Global schooling parallels global business
In the recent Sunday New York Times (Made in the World, NYT Jan 29, 2012), Tom Friedman wrote that when President Obama met with Steve Jobs shortly before his death, the President asked him why he couldn't have various Apple products manufactured in the US instead of in China. Jobs replied that those jobs were never coming back. That same sentiment was voiced by Bruce Springsteen in the early 1980s in Hometown, "They're closing down the textile mills across the railroad tracks. Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back."
It has become clear during the last few decades that the nature of international business has fundamentally changed. As Friedman also wrote, the difference between export and import is getting fuzzier and fuzzier. When you are a corporation with branches spread all over the globe, what is it you might be exporting or importing if the product is only moved from your plant in Ningbo to your store in Oslo?
This same phenomena might also be said to be occurring in boarding schools. As I write this essay on my way to Asia, I realize there is really little difference between the duties I perform with parents and alumni in Ludlow, Chicago, or Hong Kong. I am meeting with these people because all of them have a personal stake in our continued success. The better we become as a school, the greater value the WMA diploma has. We become better through program and facility improvement. This takes more than simple desire or talk. It takes financial support and participatory action. When parents and alumni "talk up" the Academy, we attract more talent to the school. When parents and alumni support our requests for gift giving, we can bring financial resources to bear to reach new goals for program development and improvement. Witness what $15 M over the last ten years has done to raise the level of accomplishment at WMA. Attracting talent in all areas allows us to compete more aggressively for enrollment in America's top colleges and universities. Providing access to those institutions of higher learning is one extremely important external validation of our program. When we receive such validation, the momentum wheel, as described by Jim Collin's Good to Great begins to spin faster and faster. The reputation of the school grows more positive and we attract more and more talented students. The cycle can then begin anew.
In a globalized business, the object is to attract the most talented workers into the company. Since there are specific limits on the number of work visas which the United States issues, it behooves a company to situate the development and production of its products where their talent pool can be maximized. Thus, we are seeing, and will continue to see, corporations blurring the distinction of what it means to be a company of a certain country. It might simply be a matter of semantics and not one of reality.
The same thing is starting to happen in the boarding school world. Schools are developing branch entities, bringing their "brand" to new places, seeking talent where talent can be found. We too are in the forefront of this new paradigm and are investigating, in a serious way, what it would mean for us to open another WMA in another country. This is a bold step toward the globalization of education and will, no doubt, become more and more common.
At present we are in the investigatory stages of a project, working with a governmental agency in Jeju, South Korea, to determine if there is synergism between our dual desires to educate the top talent in the world. As we move forward in our investigation, I will keep all of you apprised of our progress. The Academy has had nearly a two-hundred-year history of educating, in more than a token manner, students from around the world. In the past this has always meant bringing the students to the Wilbraham campus. In the future it might mean bringing the campus to the students.
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Friday February, 3, 2012 at 08:22AM
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