Amazon’s New Headquarters Is Coming to Northern Virginia. Here’s How Local Colleges Helped Make That Happen.

Associated Press, Cliff Owen

Amazon, the world’s largest internet retailer, has picked New York City and Arlington, Va., for its second headquarters locations. The move has prompted local colleges, including Virginia Tech and George Mason University, to make new investments and open new centers to tie in with expected economic and employment boom.

A “highly educated labor pool” was among the tech giant’s top criteria for selecting its new headquarters, according to the company’s request for proposals. Long Island City, in Queens, N.Y., and the Crystal City area of Arlington were chosen, in part, due to the strength of their local talent and higher-education institutions. Local colleges and universities have already set major overhauls in motion to help meet Amazon’s requirements.

The two headquarters should bring 25,000 jobs to each region and will begin hiring in 2019.

“This is a watershed moment for Virginia Tech,” said Timothy D. Sands, president of Virginia Tech. “As a land-grant research institution, we knew we needed to claim our role of driving economic development in Virginia.”

The University of Washington, in Seattle, has seen what having tech giants for neighbors can do for an institution. The university calls Microsoft and Amazon its neighbors, and Microsoft’s founders have given it more than $1 billion.

Virginia Tech, whose main campus, in Blacksburg, Va., is some 250 miles away from Arlington, plans to build a one-million-square-foot technology-focused campus in Alexandria, Va., less than two miles from Amazon’s planned new headquarters.

The Virginia Tech Innovation Campus is part of a higher-education package that helped influence Amazon’s decision to choose Virginia, according to a university statement.

The $1-billion project will help deliver more talent for Amazon and other companies in the area. The new campus will emphasize computer science and software engineering, and will offer graduate programs in areas like data science, data security, data analytics, and the internet of things, according to the university.

Virginia Tech already intended to build an innovation campus in Northern Virginia, but Amazon’s plans served as a catalyst, Sands said in an interview with The Chronicle.

Sen. Mark R. Warner, a Virginia Democrat and former governor of the state, saw a broader picture. “The Innovation Campus will transform Virginia’s high-tech economy while also providing a pipeline of talent to industry all over Virginia, including Amazon,” he said. “Once fully launched, it will benefit educational institutions and regions across the commonwealth.”

A Pipeline for Talent

George Mason, Virginia’s largest public research university, is also eager to cater to Amazon’s Arlington headquarters.

The university, based in Fairfax, Va., about 10 miles from Arlington, enrolls more than 5,000 students in computing programs, according to a news release, but a George Mason spokesman expects that number to triple due to the new headquarters.

Amazon will need more talent in computer-science and information-technology fields, said Ángel Cabrera, George Mason’s president, in an interview with The Chronicle. “A lot of that needs to be coming from us,” he said.

Big-brand companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google are attractive to most computer-science graduates, he said. To help match Amazon with qualified local graduates, George Mason will create a School of Computing to combine its data-science and cybersecurity programs.

“Mason’s role has always been to create a pipeline for talent and innovation that serves the region,” said S. David Wu, the university’s provost and executive vice president. “The School of Computing will help attract some of our most promising students and prepare them for success in the innovation economy.”

The university also has plans to build an “Institute for Digital Innovation” in a new 400,000-square-foot building on its Arlington campus, according to the news release.

But the tech giant’s new headquarters isn’t all good news for higher education, said Thomas Jungbauer, an assistant professor at Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management.

The promise of Amazon’s $150,000 average annual wage in Arlington could lure many students away from pursuing jobs in teaching or in higher-education research, he said.

Follow Cailin Crowe on Twitter at @cailincrowe, or email her at cailin.crowe@chronicle.com.