How so?

Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base is still active. It's just that ownership of Ellington was transferred to the City of Houston.

New projects drying up, others being scaled back and/or put on hold. Housing prices have plateaued. Job market somewhat flat. I was actively looking and it was tough...decided to get an MBA in the meantime. It's slowly recovering.

I said public universities. Having multiple large public universities in a metro area is always a benefit. That's a constant stream of development, ideas, research, and people coming in.

Right, but Houston has Rice, which is better than any university in TX. Whether it's privately or publicly funded has no impact on its relative benefits.

You can't talk about higher education while ignoring private schools, or you would come to crazy conclusions, like Boston being an educational backwater, because there are no prominent public institutions anywhere near Boston. Obviously places with prominent private universities are less likely to have prominent public universities.

It's unfortunate that even after Houston is emerging from a relatively solid boom decade, it's downtown skyline has little to show for it (and essentially looks like it did in the late 80's) while downtown Austin and downtown L.A. have completely taken off.

Fine, Houston has Rice which is not a very large school and recently has had a problem with having record number of applicants but very low acceptance rates (meaning quality students are left out). Now those students left out only have two other options to go to a 4-year university in the Houston area: University of Houston (many do this) or TSU (hardly any do this). If not those two things, then the young people are leaving Houston for another city in the state to attend a 4-year. Houston has one of the youngest populations of any large metro area in the US (it might be the youngest for a metro of over 4M actually). Where are all these kids going to go to school if the city doesn't have more than one large public university? They might end up in Dallas or San Antonio then decide to put down roots there (aka brain drain from Houston).

That's the importance of multiple public universities in a metro area because the private universities are generally small and inclusive.

I don't think Houston's (arguable) lack of university seats harms the city's economic prospects. You don't have to work where you attended school, and, for most elite universities, people are eventually headed all over the planet.

There are many top-tier universities in the middle of nowhere. Places like Cornell and Dartmouth. Then there are huge, successful urban agglomerations with no top-tier universities. Places like Miami and Dallas.

If you look at the Silicon Valley workforce, very few people attended Stanford, which has a tiny undergraduate student population, and is the only elite university in SV. Even if every single Stanford grad stayed local, it would barely register (in terms of raw numbers).

People from Houston go to school elsewhere and then come back. Hence all the UT-Austin, A&M, Texas Tech and LSU crap everywhere. And again, there are 4 universities within the UH system plus TSU for public universities here around town.

I would say that Houston is among the most educated cities in America. The University of Houston is a tier one research university, it is the third largest university in Texas and it has 44,000 students. Yet it hasn’t been mentioned in this thread. Then you’ve got Rice University, which needs no introduction and is one of the leading teaching and research universities in the United States. Then you’ve got the colleges. Two of the ten largest colleges in America are in Houston, Houston Community College and Lone Star college.

The Bay Area also has multiple large public universities outside of Stanford to choose from. Having all of that there helps with attracting and retaining talent. I already mentioned Dallas, but Miami also has several large public universities. Miami is a niche market too.

But the UH system does not compare to being apart of the premier university system in the state. The UH system is a very minor system. Houston is a major metropolitan city so of course it'll have alumni from all over, but it's not the same as having say A&M located in the Heights rather than College Station. Houston would be a completely different city (for the better) if this was the case, for example.

I’ve always thought of Houston as being more recognized than Dallas. It is in the news more often, has a bigger impact on politics and is more influential in the entertainment industry.

The last place I would want to put a university campus in, is The Heights and there is a Texas A&M campus in Galveston.

Rice and UH appear to do about $300,000,000 of outside-funded research per year combined. UT Austin does about double that, and it's nowhere near the top schools either.

wait, are you saying that metro houston only has three 4-year universities in total? out of a metro are of 7 million people???

that can't be right.

So a list of four year universities in Houston

Art Institute of Houston

Baylor College of Medicine

Chamberlain college of medicine

Devry University

Houston Baptist University

Rice University

Texas Southern University

University of Houston

University of St Thomas

University of Houston - Clear Lake*

University of Houston Downtown*

MD Anderson*

University of Texas Health*

University of Texas Austin and Texas A&M have programs in Houston*

*Added by Jmanc

Is this just within the city limits or something? Because that seems rather low. If we compare with 4-year universities within LA city proper:

UCLA

Cal State LA

Cal State Northridge

USC

Loyola Marymount University‎

Mount St. Mary's University

Southern California Institute of Architecture

National University

LA has 8 vs Huston's 9. But if we're going by metro areas, just the UC/CSU system alone has 10 universities in LA area.

UCLA

UCI

UCR

UCSB

Cal Stale LA

Cal State Northridge

Cal State Long Beach

Cal State Fullerton

Cal State San Bernardino

Cal Poly Pomona

South Florida only has 3 major ones (FIU, FAU and Miami) plus numerous other minor private schools scattered about (Barry, Nova,..etc) but those are pretty insignificant. FIU is the 3rd or 4th biggest in the US so it crowds out any other public schools in the area. Florida and FSU take a huge chunk of South Florida students (like I'm sure Illinois does for Chicago) despite being located elsewhere in the state.

Well downtowns in the South have participated in the booms only in minor ways. Houston has built a few downtown office towers and a small number of residential. The biggest surprise is downtown Dallas, given the strong growth of the region. I think there has only been one office building built downtown and much of the downtown residential growth has been concentrated around the basketball arena. It seems that businesses in DFW definitely prefer the suburbs over the downtown.

Not a lot of major (Tier 1) universities given the size of the region. Rice is really the best but it is small - it's too bad it could not double or triple in size. UH is okay but it has been an underperformer - I think it just got its Tier 1 status during the last 15 years and it can't compete with UT and Texas A&M in stature. Compared to DC, which is about the same size, there really is no comparison....Georgetown, American, George Washington, Virginia Polytech, U of Maryland,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ashington,_D.C.

It probably is hurting Houston by having a small number of elite universities. Houston has the biggest med center in the world but it's biomedical/pharma industry is very small and meager compared with SF and Boston, and even DC - I guess it is because it lacks the universities to draw in the talent. I think it is also hurting Houston to gain any technology industry traction - it's too bad Compaq was bought out by HP, which did mostly nothing with it. Compaq was one of the earlier tech companies to develop a smartphone/PDA.

I agree that the downtown skyline drought appears to be affecting Dallas more than Houston. I mentioned Houston (and not Dallas), though, because it was the city being discussed in the post to which I replied.

The area "around the basketball arena" in Dallas to which you are referring is called uptown, not downtown. Uptown Dallas is adjacent to downtown Dallas, and (to your point) is the area that has seen an increase in density during the most recent boom period.

And yes, much to a skyscraper enthusiast's chagrin, the campus development has become the default development approach used by corporations relocating (Toyota, etc.) to or expanding within the DFW Metroplex, further adding fuel to the rapid growth of suburban towns like Plano, Frisco, Richardson, Garland, etc.