UNC and other N.C. colleges have a lot more than stellar basketball teams to offer — and the world needs to know it. On a trip to China last week, Gov. Bev Perdue seized the opportunity to promote N.C. schools, setting an example that is worth following as UNC tries, with limited success, to expand its reach.
As administrators have recognized, there’s room to improve in the recruitment of international students. Partnerships, like the ones reached in Singapore, Ecuador and England, can be overly centralized and fail to adequately get the word out about UNC. What is needed, administrators say, is a strong base of international students who create a community at the University and return home to promote UNC by word of mouth.
To create such a community, UNC representatives must adopt a mindset that views partnerships for what they are: relationships that work to the mutual benefit of the research and educational capacities of both institutions. They are less effective when it comes to actually getting students to enjoy those resources at UNC. Administrators, students and alumni overseas would be wise to look toward the educational rungs where they can find prospective students or reach out, as Perdue did, to business and educational leaders.
The Board of Governors didn’t do N.C. schools any favors last year by proposing an additional tuition tier for international students. In its push to grow more global, the state and its schools must see international students not as a funding source but rather a source of diversity and new perspectives that enrich the classroom.
