🔒Eds & Meds: New Haven’s Salvation, or Snare?

With more than 30,000 employees at the university and its namesake health system, Yale accounts for about one of every four jobs in New Haven. That extreme employment dependence would be one thing in a little Midwestern one-factory town. In a diversified Northeast city, it’s something altogether different.

It’s not an accident, but a logical evolution. A century ago one of the region’s most vital manufacturing hubs, the City of Elms has over the last half-century evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one built on a foundation of information and science — specifically, higher education and health-care research and delivery.

They call it “Eds & Meds.”

New Haven has always (well, at least since 1716) been defined by the presence of Yale — but never solely by the university. The Elm City has always had a separate identity as a manufacturing and transportation center. And an economy independent of the university — the Elm City was never dependent solely on selling shiny baubles, entertainment and hospitality to rich kids from Westport or Wellesley.

Like many other cities, New Haven also supported two hospitals — a university-affiliated teaching hospital (Yale-New Haven) and a Catholic Hospital (St. Raphael).

As manufacturing declined after World War II and workers moved to the suburbs, New Haven embarked on a long and not always seamless metamorphosis (arguably still in process) to a knowledge-based economy. This transformation was fueled in part by scientific research coming out of Yale, including that related to bioscience applications and/or undertaken under the Yale School of Medicine umbrella.

Add to that the aggressive growth trajectory of the Yale New Haven Health system — Yale-New Haven Hospital’s corporate parent — and you have a university/health system “synergy” that has redefined the economy of the city and the region.

Today the Yale-New Haven Health (YNHH) system and the university are the two largest employees in the city and region by a large measure, employing nearly 35,000 workers between them in Connecticut.

Indeed, New Haven’s reliance on higher education and health care as its employment base is more pronounced than any other U.S. metro area. The State Science & Technology Institute, which tracks industry employment and trends, ranks New Haven tops among the 100 metropolitan areas in the country with the largest total “eds & meds” employment dependence — 26.9 percent of all jobs here.

That reliance is a double-edged sword. Economists warn that relying on one industry or industry group is risky to a local economy’s long-term health. But it’s not unique to New Haven: Many mid-sized cities rely to a great extent on a single industry that dwarfs others (e.g., Hartford and insurance).

New Haven’s dominant position in eds & meds starts with Yale’s billion-dollar R&D budget and the university’s ability to attract top-tier researchers as students, faculty and post-docs, explains Matt McCooe, chief executive officer of Connecticut Innovations, the state’s public/private technology investment arm.

“We’ve had a bunch of wins, and success begets success,” McCooe, says. “From Alexion [Pharmaceuticals] to this recent cohort with BioHaven going public and Jonathan Rothberg’s successful companies [beginning with CuraGen and now Butterfly], we’ve spent a long time creating a cluster with job-sliding opportunities.” The presence of 40 or so life-sciences companies in the region provides a critical mass of career opportunities for scientists, researchers and support staff.

“That cross-pollination and fertilization is giving people better experience that they can carry on to the next job,” McCooe says. “When Bristol Myers-Squibb bought Alexion [in 2017] and moved people to Boston, it was a bunch of really talented people who didn’t want to move.”

However, McCooe doesn’t feel that the prospect of bioscience workers leaving Connecticut when their employers seek greener pastures elsewhere is unusual — or even that great a problem.

“It’s not practical to say that we’re going to keep every single job here,” McCooe says. “People are going to go where they want to go. As long as Connecticut continues to foster an environment where people can be successful, we’ll continue to grow.

“Every bit of lab space in the city is being utilized, so private-sector developers need to start putting up more buildings and filling existing buildings so these companies have a place to go,” he adds. “And that is happening. We’re in a growth stage.”

An example is Health Haven Hub, an incubator for health care-related startups that opened on Church Street a year ago. Sri Muthu, one of its founders, knows that in any city with big universities where there is specialization of knowledge, there is a demand for launching new businesses.

“We need to build up an ecosystem and have the patience and foresight to stay in New Haven,” Muthu says. Health Haven Hub provides a space where innovators can conduct bootcamps, workshops, training and ultimately pitch new enterprises to investors. It also reaches out to young students, college students and professionals, hospitals and clinics to create and nurture channels to connect ideas.

“Eds & meds is in its infancy stage in New Haven, but we’re making progress,” Muthu says. “We have an amazing set of talent here; they just need to talk to each other. There is this ecosystem building up, but my worry is that if we don’t support these early-stage companies, they leave.”

“New Haven needs to be strategic and long-term,” Muthu adds. “We have the fundamentals: great colleges, a great set of young community members, amazing hospitals, and an ecosystem where everything to create a successful health-care hub exists, we’re just not connecting it all together [yet] or making it a priority.”

He cautions that fundamental industry transformations such as New Haven’s take time to gain traction.

“People think that becoming a health-care hub is an overnight thing. People need to take the time, invest and build up the community,” Muthu says. “There is so much potential for startups in Connecticut, but it takes time.”

Yale School of Management Professor Douglas Rae cautions that New Haven will never have the kind of science-star drawing power or research-commercialization muscle of, say, Cambridge, Mass., but that’s okay.

“We’re not going to come close,” says Rae, who in 2003 authored Urbanism & Its End, a contemporary history of New Haven. “They’re in a different league and we’re not going to get to be in that league even if we bend everything in the direction of technology.”

Another factor is that both the size and the diversification of the New Haven labor market has not expanded in tandem with the growth of eds & meds. And that’s a recruiting challenge for the university and the health system to vie for top faculty and research professionals.

“Cornell [Weill Cornell Medical College] is putting about 10 or 12 percent of its jobs in Roosevelt Island, Manhattan and that would be an interesting play for us,” Rae explains. “If you were thinking about a long-term strategic plan for Yale and Yale New Haven you would carefully consider putting some strategic parts of both operations somewhere in the five boroughs of New York City.”

Overall, “I am pretty upbeat about New Haven and I think that there are a lot of things that make sense that can be done,” says Rae. However, “First, we need to put aside delusional ideas”

The University of New Haven has a different strategy for making sure its students are putting down roots in the local area in hopes that the relationships between the university and area hospitals will keep the region’s talent pipeline flowing.

As part of the capstone program at the University of New Haven, 75 health sciences students work at Yale-New Haven, St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport and Griffin Hospital in Derby. Summer McGee, dean of UNH’s School of Health Sciences, says the relationship is vital to the future of the health-care industry in south-central Connecticut.

“Our local health-care organizations really are the learning laboratories for our students in a wide range of programs. Not only in the health-care field, but also across a wide range of industries from information technology, to human resources, to engineering,” McGee explains. “Our local hospital partners work very closely with us to ensure that our students get real-world opportunities to practice their skills and to get experience even before they graduate.”

UNH was seeking means to create culminating experiences for its master’s in health care administration curriculum, as well as its health sciences program, to give students real-world projects to work on as part of their capstones.

“We want them to be able to solve some of the challenges that those organizations were facing,” McGee says.

To facilitate that, students are going into hospital settings where they find opportunities to use real data sets, work with and talk to patients, employees, as well as community members. They gather information and use that information to write reports and to work on different kinds of initiatives in the hospital.

“They really are treated like consultants who come in and get access to information and data, and then use that information to make recommendations about how to improve a particular program or process,” McGee says.

These relationships benefit UNH in two important ways, according to McGee: One, it allows the students to build their résumé and to be able to say when they go out on job interviews and go out into the field, that they’ve worked on some really challenging, important issues that are facing hospitals and other health-care organizations today.

Second, many of those students also benefit because they find job opportunities directly in the organizations. A number of UNH students have been hired to continue on with projects they began in school, now as professionals.

Many projects focus on improving workflow and processes at the host organization, but also involve issues specifically related to patient experience, or how to improve the hospital discharge process. In one project, students worked to reduce wait times in the emergency department by studying where the bottlenecks were, to try to make the process of getting patients through the emergency department that much faster.

“The key to the success of this venture — and I think both the hospital leaders and universities would agree — is having committed faculty who understand both the academic side, and the hospital side,” says McGee. “We have faculty members who have worked as health-care consultants, or have worked in these health-care organizations and are our liaisons between the students and the hospitals.

“The hospitals are really partners in the process of learning and discovery, and that you have faculty who are really committed to partnering with the hospital, and to helping the students get the most out of that experience,” she adds.

Even as UNH works to keep students in Connecticut following graduation, Health Haven Hub is working to import talent here from abroad. The organization is partnering with teams in India, China and Portugal to come to New Haven. Part of the attraction may also be a key competitive advantage: it’s cheaper to live and work here than in New York or Boston.

“Five or six years down the road, health care will be global and New Haven has a lot of assets to be a key player,” says Muthu. “And it has an environment and a lifestyle to support it. This has to be a larger story. We have to take advantage of what we have to offer.”