On one hand, it’s understandable that students will naturally tend to act within their existing, convenient, local university community rather than a larger, more amorphous Boston techie community. On the other hand, the presence of great universities is clearly a sustaining influence for this city’s go-read-your-books vibe, and a source of many valuable research and startup partnerships. So why can’t I think of more than 2 students who might be worth recruiting for part-time or internship work? The theory is that a competent student can, with some supervision, work passionately and productively for cheap.

One possible explanation is scarcity. The average computer science student probably expects a job at a big, stable corporation that will offer them well-packaged, skill-appropriate work for a year or two while they learn. Thirty years ago, that corporation was Digital Electronics in Maynard, MA; now it’s Intel, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Monster now occupies the former home of Digital, but probably hires far fewer college graduates than any one of these big, West coast companies. People who don’t need this sort of two-year training cycle before becoming productive hackers are naturally rare; and if we have to fetch back from California the ones who do, that’s an added challenge.

If competent students are scarce, are we doing enough to connect with them while they’re still in school around here? It’s one thing for a big company to set up a table at a job fair or schedule interviews at a school’s career placement office. It’s quite another for there to be a strong network of relationships between people in companies and universities, such that a professor will automatically refer her top students to work with startups run by her friends. Do we need more of the latter? How can we get it?