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UHV makes friends (and does business) in China
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If you have young children, and I have three, you know that there is a lot of wisdom embedded in their literature, stories, poems, music, etc. In fact, I often think what a peaceful and prosperous world this would be if we paid more attention to these lessons of tolerance, cooperation, selflessness and joy.
One of my favorite little peals from that canon is that singsong adage: “Make new friends and keep the old, one is silver and the other gold.”
During the past four years, UHV has been doing just that. We’re keeping our current friends and supporters, but we also are making new friends and colleagues – and no place more rapidly, or perhaps significantly, than in China.
I just returned from my third trip there in as many years, and I continue to be amazed by the pace of development and by the country’s seemingly insatiable ambition to create a modern country with wide-ranging benefits for (most) everyone. I first went to China in 1990, and everyone rode a bicycle. Now all those people seem to have a car. But you don’t need me to recite all of the staggering statistics about this giant of a country, housing one in every five humans on the planet. One estimate I saw the other day, however, really struck me as an educator: By 2022, there will be more Chinese speakers of English than there are American speakers of English!
On all my trips, I have been impressed by the English ability of my new friends and colleagues. During this last one, I had a wonderful conversation with a first-grader who explained to me that she had been taking English in school since age 3 – such ambition and such national foresight!
China is now famous for making everything – from clothes to ships. Of the few “foreign” products that they desire, education ranks very high on the list. This explains why I, Jeffrey Di Leo (dean of the School of Arts & Sciences) and others at UHV have undertaken these interesting but arduous journeys (I have to admit that my chopstick and banqueting skills have taken the “great leap forward,” and I can now pluck a jellied eel from a spinning Lazy Susan) to open up relations with the largest single potential market on Earth.
Is it paying off? Well, from the handful of agreements we have signed with partner universities in Hangzhou, Xian, Nanjing and Qingdao, more than 30 Chinese students have come and gone and there are six in Victoria right now (you should invite them to visit your school, club, home, etc.). We have hosted a spate of delegations and visiting professors – all of whom become ambassadors for UHV when they return to China.
In the past, it was difficult for Chinese students to get the necessary visas to study in the U.S., but this has changed due to a growing realization on the part of the U.S. that we need more “friends” in China in order to build trust relationships. What better way to cultivate such friendships than to offer them a chance to study in what is perceived as the most prestigious educational market in the world? Yep, it’s still the U.S.
Also in the past, Chinese students had trouble affording a U.S. education, and this is still true for the overwhelming majority. But the combination of the rise of the middle and upper classes in China, the affordability of UHV and the extensive vetting process undertaken by our partners in China who select the students coming to us, has alleviated this problem to a great extent.
UHV is a leader in establishing partners in China to send us students thanks in large part to the efforts of our many Chinese-origin faculty, such as our business school’s Dr. Jifu Wang, who started life on the China-Russia border, became a linguist, went into business as soon as it was allowed and later got his Ph.D. in America. UHV also now routinely receives high rankings from independent evaluators (such as the Princeton Review) of our academic programs; these rankings are watched like the weather by the Chinese.
When UHV manages to get some accommodation of its own and develops more of the attributes of a destination campus, we will no doubt be able to enroll many, many more excellent Chinese students – all of whom will return to China to be leaders in what could arguably be America’s most important international relationship in the century ahead.
For UHV, then, our Chinese initiatives offer us a chance to do good business while doing good work. We enroll excellent, fee-paying students while offering our U.S. students a chance to meet Chinese counterparts – and to make new friends.
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Definitely there's a big need for high quality education in "the largest single potential market on Earth." It is worthy for UHV to make more efforts to attract more Chinese students.
November 12, 2009 at 4:34 p.m.Dr. Hudson, I fully agree with you on your observation of the educational needs in China. In the eyes of the Chinese people, business schools from U.S. provide a high quality education that develops knowledge, skills, and abilities. Above all, graduate education provided here is able to broaden their horizon and deepen their understanding of the values and business practices which are prevalent in western society.
Nowadays, providing quality graduate business education to the emerging markets is not only a valuable but also a pressing mission. With the recent policy change to allow foreign universities to provide education within China, the education market there is getting even hotter. We recently learned that some university from the States assigned a representative to stay on campus in China to make sure that things are not “out of sight, out of mind.” High rank visits from both sides have been valuable in getting important decisions made for UHV’s China initiatives. To ascertain the healthy development and positive results in the near future, there is a need to maintain the newly established education relationships on a regular basis. It is doable for UHV to have someone serving as a liaison to keep an open and direct communication channel with our partners in China and report the progress of the joint programs in a timely manner.
It is not only for meeting the demands in China, but also for securing the share for our students in this new land of opportunities…
November 11, 2009 at 1:24 p.m.