Two Southern Tier universities announced partnerships with universities overseas this week. Binghamton University has joined a number of institutions that are making connections with a university in India. And Cornell has ventured farther afield, with a new business school partnership in China.
The Johnson School of Management will be partnering with the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in China.
"It deepens our academic ties for research," says Randy Allen, associate dean for international and corporate relations at Cornell. "It provides funding, it provides education for our students to make them more effective globally, and I think [it] creates opportunities for us to learn from each other."
The partnership will include an MBA exchange program, and opportunities for Chinese MBAs to study energy in Ithaca.
Allen says there's an aspect of the agreement that's likely to be overlooked, but which is still an important component of the deal: the potential effect of the personal relationships and experiences built between participants in the program.
Allen notes that friendships between domestic students and Chinese students, and the encounters that Chinese students have with Cornell's research products, could be as important as the official ties that help create border-crossing business opportunities.
