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Originally Posted by themaguffin
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Nice piece, if rather fluffy for Gannon's ego... though Erie and Waterville, ME are too extremely different places, with vast differences in the impact that the colleges featured in this article have. Erie is never going to be mistaken for a "college town", as a place like Waterville, ME undoubtedly is.
Gannon University is certainly an economic force in the region as an anchor of downtown Erie, but it is one of a number of institutions of higher ed in the area... who all are contributors to the economy, but are certainly not going to be the reason why Erie resurrects itself or not.
Even if you combined all of the them together (Gannon, Mercyhurst, Penn State-Behrend, Edinboro, LECOM, and even Allegheny)... we're still just not talking about all that many students... and there's no critical mass because they're spread across the county with significant distance between them. The colleges are going to thrive or wither with the region, not the other way around.
I'm definitely glad that Gannon (and other enterprises in downtown Erie) finally started to give a shit about their surroundings as they finally realized the decay around them was going to affect them quite negatively very soon if they didn't act... though I'm not going to praise them too much for waiting until the 11th hour (when many downtown buildings surrounding them became vacant and on the verge of blight... read cheap) to take action.