Education

That the San Francisco Bay Area is home to numerous prestigious private and public institutions of higher education is no accident of history, but a calculated response on the part of educators to an environment that is near-perfect for teaching, learning and research. If real estate is about "location, location, location," so is higher education.

The Bay Area's strength in knowledge-intensive industries is considered by many to be its signature attraction as a technology powerhouse. It is also a world leader in transferring new knowledge from the lab to the marketplace,thanks to a skilled,entrepreneurial workforce and a heavy concentration of venture capital. The result for decades has been a virtuous cycle of development in which the excellence of California's higher education system attracts more and more talent and investment to the Bay Area, which in turn enables it to dominate one emerging industry after another.

For example, such world-class information technology companies as Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Sun have their roots in UC Berkeley or Stanford research. One-fourth of all publicly traded biotechnology firms in the United States can be found within 35 miles of UC Berkeley's campus.

within 35 miles of UC Berkeley's campus. Today, new combinations of bio-, info- and nanotechnologies are emerging, with our area universities at the center of these new developments. Not only are these three technologies important in their own right, in combination they can rapidly accelerate scientific progress. For example, information technology is critical to interpreting the flood of data generated by high-throughput DNA sequencing and gene chips.

Higher Education is also a significant employer in the Bay Area. Our institutions have a combined overall budget estimated at more than $7 billion, with over 20,000 faculty employees and 50,000 staff. Over the next five years, Bay Area campuses will hire an estimated 20,000 new employees.

The city of San Francisco higher educational landscape is comprised of private universities including the University of San Francisco and Golden Gate University, while public institutions include the University of California, San Francisco; the University of California, Hastings College of the Law; San Francisco State University; and the City College of San Francisco. There are also several specialty institutions of higher education in San Francisco alone, such as the Academy of Art University, the California College of the Arts, the California Culinary Academy, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.More than 66,000 students are enrolled in San Francisco's higher education institutions, and approximately 51 percent of city residents aged 25 years and over hold a bachelor's degree or higher.
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