By luring tech corporations to Atlanta whereas concurrently rising its enrollment, the Georgia Institute Of Expertise is making a super-sized rival to MIT, Caltech and Stanford and fueling Silicon Valley South.
By Emma Whitford, Forbes Workers
Since setting up store in Atlanta in 2009, leaders from the ATM and self-checkout expertise supplier NCR Voyix have turn out to be frequent faces on the Georgia Institute of Expertise campus. With its new headquarters lower than 1 / 4 mile from Tech, NCR Voyix, which started life as Nationwide Money Register in Dayton Ohio in 1884, has employed a whole lot of Georgia Tech graduates over the previous 5 years. In 2022 alone, the corporate introduced on 270 graduates and college students—and took part in profession festivals, enterprise practicums, hackathons, open homes, membership panels and different campus actions. “I don’t suppose it’s an exaggeration to say that we have now staff on the Tech campus at the least 20 occasions every semester,” Tony Burdett, NCR’s college relations chief, mentioned in 2022.
NCR Voyix is one in every of dozens of expertise corporations drawn to Atlanta within the final twenty years. Town, which pre-Civil Warfare was as a railroad hub connecting trains from the south and midwest to the port of Savannah, has turn out to be a expertise and healthcare mecca within the south. It’s dwelling to America’s busiest airport, has a neighborhood authorities eager on attracting enterprise and entrepreneurship, and thanks largely to Georgia Tech, it’s an emergent hub for world-class expert expertise. Lately, the general public college’s repute has begun to rival that of the Ivy League and engineering powerhouses MIT, Stanford and Cal Tech, and it has finished so by bucking exclusivity and establishing profession pipelines with tech trade giants. In April, Forbes named Georgia Tech one in every of its 10 public “New Ivies” as a consequence of its stellar repute amongst employers and excessive requirements for admittance.
Main Georgia Tech’s climb is president Ángel Cabrera, a profession administrator with a monitor document of leaving establishments greater, higher and extra business-savvy than he discovered them. Since Cabrera assumed the presidency in 2019, Georgia Tech’s enrollment, together with on-line college students, has swelled from round 43,000 to 53,000 college students. Annual analysis funding has grown from $900 million to just about $1.5 billion—Georgia Tech now ranks sixteenth by way of cash spent on R&D, up from 21 in 2019—and the college has inked dozens of recent partnerships with trade. Thanks partially to progress in on-line laptop science and cybersecurity masters applications, Georgia Tech is now the biggest college in Georgia by enrollment. Enrollment in on-line applications has greater than doubled since Cabrera took workplace, from round 10,000 college students in 2019 to 25,000 in 2024. “We was once just a little ambivalent about our progress,” Cabrera says, however he views the college’s headcount as an asset—extra college students, extra expertise, extra potential for space companies who need to develop. It additionally means extra gross revenues—in fiscal 2023, Georgia Tech revenues surpassed $2.5 billion up from $1.8 billion in fiscal 2019. “We’re not attempting to be small,” says Cabrera, “We outline our success by what number of of us we are able to impression.”
Georgia Tech is a troublesome ticket for college students exterior the state—in 2024, the college admitted 33% of Georgia residents who utilized, and solely 10% of nonresident candidates. These odds have been getting more durable because the college has gained in recognition. A decade in the past its total admission price was 55%, final yr it fell to 16%. Its admission yield, which gauges the quantity accepted who truly enroll, has risen from 38% a decade in the past to 44%. “Once I arrived at Georgia Tech, that yr we had acquired 32,000, 33,000 purposes. [This spring] we closed the yr at nearly 60,000 purposes,” Cabrera says. Nonetheless, admission odds are a method higher wager than personal tech colleges of comparable status. MIT, for instance, admitted 4.5% of its candidates in 2024, and Stanford admitted round 4%.
For most of his grownup life, Ángel Cabrera, 57, has been at college. Raised in Madrid, he acquired a bachelors diploma in engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and was launched to Georgia Tech in 1991 when he got here to america on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a masters and PhD in psychology. There, he met his spouse, Elizabeth, a fellow psychology scholar, and the 2 moved to Spain in 1995. Nonetheless caught on the attract of academia, Cabrera left a consulting job in 1998 to show at IE Enterprise College in Madrid, and was promoted to dean two years later, the place his knack for rising establishments started to point out—he recruited dozens of professors from america, expanded applications taught in English and tripled worldwide recruitment, giving the enterprise college a world repute. The Thunderbird College of World Administration, then an impartial enterprise college and now part of Arizona State College, took discover, and requested Cabrera to return to america and lead the varsity in 2004.
Cabrera spent eight years at Thunderbird, tasked with turning round a steep enrollment decline after demand for MBAs dropped within the early 2000s. By way of the introduction of on-line applications, Cabrera introduced Thunderbird’s enrollment up from beneath 600 college students to over 1,400 earlier than he left in 2012 to take up the helm at George Mason College in Fairfax, Virginia. Beneath his management, George Mason was elevated to an R1 analysis college—a prestigious rating that signifies very excessive analysis exercise, attracts high expertise, and which solely 145 different U.S. schools maintain. Enrollment grew from 38,836 to 46,894 college students, making George Mason the state’s largest public college. “I might’ve fortunately stayed at George Mason for so long as they might’ve had me,” Cabrera says. “However when Georgia Tech referred to as … I needed to hear.”
When Cabrera returned to his alma mater, Georgia Tech, in 2019, one in every of his first priorities was strengthening current ties with trade and creating new ones. “When Microsoft thought of the place to develop its presence on the east coast, it was a no brainer. They planted a constructing only a few hundred yards away from our campus,” says Cabrera. “Identical factor with Google … Google simply opened a tower on twelfth Avenue. I can nearly see it from my workplace.” Google, which has had an workplace in Atlanta since 2001 however expanded its presence in 2022, has invested a whole lot of 1000’s of {dollars} into the college through the years, to coach laptop science instructing assistants, assist Georgia Tech’s Ok-12 outreach and scale up the college’s student-led computing program.
“I don’t deliver them to my workplace or a convention room. We don’t kill ‘em with PowerPoint displays,” Cabrera says of his visits with high CEOs. “I say ‘deliver your snug sneakers, we’re going to go for a stroll.’” He takes them to scholar maker areas to speak with college students about what they’re constructing; to the highest stage of the library, the place the view of Midtown Atlanta reveals Georgia Tech’s startup incubators and biotech labs nestled amongst the Google, Cisco and Microsoft workplaces. When $127 billion South Korean automaker Hyundai was trying to open an electrical automobile plant a number of years in the past, Cabrera invited its chairman Chung Eui-sun, CEO José Muñoz and different executives to campus for a tour. Hyundai in the end opened its plant in Savannah, lower than 4 hours south by automotive and close to a crucial delivery port, however has recruited from Georgia Tech since earlier than Cabrera joined and spent $55 million in 2023 (to be paid over 20 years) for naming rights to the college’s soccer stadium.
Georgia Tech graduates make up the second-largest group of staff at Microsoft, simply behind College of Washington graduates, in line with LinkedIn information. “Georgia Tech persistently produces a number of the brightest minds on the forefront of technological development,” a Microsoft spokesperson mentioned. “We’re fortunate to depend many GT alumni amongst our staff driving world innovation proper right here in our Atlanta engineering workplace.” Past the established tech giants, Atlanta can also be dwelling to seven unicorns (privately owned startups valued at over $1 billion), and 5 of them—OneTrust, Flock Security, Greenlight, FullStory, and Stord—had been created by Georgia Tech graduates.
And the trade partnerships carry on coming. Final month, Georgia Tech’s College of Electrical and Pc Engineering introduced it could be part of Apple’s New Silicon Initiative, a program that prepares college students for careers in {hardware} expertise, laptop structure and silicon chip design—expertise that Apple wants in an effort to proceed to develop. As a part of this system, Apple will lend material consultants for visitor lectures, rent interns, and lead a tapeout fabrication class (tapeout is the ultimate design stage for built-in circuits earlier than they’re despatched to the producer). “Built-in circuits energy numerous services and products in each facet of our world right this moment, and we are able to’t wait to see how Georgia Tech college students will assist allow and invent the long run,” gushed an Apple press launch.
Schools should make university-business partnerships “a part of the tradition,” says Cabrera, “Serving to our college students get job and begin profession will not be beneath us.”
Like many southern universities, Georgia Tech has a large athletics program that prices round $140 million a yr (by comparability, the College of Georgia spends round $197 million). Solely half a % of Tech’s price range pays for athletics, the remainder of the funding comes from the athletics program itself, via TV contracts, ticket and merchandise gross sales, and sponsorships. Cabrera sees that 0.5% as cash properly spent. A latest soccer sport in opposition to the College of Georgia went into eight overtimes and racked up 11.5 million simultaneous viewers at its peak. “These are 11 million people who find themselves watching the Georgia Tech emblem on display screen, who’re watching our PSA advertisements throughout timeouts and media breaks,” says Cabrera. “The power to model Georgia Tech nationally—I don’t have the rest that comes near [athletics].”
Whereas competing with the nation’s most famous universities, Cabrera hasn’t overpassed Georgia Tech’s public mission. He has no need to make the college extra unique for Georgia residents. “I really like that about Georgia Tech—it has actual scale and an ambition to have an effect versus simply being obsessive about its personal repute.” He calls Georgia Tech “a smoking deal.” Tuition, housing, meals, transportation, books and charges for Georgia residents prices a mixed $29,726 per yr. For out-of-staters, it’s $52,152. The common Georgia Tech scholar earns $89,700 six years post-graduation, and $163,500 10 years post-grad. Third Method, a nonprofit that measures return-on-investment at a whole lot of universities throughout the nation, ranks Georgia Tech within the 98% percentile by way of return-on-investment. Graduates on the college recoup the subsequent value of their diploma in lower than a yr.
“In case you would have come right here one president in the past or two presidents in the past, you’d have heard comparable themes. This can be a multi-president agenda ” Cabrera says. “We’re not right here to emulate or imitate what others have finished. We’re creating our personal path.”
