By luring tech companies to Atlanta while simultaneously growing its enrollment, the Georgia Institute Of Technology is creating a super-sized rival to MIT, Caltech and Stanford and fueling Silicon Valley South.
By Emma Whitford, Forbes Staff
Since setting up shop in Atlanta in 2009, leaders from the ATM and self-checkout technology provider NCR Voyix have become frequent faces on the Georgia Institute of Technology campus. With its new headquarters less than a quarter mile from Tech, NCR Voyix, which began life as National Cash Register in Dayton Ohio in 1884, has hired hundreds of Georgia Tech graduates over the past five years. In 2022 alone, the company brought on 270 graduates and students—and participated in career fairs, business practicums, hackathons, open houses, club panels and other campus activities. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we have employees on the Tech campus at least 20 times each semester,” Tony Burdett, NCR’s university relations leader, said in 2022.
NCR Voyix is one of dozens of technology companies drawn to Atlanta in the last two decades. The city, which pre-Civil War was as a railroad hub connecting trains from the south and midwest to the port of Savannah, has become a technology and healthcare mecca in the south. It is home to America’s busiest airport, has a local government keen on attracting business and entrepreneurship, and thanks largely to Georgia Tech, it is an emergent hub for world-class skilled talent. In recent years, the public university’s reputation has begun to rival that of the Ivy League and engineering powerhouses MIT, Stanford and Cal Tech, and it has done so by bucking exclusivity and establishing career pipelines with tech industry giants. In April, Forbes named Georgia Tech one of its 10 public “New Ivies” due to its stellar reputation amongst employers and high standards for admittance.
Leading Georgia Tech’s climb is president Ángel Cabrera, a career administrator with a track record of leaving institutions bigger, better and more business-savvy than he found them. Since Cabrera assumed the presidency in 2019, Georgia Tech’s enrollment, including online students, has swelled from around 43,000 to 53,000 students. Annual research funding has grown from $900 million to nearly $1.5 billion—Georgia Tech now ranks 16th in terms of money spent on R&D, up from 21 in 2019—and the university has inked dozens of new partnerships with industry. Thanks in part to growth in online computer science and cybersecurity masters programs, Georgia Tech is now the largest university in Georgia by enrollment. Enrollment in online programs has more than doubled since Cabrera took office, from around 10,000 students in 2019 to 25,000 in 2024. “We used to be a little ambivalent about our growth,” Cabrera says, but he views the university’s headcount as an asset—more students, more talent, more potential for area businesses who want to grow. It also means more gross revenues—in fiscal 2023, Georgia Tech revenues surpassed $2.5 billion up from $1.8 billion in fiscal 2019. “We’re not trying to be small,” says Cabrera, “We define our success by how many folks we can impact.”
Georgia Tech is a tough ticket for students outside the state—in 2024, the university admitted 33% of Georgia residents who applied, and only 10% of nonresident applicants. Those odds have been getting tougher as the university has gained in popularity. A decade ago its overall admission rate was 55%, last year it fell to 16%. Its admission yield, which gauges the number accepted who actually enroll, has risen from 38% a decade ago to 44%. “When I arrived at Georgia Tech, that year we had received 32,000, 33,000 applications. [This spring] we closed the year at almost 60,000 applications,” Cabrera says. Still, admission odds are a way better bet than private tech schools of similar prestige. MIT, for example, admitted 4.5% of its applicants in 2024, and Stanford admitted around 4%.
For most of his adult life, Ángel Cabrera, 57, has been at school. Raised in Madrid, he received a bachelors degree in engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and was introduced to Georgia Tech in 1991 when he came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a masters and PhD in psychology. There, he met his wife, Elizabeth, a fellow psychology student, and the two moved to Spain in 1995. Still stuck on the allure of academia, Cabrera left a consulting job in 1998 to teach at IE Business School in Madrid, and was promoted to dean two years later, where his knack for growing institutions began to show—he recruited dozens of professors from the United States, expanded programs taught in English and tripled international recruitment, giving the business school a global reputation. The Thunderbird School of Global Management, then an independent business school and now a part of Arizona State University, took notice, and asked Cabrera to return to the United States and lead the school in 2004.
Cabrera spent eight years at Thunderbird, tasked with turning around a steep enrollment decline after demand for MBAs dropped in the early 2000s. Through the introduction of online programs, Cabrera brought Thunderbird’s enrollment up from below 600 students to over 1,400 before he left in 2012 to take up the helm at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Under his leadership, George Mason was elevated to an R1 research university—a prestigious ranking that indicates very high research activity, attracts top talent, and which only 145 other U.S. colleges hold. Enrollment grew from 38,836 to 46,894 students, making George Mason the state’s largest public university. “I would’ve happily stayed at George Mason for as long as they would’ve had me,” Cabrera says. “But when Georgia Tech called … I had to listen.”
When Cabrera returned to his alma mater, Georgia Tech, in 2019, one of his first priorities was strengthening existing ties with industry and creating new ones. “When Microsoft thought about where to grow its presence on the east coast, it was a no brainer. They planted a building just a few hundred yards away from our campus,” says Cabrera. “Same thing with Google … Google just opened a tower on 12th Street. I can almost see it from my office.” Google, which has had an office in Atlanta since 2001 but expanded its presence in 2022, has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into the university over the years, to train computer science teaching assistants, support Georgia Tech’s K-12 outreach and scale up the university’s student-led computing program.
“I don’t bring them to my office or a conference room. We don’t kill ‘em with PowerPoint presentations,” Cabrera says of his visits with top CEOs. “I say ‘bring your comfortable shoes, we’re going to go for a walk.’” He takes them to student maker spaces to talk with students about what they are building; to the top level of the library, where the view of Midtown Atlanta shows Georgia Tech’s startup incubators and biotech labs nestled amongst the Google, Cisco and Microsoft offices. When $127 billion South Korean automaker Hyundai was looking to open an electric vehicle plant a few years ago, Cabrera invited its chairman Chung Eui-sun, CEO José Muñoz and other executives to campus for a tour. Hyundai ultimately opened its plant in Savannah, less than four hours south by car and near a critical shipping port, but has recruited from Georgia Tech since before Cabrera joined and spent $55 million in 2023 (to be paid over 20 years) for naming rights to the university’s football stadium.
Georgia Tech graduates make up the second-largest group of employees at Microsoft, just behind University of Washington graduates, according to LinkedIn data. “Georgia Tech consistently produces some of the brightest minds at the forefront of technological advancement,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “We are lucky to count many GT alumni among our employees driving global innovation right here in our Atlanta engineering office.” Beyond the established tech giants, Atlanta is also home to seven unicorns (privately owned startups valued at over $1 billion), and five of them—OneTrust, Flock Safety, Greenlight, FullStory, and Stord—were created by Georgia Tech graduates.
And the industry partnerships keep on coming. Last month, Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering announced it would join Apple’s New Silicon Initiative, a program that prepares students for careers in hardware technology, computer architecture and silicon chip design—skills that Apple needs in order to continue to grow. As part of the program, Apple will lend subject matter experts for guest lectures, hire interns, and lead a tapeout fabrication class (tapeout is the final design stage for integrated circuits before they are sent to the manufacturer). “Integrated circuits power countless products and services in every aspect of our world today, and we can’t wait to see how Georgia Tech students will help enable and invent the future,” gushed an Apple press release.
Colleges must make university-business partnerships “part of the culture,” says Cabrera, “Helping our students get a good job and start a good career is not beneath us.”
Like many southern universities, Georgia Tech has a sizable athletics program that costs around $140 million a year (by comparison, the University of Georgia spends around $197 million). Only half a percent of Tech’s budget pays for athletics, the rest of the funding comes from the athletics program itself, through TV contracts, ticket and merchandise sales, and sponsorships. Cabrera sees that 0.5% as money well spent. A recent football game against the University of Georgia went into eight overtimes and racked up 11.5 million simultaneous viewers at its peak. “Those are 11 million people who are watching the Georgia Tech logo on screen, who are watching our PSA ads during timeouts and media breaks,” says Cabrera. “The ability to brand Georgia Tech nationally—I don’t have anything else that comes close to [athletics].”
While competing with the country’s most renowned universities, Cabrera hasn’t lost sight of Georgia Tech’s public mission. He has no desire to make the university more exclusive for Georgia residents. “I love that about Georgia Tech—it has real scale and an ambition to have an impact as opposed to just being obsessed with its own reputation.” He calls Georgia Tech “a smoking deal.” Tuition, housing, food, transportation, books and fees for Georgia residents costs a combined $29,726 per year. For out-of-staters, it’s $52,152. The average Georgia Tech student earns $89,700 six years post-graduation, and $163,500 10 years post-grad. Third Way, a nonprofit that measures return-on-investment at hundreds of universities across the country, ranks Georgia Tech in the 98% percentile in terms of return-on-investment. Graduates at the university recoup the next cost of their degree in less than a year.
“If you would have come here one president ago or two presidents ago, you would have heard similar themes. This is a multi-president agenda ” Cabrera says. “We’re not here to emulate or imitate what others have done. We’re creating our own path.”
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