By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer

If local education leaders achieve their dream, the Lowcountry will produce research programs that spawn technology companies. In turn, those companies would pay high-end salaries, bolstering the region’s per capita wealth.

That’s the economic impact of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose Lincoln Laboratory has spun off more than 80 electronics and air-defense system companies.

For the Lowcountry’s higher education community to accomplish similar feats, graduate degree programs in engineering are needed. That message has been stated repeatedly by local business and education leaders and by economic development experts such as Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School and Ed Morrison, executive director of the Center for Regional Economic Issues at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

That message also fuels the Lowcountry Graduate Center, whose goal is to provide resources for graduate education in engineering, business and computer science. 

However, such programs require money—and there lies the barrier, say Rew Godow Jr., director of the Lowcountry Graduate Center, and Earl Walker, dean of The Citadel’s School of Business Administration.

“State budget cuts are making it difficult to get the funding, and institutions face other priorities that must be considered,” Walker explains.

Last year the College of Charleston suffered $6.3 million in cuts while The Citadel saw a $3 million reduction in state funding. Both schools, along with the Medical University of South Carolina, form the Lowcountry Graduate Center. The center is funded by contributions from those schools.

Walker and Godow want to create graduate programs in electrical engineering and computer science engineering—programs the local Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center considers a high priority. SPAWAR would prefer sending its employees to the Lowcountry Graduate Center for electrical engineering and computer science degrees rather than to Clemson University, the University of Alabama-Huntsville and other institutions located outside the Lowcountry where SPAWAR has education partnerships.

Additionally, such programs would broaden research opportunities for local faculty—opportunities that could create clusters of high-tech industries in the Lowcountry, Walker and Godow point out.

Launching a graduate program in either electrical engineering or computer science would cost nearly $500,000, Walker claims.

“You would need three top-notch professors with doctorates to teach the program, and you would have to pay each of them a salary of about $70,000,” Walker explains. “Then you would add benefit costs, which amount to about a third of each salary, and then add about $200,000 for lab space.”

Monetary help could arrive this summer if the South Carolina Legislature approves $465,000 for the Lowcountry Graduate Center, says Godow. The funding request was passed in the House and is now with the Senate.

“We need the money as a foundation to set up the programs,” explains Godow, who is confident the Legislature will award the funds. However, if the money is not approved, the center will continue funding itself through contributions from its three institutions.

Godow and Walker say the funding problem is a tricky one to solve. Research draws funding, but funding is necessary to attract research.

“It’s a chicken-or-the-egg situation,” says Carl Lundquist, spokesman for the Charleston Defense Contractors Association, a consortium of high-technology firms whose primary client is SPAWAR.

“You need research to create high-tech jobs, you need salaries to attract people to those jobs and you need people to do the research,” Lundquist explains. “Which do you start with?”

It’s a question crucial to the Lowcountry’s economy, he continues. “We need to produce people educated in high technology, and we need to keep them here. To keep them here, we need jobs.”

Dennis Quick covers economic development for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@crbj.com.

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