Plan to get good tech school in NYC:<p>Subsidized rent: Many engineers are smart people who know the value of an engineering education and not spending their 20's and 30's in debt. No where else has that crappy of living conditions per dollar spent where there is a good engineering school.<p>Low out of state tuition: My alma mater (Georgia Tech) gets tons and tons of out of state students due to the low cost yet good results. Many of those students then STAY there in Atlanta.<p>Tons of well paying internships/co-op jobs: NYC is addicted to free/low priced interns. I'd say many NYC companies are giant dicks about this policy as well. Make it illegal and harshly punished to offer those in the engineering professions, or setup a huge list of partners pledging to never ever accept unpaid work. In every other part of the country with good engineering schools, you get paid between $12-30 bucks an hour while co-op working (basically an internship you go back to every other semester). This <i>has</i> to happen to keep people in NYC when they get out. Co-op jobs are a great way to basically keep engineers there in town as they almost always get an offer at that position after graduation.<p>Get nerdy sheik cultural events going on in the city: NYC is too overly status conscious in many ways to appeal to geeky folk. And while not all engineers are geeks, many people assume they are. They act like they're some sort of neckbearded smelly dude in the back of class who's good for nothing other than fixing your computer. You gotta change that perception, and the perception of the perception. Put incredibly dorky installation art in instead of experiemental cultural art. Host events related to hacking things up. Make maker faires, etc.