Pittsburgh is often touted as a Rust Belt regeneration success story, the post-industrial city whose bets on the knowledge economy—institutional investment, entrepreneurialism, technology—paid off and thrust it into the future. One of the city's major universities, Carnegie Mellon, played a huge role in that rebirth, creating jobs, fostering student entrepreneurs, and attracting tech companies like Google, Intel, and Apple. The latter two have research venues in CMU’s Collaborative Innovation Center; a CMU professor was the founding director of Google’s Pittsburgh office. CMU played such a huge role, in fact, that the New England Board of Higher Education named it a "savior" school, one that dramatically improved the economy and quality of life of its hometown.
