A panel of experts drawn from industry and academia selects the best projects for funding. At least half of the funding for each project comes from industry, with the remainder from the University. The benefits to companies and to California are evident. The most important of these benefits is that the UC program involves graduate students in every aspect of the research it sponsors. Industry thus gets the benefit of some of the world's brightest young minds.
Graduate students learn firsthand about industry's needs.
As a result, they have an incentive to stay in California and continue contributing their talents to our economy. We want to foster these kinds of exchanges between industry and universities. But we do want to be involved in speeding the transfer of ideas developed at the University to the marketplace. Events have proved him right. The partnership among government, universities, and industry that Bush envisioned and helped create has been a remarkable success.