As businesses frustrated with the lack of organic economic growth in Connecticut look to reinvent themselves and broaden revenues, economists have increasingly pointed to overseas markets.
With the Euro beginning to stabilize and Japan, whose economy has been stagnant for years and now exhibiting positive signs of growth, goods and services exported by Connecticut firms have jumped, rising 14 percent from $13.9 billion in 2009 to $15.9 billion last year.
The European Union continues to be the principal destination for Connecticut exports, but last year Canada was the state”™s largest trading partner, with exports to the likes of Singapore, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Algeria all growing by double-digit percentiles from 2011 to 2012, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
That”™s where people like Thomas Ward and institutions like the University of Bridgeport”™s College of Public and International Affairs come into play.
With offerings that include some of the business world”™s most coveted languages and internship opportunities from China to Cameroon, India, Jordan and Paraguay, the college ”” which until last year was called the International College ”” has grown exponentially since its founding in 2000.
As businesses expand their global reach, they are looking more and more to candidates with culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and experiences, making graduates of schools like the College of Public and International Affairs all the more attractive.
The Business Journal caught up with Ward, dean of the college, to hear about its evolution.
What does the school offer for students who aren’t necessarily interested in becoming diplomats?
“We have graduates of our program who have been employed by Bank of America, by Swiss banks, by PricewaterhouseCoopers, by Sony, AOL, Google. There are a lot of people that do choose a corporate path and I think one of the important dimensions of this type of an option is that it does allow students, particularly as they begin their undergraduate studies, to begin to see the bigger picture.
“I worked as a risk analyst for two banks and did a lot of work in the area of international loans. …Every single time back when I was involved with this, we always looked at it three different ways: what is the political risk, what is the economic risk, and only then did we look at the credit risk. It”™s important to be able to see the whole picture.”
What makes the school and its offerings unique?
“All of our majors require language training and we have a special emphasis on the less commonly taught languages. We do offer French and Spanish here, but in addition to that we also teach Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Korean and also Russian. …
“(Master”™s) students are all expected to have an internship, and particularly our American students ”” they are expected to go and spend some time overseas and really have an immersion experience in a culture other than their own. And they need to be in a setting where the language that they’ve studied is spoken on a day-to-day basis.”
Has there been an increase in interest among students?
“When we started back in 2000, I think more than half of our students were international students. That has changed pretty dramatically ”” now I would say about 50 percent of our students are from Connecticut and probably 80 percent are Americans. …At the beginning we had less than 100 students, so that”™s quadrupled.”
From a business perspective, what”™s the value of having an international background?
“In 1960, the United States did twice as much trade with Western Europe as we did with East Asia. The opposite was true by 1980, and by the 1990s, trade within the East Asian countries themselves had become the major trade center of the world. That has huge implications.
“I often give the example that if you look after World War II, Japan was in shambles, Germany was in shambles, but what both of these countries understood was the key to getting back into the game was they had to be successful in understanding the American market. …
“In the past 10 years or so, Connecticut”™s trade with China has increased over 1,000 percent. …There”™s a need for a new kind of professional, someone who can facilitate trade with those regions. And of course you still have Europe, you still have Latin America. If you have Americans who have those capacities, it just facilitates things tremendously.”
