Washington offers a study in higher ed success

As Oregon searches for a path to prosperity, leaders could learn from Washington, where years of investment in colleges and universities have generated billions of research dollars, new companies and high-paying jobs.

Nowhere is that more apparent than at the University of Washington in Seattle.

UW employs 27,000 people and supports 5,000 research projects. It attracts more federal money for science and engineering than any public or private university in the nation save Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. It has produced patents, royalties and 200 spin-off businesses -- from ultrasound imaging to computer animation -- that ripple through Washington's economy.

The university anchors a higher education system that Oregon can't match. Its strength is one reason the state has lower unemployment, less poverty, more adults with college degrees and higher average household income than Oregon, according to Tom Potiowsky, Oregon's economist.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski agrees UW functions as a "tremendous economic engine" that Portland should strive to imitate.

"It has benefited Microsoft and the multitude of software developers around there," he says. "It has benefited Boeing. Every major employer in Washington benefits because the University of Washington is in Seattle."

Washington has sustained its spending on higher education even in economic downturns. Funding for Oregon universities, in contrast, crests and dips on the waves of the state's economy.

The differences between the states, however, are as much about strategy as money.

Washington has paid more attention to higher education. Four decades ago, state leaders decided to focus research at UW's Seattle campus. And the Legislature has a committee devoted entirely to the issue.

Oregon, by contrast, has three research universities in Corvallis, Eugene and Portland that compete for state money.

The result: UW attracted $1 billion in private and federal research dollars last fiscal year; twice as much as the research money garnered by all seven Oregon public universities and Oregon Health & Science University.

Oregon taxpayers pay significant dollars to support higher education. On average, a family of four pays $756 in taxes for the state's colleges and universities. A similar Washington family pays $880, or 16 percent more.

Washington residents get a lot more for their money.

Besides building UW into a research powerhouse, Washington universities are more affordable for lower-income students.

The state charges lower tuition, on average, and spends five times more on financial aid. Washington community colleges produce twice as many associate degree graduates relative to their enrollments as Oregon two-year colleges. And it has a higher graduation rate: 67 percent of students in Washington's research universities graduated in six years or less compared with 55 percent at Oregon's universities.

Oregon trying to change

Oregon's long-standing ambivalence about higher education may be changing.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski has hammered the theme that strong, accessible options for education after high school are crucial to creating better jobs.

Kulongoski appointed a new slate of faces to the State Board of Higher Education, many with business backgrounds, and charged them with finding ways to produce more degrees, harness university research and make college more affordable.

In the short term, Kulongoski is asking the Legislature to double the amount of financial aid to students in the next two years and to catch up on maintenance and repairs across the campuses. Despite a revenue shortfall, some lawmakers want to help.

"The big goal is to reverse the disinvestment we've seen in the last decade," says Sen. Ryan Deckert, D-Beaverton. "Our historical strategic advantages in cheap land and cheap labor -- that is completely gone. And so all we have left is higher education."

For the most part, however, Oregon's efforts to elevate higher education have been more talk than action.

The 2 percent funding increase Kulongoski proposes for universities -- which campus lobbyists say they'll be lucky to get -- won't cover the rise in their operating costs, mainly inflation and increases for health benefits and retirement plan contributions. The community colleges could be hit harder: The governor's budget would give them $22 million less than they received for the current biennium.

The riches of research

Washington leaders recognized the economic promise of higher education in the early 1960s, when they began investing heavily in the University of Washington's medical school.

Then-President Charles Odegaard recruited entrepreneurial faculty eager to catch the rising wave of research money flowing from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, says Harlan Patterson, vice provost at UW.

Powerful U.S. senators, Henry Jackson and Warren Magnuson, helped steer federal money to UW. Between 1958 and 1973, when Odegaard stepped down, enrollment and floor space doubled and research grants grew sevenfold.

Oregon leaders, by contrast, showed little interest in university research, recalls David Frohnmayer, president of the University of Oregon. There was even talk in the 1970s of closing UO's medical school, which eventually evolved into OHSU.

"(Legislators) thought that research was superfluous," he says.

There are trade-offs to a research-driven university. Undergraduates can get lost in such a large enterprise. Universities built on research grants are at the mercy of unstable funding. In the long run, research-based campuses cost states more to operate, and those universities charge more to the students who attend.

The state's economic and technology payoffs from UW's research emphasis, however, are without peer in the Northwest. A recent visit to the computer science and engineering program, ranked among the top 10 in the nation, showed why.

The department moved last year into the six-story Paul G. Allen Center, a new research building named for the Microsoft co-founder who donated $14 million to UW. The department's 40 faculty, 275 graduate majors and 450 undergraduate majors explore computer animation, three-dimensional photography, computer assistance for Alzheimer's patients and dozens of other frontiers. The projects reaped $10 million in grants last year.

One rainy morning this winter, Edward Lazowska, who occupies the department's Bill & Melinda Gates chair, stands next to a small, green-carpeted soccer field in one of the center's labs and describes how a team of researchers and students explores artificial intelligence.

He holds up a curious, multi-jointed robot dog. The dog, he explains, can play soccer, by itself, with no human assistance. And it competes with other robot dogs.

Researchers program the dogs' computer brains to size up the field and opposing dogs, make decisions and learn from mistakes. The dogs drive an orange plastic ball down the field with their snouts, and when one takes a shot, the goalie robot stretches a leg to block. The goal is not to produce robot soccer players, but to reach more sophisticated levels of artificial intelligence.

Lazowska dashes in long strides down stairways that seem to hang in the air of the building's central atrium to a black-walled lab.

Researchers dress a student in a silky black body suit riveted with reflectors, which a dozen infrared cameras and computers track at 100 frames per second as the student moves. Computers convert the captured motion into animation. The work involves researchers from computer science, art, music and architecture, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of much UW research.

"Increasingly, university departments don't make any sense," says Lazowska.

Though the computer science building has no classrooms, it's filled with undergraduate and graduate students who get hands-on experience assisting in research, often for pay.

Each year, the department awards 170 bachelor's degrees, 65 master's degrees and 20 doctorates to students who leave with bright prospects. UW is among the nation's top suppliers of new college graduates to Microsoft and Intel.

Expanding its advantage

UW has gained a critical mass of top scientists and professors that gives it an edge over Oregon universities in attracting top faculty, students and grants.

In the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, researchers identified a missing protein that causes muscular dystrophy and are exploring ways to restore it in the body. Nearby, cranes lift beams for the $150 million Bioengineering-Genome Sciences Building, which will open this fall.

In an office near Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, a half-hour drive from UW, Karen Hedine holds what looks like a credit card with a circuit cut into it.

The circuit is actually a tiny plumbing system, complete with pump, valves and hair-thin pipes. The disposable tiny lab can process a pin-prick of blood and identify its type. Micronics has produced similar cards to test blood and other body fluids in minutes, even seconds, for HIV/AIDS, pregnancy, glucose levels and other conditions.

"We haven't had an application we couldn't do," says Hedine, president of the company, who predicts her diagnostic lab-on-a-card products will hit the market in a year or two.

Micronics, created in 1996 with venture capital, is based on research in microscopic plumbing systems, called microfluidics. The research was conducted in bioengineering labs at UW, which holds a license and collects royalties on some of the new technology.

Micronics is one of more than 200 startup companies that have emerged from UW research, most since 1990, and a new one appears about once a month, wrote Ken Walters, a former UW professor, in a study of the companies.

Most startups are small, like Micronics, which employs 17 people.

But some, such as Philips Ultrasound, are big. The ultrasound-machine maker began as ATL Ultrasound, a UW spinoff, and has annual sales now over $625 million. SonoSite Inc., a spinoff of ATL, earns millions more in small portable ultrasound machines.

Spinoff revenues pale against the money UW itself pumps into the local economy with a $2.7 billion budget that employs 27,000 people.

By comparison, Oregon's urban university, Portland State University, has a budget of $376 million and employs 2,248 people.

OHSU is state's model

Oregon leaders are exploring ways to make the state's higher education system more efficient and to concentrate research dollars in areas where universities already shine.

OHSU has followed UW's path in many ways -- and reaped the rewards.

With modest help from the state and years of federal investments won by former U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield, OHSU has built a competitive research infrastructure of laboratories and specialties. The Legislature approved $200 million in bonds for the Oregon Opportunity Program, which finances construction and helps lure top researchers to OHSU with perks and other incentives.

The university's research income grew fourfold in the past decade to $260 million a year, more than any other Oregon university. OHSU supports more than 3,000 research projects in Alzheimer's, alcohol and addiction, aging, child development, neurology and other health and medical areas.

The university stimulates Portland's economy, with a $1.2 billion operating budget that employs 11,500 people, making it the city's largest employer. Its research has spawned 51 companies.

But OHSU focuses on medical research and training physicians, a narrower mission than a comprehensive research university such as UW. OHSU has limited connections to the state's major research universities -- Oregon State University in Corvallis and UO in Eugene.

That separation makes it harder for OHSU to engage in research involving multiple disciplines. UW researchers repeatedly said their capacity to cross academic boundaries gives them an edge in winning grants.

The National Institutes of Health in 2003 awarded $48 million to UW to create a center for biodefense at the UW because "we have strengths in every area," including electrical engineering, DNA sequencing and computer science, says center director Samuel Miller, who left Harvard University in 1995 to work at UW.

OHSU's bid for the biodefense center was rejected.

A bold bill and other plans

Nobody is talking about creating another UW in Portland. The ascension of UW to the top ranks of research universities took decades, as well as money that Oregon doesn't have.

Still, Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, has an idea that comes close. He and Rep. Linda Flores, R-Oregon City, introduced a bill Friday that would merge OHSU with PSU.

"It's very clear to me that a barrier to economic development in the metro area is we don't have a major comprehensive university," says Greenlick, who introduced a similar bill two years ago that never gained traction. "Seattle has the University of Washington, San Jose has Stanford. . . . Everywhere you look where we're competing in the world economy, there's a major university."

Short of such a dramatic step, the State Board of Higher Education has engaged economic development officials, university presidents, business executives and venture capitalists to find ways that Oregon universities can capitalize on regional industry strengths and stake new claims to emerging markets -- such as a field of microscopic electronics called nanotechnology, wine growing, creative industries and environment-friendly and sustainable industries.

Kulongoski has proposed $2 million for a new commercialized research fund to forge university research into businesses and products.

A consortium of Oregon universities are pooling talents to establish the state's first signature research center. And universities are building other pockets of excellence.

UO, which has top-ranked programs in brain research, education and architecture, attracted $78 million in grants and spun off three companies from faculty research last year.

OSU, with about $131 million last year in sponsored research, has distinguished itself nationally in nanoscience, public health, food science, ecology and oceanography, much of which is conducted at its Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.

"The reality is the level of experience here in our own back yard is pretty impressive," says Kirby A. Dyess, a higher education board member from Beaverton and former Intel executive.

Another reality is that without a stronger research engine, Oregon will have less control over its economic fortunes, says the UO's Frohnmayer.

"The region that doesn't support research institutions," he says, "is destined to become someone else's colony."

Monday: A smarter system Bill Graves: 503-221-8549; billgraves@news.oregonian.com Shelby Oppel Wood: 503-221-5368; shelbyoppel@news.oregonian.com