UNC is hard at work in the community, the economy, and the world. UNC@Work features some of the highlights of that work. Sign up to receive monthly issues in your inbox by clicking here.
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UNC is at work in the community, the economy, and the world. Read February updates here. (February 28, 2012)
UNC@Work, February 2012 issue
UNC@Work:
The University of North Carolina:
A 17 member system of engaged campuses
February 2012
Issue 8
@work on the economy:
Seven Billion Dollars Worth of Change
What’s the economic benefit to North Carolina of each year’s new wave of graduating UNC students? Somewhere north of $7 billion. And in a time of job stress, that means more than 90,000 jobs.
That’s the finding of NCSU faculty member Mike Walden, who looked at the latest figures available to develop his figures, available in a new report. The figures are impressive for both what they count and for what they don’t.
Walden looked at the starting salaries of all 2008 UNC graduates and compared them to the average salaries for those with the next lowest degree, then projected what that difference would mean over the remainder of their working life. For the latest class available, the class of 2008, the value of those degrees totaled $6.1 billion in current dollars and generated 51,000 jobs.
Then Dr. Walden looked at the total amount of research done by UNC campuses in the latest reporting year, counting only the amount coming from outside of the state. The impact of that research for the latest year available was $1.5 billion, an amount that would generate an estimated 29,000 new jobs.
Finally, he looked at how much students coming into the state spend on expenses beyond tuition – about $400 million, spending that creates an estimated 10,455 jobs. When you compare these impacts to the amount the state invests in UNC each year, Dr. Walden’s estimates put the known return on investment for these benefits at $3.65 for every dollar the state invests in UNC.
The benefit study also notes the activity of several UNC statewide “service” agencies, which collectively assist between one third and one half of the state’s citizens annually. Those include the Cooperative Extension Service, which makes contact with 6.5 million people a year; UNC and ECU hospitals, which serve 1.6 million patients a year and provide more than $320 million in uncompensated indigent care; the UNC School of Government, which trains more than 12,000 government officials each year; and the Small Business Technology Development Center, which provides counseling services to more than 5,000 small businesses annually. A variety of other centers and institutes provide critical services on a regional basis.
Walden notes that he does not attempt to calculate a wide range of other impacts of the university, including the economic value of patents by university faculty or the value of companies spun out of universities with research discoveries. He also does not include difficult to quantify items such as the savings from lower unemployment rates or the value of the lower rates of use of social services and other public services of people with higher levels of education, or other intangible positive impacts such as community service and leadership.
Walden’s study has shown some of the benefit of the three central functions of the university: teaching, research and public service. He hasn’t answered the larger question of the total impact of UNC. The answer to that question? How about “a lot”?
Many students at UNC campuses want to change the world, but not everybody has all the skills, support or space to do that. That’s where Richard Harrill comes in.
Harrill, the incubator director of the new Social Innovation Incubator at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is out to help a new generation of “social entrepreneurs” – people with powerful ideas to solve problems, from local to global in size. The program offers more than office space to budding entrepreneurs. It is a comprehensive offering of tools from legal, financing to launch to transform ideas to actual businesses, either for profit or non-profit, with help from the business school, law school and computer science departments.
Currently businesses in the incubator receive $4,000 to help with their ventures; overtime the plan is to raise enough money to offer businesses $15,000 and space for 18-24 months.
The ideas for start-ups are as diverse as the groups themselves. One group of students joined a social incubator to form a musical instrument lending program. Their goal to provide instruments and lessons to children that might otherwise not be exposed nor have the means to play music.
Another group is looking to market a test that can detect harmful materials in water in developing countries, which could dramatically reduce disease from unsafe water. Alice Wang, a doctoral student at the School of Public Health, says their team is looking to make its first big public sector sale in developing countries and is also getting interest from others interested in private sale of the product.
Harrill said that universities are increasingly interested in social entrepreneurship, and are beginning to allocate resources to it. “It’s a much longer trend, it’s now crystallizing in American higher education.”
There are two other programs connected to incubator, one that houses entrepreneurs on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill and a nonprofit for social start-up in downtown Durham called Bull City Forward.
Faculty from three UNC campuses are spending the spring getting ready to make a new kind of connection to the world– virtually.
Appalachian State, Fayetteville State and NC A&T State will spend the spring working with East Carolina to develop “Global Understanding” courses. The courses, which ECU currently offers to freshmen and sophomores, bring North Carolina students into contact with students from other campuses across the world, with faculty from each country sharing the teaching, and students pairing off with their international counterparts to write papers and complete projects focused on cultural comparisons.
“We are excited to be working with other UNC institutions on Global Understanding initiatives because we have seen the transformative effects of these experiences on students,” says Dr. Rosina Chia, who along with ECU colleague Elmer Poe has developed Global Understanding, recognized by the United Nations as a “best practice” in global education. “Formal assessment of the courses has shown us that they broaden students’ attitudes and outlooks. The student discussions and projects provide working experience with peers from around the globe and help prepare our students to work in a global society.”
The multi-campus expansion builds off of the recommendation of the UNC Tomorrow Commission that UNC should look for ways to get all of its students more “globally engaged.”With financial challenges making it difficult for students to study abroad, less than 4% of students participate. The virtual classroom offers an alternative.
“Living in another country gives students a ‘cultural competence’ that will be invaluable to them as they move into the global workplace,” notes Leslie Boney, Vice President of International, Community and Economic Engagement. “But ECU’s Global Understanding courses give even more young students, regardless of their economic background, an opportunity to get into real conversations, working on real projects with students from other cultures. And it also appears to get students more excited about studying abroad later in their careers.”
This spring ASU, FSU and NCATSU will develop courses they will teach next fall with Chinese partner universities. In May, faculty members will travel to the campuses of their Chinese counterparts to finalize the courses. Over time they will bring in additional countries as partners.
How big could the program get? Since 2004 when ECU launched its program, they have developed courses taught with 43 partners in 25 countries and formed the Global Partners in Education network. On May 7-11, members of the international organization will travel to Greenville to explore new courses, new partnerships, and new ways of offering cost-effective international courses. The good news for UNC schools: if they do it right, a lot more students will graduate ready to take on the world – and succeed. As one student noted in a post course assessment at ECU, “Having taken this course I feel it gives me an edge in looking for jobs when I graduate. Not too many students will have had the experience of having sat in class with people in China and Brazil and Russia.”
