did was google CITY largest employers. You can do that and judge for yourself which ones meet your criteria the best.
It’s not a boring question. If you think so, just stay away from the thread.
And, yes, several sites I visited listed the U of R and Strong together, explicitly.
It’s an interesting question, to me, because I can’t think, offhand, of any other cities where this is the case. as I say, it’s not true of Boston, Princeton, or Hartford. It’s not true of New Brunswick, NJ. Despite the presence of Rutgers, which is huge, Johnson and Johnson has its world headquarters there.
It’s not true of Camden, NJ. Depressed as it is, Campbell is still the big fish in that pond, with its headquarters there.
Even Detroit, poster child for urban decay, doesn’t have a school at its major employer. Detroit Medical center is the biggest employer, but it has affiliations with multiple colleges. The biggest employer afterwards is the City of Detroit itself.
Buffalo is certainly a case in point–there is some high tech and aerospace, along with burgeoning health care and biotech industry, all of which seems to have been catalyzed by the University of Buffalo.
I googled biggest employers/biggest private employers and quickly checked a couple sites–there seems to be some disagreement about who the biggest are and I don’t have time to run it down now.
Schenectady is not part of the trend. GE is still the biggest employer (though far smaller than it was in its heyday). Union College and Schenectady Community College (the only colleges in the county) are still far below GE. In the county, the biggest employer is probably Golub Corporation, which runs Price Chopper supermarkets, but it’s corporate headquarters are outside the city.
Yes. “Displacing” means the school’s growth caused heavy industry to leave the city. The industries left for various reasons, leaving schools (& medical centers, etc.) behind.