It would take a lot of money to make us leave this. (flickr.com/Hugo Pardo Kuklinski)

Computer science majors are the new star basketball players. That is seriously the thesis of this Wall Street Journal article. Welcome to America's tech industry in 2012, which is apparently one steroid scandal away from becoming completely analogous to professional sports.

There's no question the developer talent crunch has filtered down to our nation's institutions of higher learning. Startups and established companies alike are jockeying to remove students from said institutions as quickly as possible, and to that end, they are plying them with free food and free Android pajamas (no, really). According to one student: 

Companies, he said, routinely wine and dine students at posh restaurants to discuss internships and jobs, plying them with free limo rides to bars, $500 cash giveaways and raffles for iPads. So many companies give away free food when they hold technology talks at Brown that sponsors had to move the food inside the computer science auditorium to keep non-engineering students from grazing.

Well, it's not exactly hookers and blow, but it's the next best thing.

Some students don't even have to choose between big checks at established companies and a lottery ticket at a startup. One student turned down an internship from Amazon that paid $5,300 a month, plus $3,000 for housing, in favor of a better offer from Nebula, a Kleiner Perkins-backed cloud computing startup. As part of the wooing process, she got a personal phone call from the Nebula CEO. What did they offer her, a blank check? A Lexus?

But at least one person the Journal talked to sounded a little cynical about the whole thing. An assistant dean at Carnegie Mellon pointed out, "Many companies are trying to seduce students because they really need them," he said. "Students get a little starry eyed. For many of them they are better off finishing."

If we might be equally cynical, it's also worth pointing out that that extra year or two of college doesn't come for free, and it's easy to understand why someone in college pursuing a career in computer engineering might leave college to take a promising job in computer engineering.

Besides, everyone knows you can cover the core requirements for $1.50 in late fees from the public library.

NYU's initial proposal for a tech campus at 370 Jay St.

UPDATE: Read our liveblog of the Mayor's press conference about the NYU's new Brooklyn campus here.

Well that was well-timed! Hours after The New Yorker posted a profile of Stanford that tore at old wounds about the innovation engine's decision to drop out of building an engineering campus in NYC--blame sour grapes or Seth Pinsky, depending on who you ask--the city is finally ready to make an announcement about a secondary initiative.

According to Mayor Bloomberg's schedule, it looks like the second-place winner is a bid from NYU and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly). In its initial proposal, NYU wanted to transform the derelict former MTA headquarters at 370 Jay Street into a Center for Urban Science and Progress. At 1pm this afternoon, the Mayor will be joining NYU President John Sexton to announce a partnership to create a new "applied sciences center in Downtown Brooklyn." 

A quick refresher: Back in December, when a joint submission from Cornell-Technion was named the winner of the New York City Economic Development Corporation's competition to build an applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island, Mayor Bloomberg also teased the possibility that a secondary winner would be named among the three remaining proposals: NYU (Downtown Brooklyn), Columbia (Manhattanville), and Carnegie Mellon (Brooklyn Navy Yard).

The only hangup? The entire $100 million grant from the city for the campus contest had been allotted to Cornell-Technion, meaning the new project (or projects, the city said they would love to build all three) would likely have to rely on philanthropic donations or some creative financing on the city's part in terms of incentives. That's probably why this announcement took months longer than expected.

It's unclear whether NYU's proposal, which also got hung up on the MTA's buyout price for 370 Jay St., will still be at the same location and cover the same scope as initially proposed. But we'll be live-blogging the presser and let you know as soon as we find out. Brooklyn politicians--and real estate developers!--have been lobbying hard for this to get approved, so expect plenty of self-congratulatory back-patting.

Pobrecito, Andy.

With less than three weeks left until proposals are due to build a Stanford-like engineering mecca on the isle of Manhattan, no one is taking any chances. Rumor may have it that Stanford proper is a lock for the contract. But as Betabeat has reported, a source familiar with the decision-making process says it's pretty much about the RFP. (Even Mayor Bloomberg's imprimatur is merely  a "small to medium plus," said the source.)

Cornell's PR firm and power lobbyist, hired to help manage the school's campaign, seem convinced that a little community spirit can't hurt. This Saturday, October 15th, Cornell will be the only academic sponsor for Next Jump's Silicon Alley 500 recruiting event on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, matching engineers and engineering students with hot Made in NYC startups like 10gen, Etsy, Boxee, Meetup, SecondMarket, and Tumblr.

Cornell may need the good will. Over the weekend, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, and Columbia all showed a little RFP leg--with proposals that opt for Brooklyn and Manhattanville over Roosevelt Island. And this morning Stanford just announced that it's partnering with CUNY and City College.

The creation of the Stanford-CUNY Collaboration at City College, or Stanford@CCNY for short, seems like an aggressive response to critics, among them Union Square Ventures's Fred Wilson, who told Betabeat, "It’s downright anti-NYC for the mayor’s office to consider helping an outsider come into NYC and a massive slap in the face of all the great institutions NYC has here already." Well, it looks like Stanford's bid just got some local flavor.

Mr. Wilson, who is on the board of NYU and its engineering school NYU-Poly will likely be backing the joint bid from NYU, which partners with schools like Carnegie Mellon, CUNY, the Indian Institute of Technology and companies like IBM, ConEd, and Cisco. The latest issue of Crain's New York Business reveals previously undisclosed details, like the fact that neither NYU's nor Columbia's proposal will use Roosevelt Island, the parcel of city-owned land thought to be the preferred choice for the new campus.

According to Crain's, "NYU will put forward a 450,000-square-foot campus at 370 Jay St. [in Brooklyn], an underutilized city-owned building—across the street from Polytechnic Institute of NYU—that is leased to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority." Columbia will stick with Manhattan, but further uptown:

"Columbia, which is flying solo, wants to build a 1 million-square-foot data science institute on its emerging Manhattanville campus, north of West 130th Street, between 12th Avenue and Broadway. Two new buildings would be constructed, and an old auto factory would be refurbished. The center would focus on new media, smart cities, cybersecurity, finance and health analytics, and would involve the university's business, journalism, engineering, international and business schools."

While Carnegie Mellon brings the Brooklyn Navy Yard, one of the original four locations proposed by the NYC EDC, back into play:

"Carnegie Mellon's bid, aimed at making the city a production powerhouse, is altogether different. Patterned loosely on partnerships the university has with Disney and Google in its home city of Pittsburgh, the plan calls for collaborating with Steiner Studios to build an entertainment technology center adjacent to Steiner's home at the Brooklyn Navy Yard."

Crains' says that kind of smaller-scale plan, at least compared to the campus on Roosevelt Island, opens up the possibility of the EDC picking two or more winners, something that agency hasn't ruled out. But breaking ground on that many projects before Mayor Bloomberg leaves office may stretch the resources and efforts too thin.

Not surprisingly, Northern Californians write that they are "hella tired" rather than the more Southern Californian "tired af" (as fuck). Tweets in New York City turned up with "something" written as "suttin," and the word "koo" for "cool" is found in North Carolina (and the Philippines!).

However, these findings are not conclusive, the study cautions:

While research in perceptual dialectology does confirm the link of hella to Northern California (Bucholtz et al., 2007), we caution that our findings are merely suggestive, and a more rigorous analysis must be undertaken before making definitive statements about the regional membership of individual terms.

 

Carnegie Mellon's researchers were able to pull some Twitterisms and translate them using UrbanDictionary.com. Here are some:

af - as fuck (very)
coo - cool
dl - download
fasho -  for sure
gna - going to
iam - I am
ima - I'm going to
imm - I'm
iono - I don't know
lames - lame (not cool)
jp - just playing (kidding)
koo - cool
od - overdone (very)
omw - on my way
smh - shake my head
wyd - what are you doing

[via Yahoo! News]

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries