the Internet. Traditional universities also recruit locally for special programs, such as executive MBA degrees. The 12th century witnessed the birth of the first predecessors of the modern university; many educational futurists argue that the division between town and gown is rapidly fading and that the 21st century is the cusp of another revolutionary educational paradigm. According to these forecasts, the 21st-century college student may well be someone sitting at his or her personal computer miles from a college campus. Graduation may or may not include the traditional commencement ceremony. These reformers argue that for graduating students, the gown may be left hanging in the closet, with the graduate interacting more seamlessly within the global community. However, such views are currently dismissed to a greater or lesser extent by leading universities, who admit the importance of technology and the diminution in town/gown rivalries but stress the continuing value of traditional learning and teaching methods. Post-2000s: University agglomeration and knowledge spillovers Post-2000s, the face of town and gown relations has changed as the effects of agglomeration have increasingly been studied and understood in urban economics. University agglomeration, or clustering, occurs when a large amount of institutions of higher education all locate in the same geographical area. This shift has been an important one for town and gown relations, as increasingly relationships between universities and their surrounding communities is no longer bilateral but multilateral; no longer town and gown but town and gowns. Prominent examples of such agglomeration in the United States include the large numbers of colleges and universities located in the San Francisco Bay Area, contributing to the development of Silicon Valley, as well as the well-known Research Triangle located in North Carolina. These agglomerations in metropolitan areas leads to what experts call knowledge spillovers, which is simply defined as the exchange of ideas among individuals. The physical proximity of entities allows for the rapid exchange of knowledge, ideas, expertise, and people. A common example of knowledge spillovers is a business park, where many businesses that often have no relation locate in the same complex and benefit simply from each other's presence. This is extremely similar to university agglomerations – colleges and universities that have no special relationship often benefit simply from having other institutions of higher education near them for easy exchange of ideas, resources, and opportunities between faculty and students. An extreme example of this is the Claremont