Bringing a university research park to Harford County as a way to spark the development of new technologies and provide an opportunity for students to pursue post-graduate degrees may be a great idea.

Unfortunately, the proposal presented recently to the Harford County Economic Development Advisory Board, has an element of too-good-to-be-true to it.

The idea is to establish a sort of research campus, locally driven by the need for tech research resulting from the BRAC-related expansions at Aberdeen Proving Ground, that would allow businesses to profit from burgeoning technologies developed in a spirit of camaraderie, universities to raise money thanks to these new technologies and students to reach the goals relating to furthering their educations.

Actually, it sounds a lot like the Higher Education and Applied Technology Center that's been up and running in Aberdeen as a cooperative venture involving APG and Harford Community College. The difference, as pointed out by those advocating for a new university research park, is that the HEAT Center is geared to undergraduate studies, while a university research park would be geared to postgraduate studies.

This is a relatively esoteric distinction. Certainly, many colleges and universities offer both undergraduate and post-graduate degree programs on the same campus, with the different groups of students mingling.

Given that we've already got a center with the words higher education in its name, the HEAT Center may well be a good place for those looking to establish a university research park, sometimes referred to as "a URP," to do a little research to see if such an idea would work.

This would be a good idea, if for no other reason than HEAT Center has a much nicer ring to it than URP, which sounds like a bad case of indigestion.