Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Hickenlooper

Hickenlooper’s line is boosterism with a spreadsheet behind it: universities as “powerful engines,” people as output, entrepreneurship as the preferred fuel. The metaphor is doing heavy political work. Engines imply inevitability and efficiency; you don’t argue with an engine, you invest in it, tune it up, and take credit for the torque. By describing Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Colorado in the same breath, he collapses prestige hierarchy into a single pro-growth coalition: coastal brand names plus the home-state flagship. It’s a subtle bid for Colorado to be read as belonging in the same innovation sentence as the Ivies.

The specific intent is to reframe higher education less as a public good and more as economic infrastructure. “Turning out people ready” suggests employability and founder-readiness as the primary metric of success, not civic literacy or scholarship. Even the phrase “create and grow businesses” signals a bipartisan-safe idol: growth. It’s less about what businesses do than that they scale.

The subtext is a defense of technocratic governance: fund the talent pipeline, streamline regulation, celebrate “job creators,” and you can skip messier ideological fights. Coming from a politician-entrepreneur type associated with Colorado’s modern, innovation-friendly brand, the context is post-1990s America’s pivot to the knowledge economy, where cities compete like startups and universities become anchor tenants in regional identity.

What makes it work rhetorically is its optimism without specificity. It flatters elites, reassures moderates, and offers a story of upward motion that turns education policy into economic destiny. It also quietly sidelines who gets left out of the engine room.