A+ for Region’s Academic Links to Asia
When South Korea’s President Kim Young Sam flew to Los Angeles recently, Yang Ho Cho, president of Korean Air Lines, accompanied him and took the opportunity to visit old friends at USC, where Cho earned his master’s in business administration in 1979.
When China’s 26 universities started offering MBA programs last year, they reached out for help to UCLA and UC Irvine, which now are working jointly to help Chinese professors get up to speed on the teaching of graduate-level business courses.
Next April, chief executives of Asia’s largest companies will meet CEOs of U.S. companies and officials of the U.S. State and Commerce departments at a conference in Hawaii organized by UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, which many Asian CEOs also call their alma mater.
Similar links to Asian business and government leadership run from the Claremont Colleges, Pepperdine, Caltech, Occidental, Chapman, San Diego State, UC San Diego and many other universities and colleges throughout Southern California. There are strong links to Latin American leadership also, but Southern California is not the mecca for that region’s top people as it is for those in Asia.
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Call it the Academic Asset. University links to overseas business communities are one of the great resources of Southern California’s economy, analogous to the foundation Stanford and UC Berkeley have given to Silicon Valley or the Ivy League universities gave to large corporations and law firms in the East.
The region’s schools and colleges, teaching business principles and performing research here and in Asian countries, support the $110 billion a year in two-way merchandise trade between Southern California and Asia. They attract overseas companies to set up factories here. And that’s not to mention the even larger total of trade in Hollywood films, music and TV shows, engineering and financial services and, of course, education itself.
Thousands of students from Asia come to local universities for undergraduate study--creating a boost for the local economy all by themselves.
In addition, members of top business families and rising executives in Asian companies come to Southern California for advanced studies. USC’s International Business Education and Research Program (IBEAR) has attracted MBA candidates for almost two decades from all the major countries of Asia. The Claremont Graduate School has connections in Japan thanks to Peter Drucker’s prominence in that country. UC Irvine has an MBA exchange program with Tsing-hua University in Beijing.
The links are direct and deep-rooted. The chief of staff to Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed and 10 of Malaysia’s top civil servants earned MBAs at USC. UCLA’s Anderson School is training executives in accounting and finance for China’s Ministry of Finance.
Relationships grow, says Dennis Aigner, dean of the UC Irvine Graduate School of Management. “We take U.S. students to visit the headquarters of companies, such as Mitsubishi and Hitachi, that have operations in Orange County.”
Resources are eager and waiting, says Richard Drobnick, head of USC’s IBEAR program. “We have the future leaders of Asia and Latin America studying here. U.S. companies should hire them for the summer, consult with them about what’s happening back home.”
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Unfortunately, for all its growing expertise, Southern California’s academic asset still suffers from the Rodney Dangerfield factor: insufficient respect. Washington politicians and Eastern institutions seem chronically ignorant or oblivious of the growing importance of Asia and the knowledge base in Southern California.
But the region’s importance is recognized overseas. When Hong Kong wanted to tell U.S. business that it would defend its currency against speculation and continue its prosperous economy after the changeover to governance by China, it chose to do so at UCLA.
The academic asset, like any other, demands fresh investment. USC announced last week that it is investing $1 million to recruit six experts on Asia and Latin America to its faculty by 1999.
Claremont, Pepperdine and other schools are increasing their research programs on cost accounting and financial structures in Asian economies. And all the universities are appointing Asian business leaders as trustees.
That’s a time-honored tactic for universities seeking endowments, of course. And local universities surely do hope to benefit from grants and bequests from Asia.
But their vision goes well beyond an academic chair here and a new dormitory there, simply because of the dynamics of the global economy and this region’s place in it. Today 25% of the world’s output of goods and services are produced in Asia. By 2020--a mere generation from now--Asia will account for 50% of the world’s goods and services, according to Singapore’s former ruler, Lee Kuan Yew.
Such a projection need not be exact to reflect the clear direction of the future. And the colleges and universities of Southern California are helping to make that future by dealing in knowledge for the knowledge economy. The academic asset may one day prove to be as valuable as the region’s famous sunshine.
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Asian Connections Los Angeles has forged important links with Asian businesses through university graduates who work in upper management or head overseas conglomerates. A look at prominent business people with MBA degrees from UCLA or USC: *
Executive, company: Celia Chang, Vice president, Citicorp/Citibank
Country: Taiwan
Year: 1980, UCLA *
Executive, company: Alexander Chan, Managing director, Hewlett Packard
Country: Singapore
Year: 1979, UCLA *
Executive, company: Joseph Chia, President, Chia Hsin Cement
Country: Taiwan
Year: 1982, USC *
Executive, company: Yoshitaka Hayashi, President, Humax
Country: Japan
Year: 1992, UCLA *
Executive, company: Jiro Iwasaki, Managing director, TDK
Country: Japan
Year: 1979, USC *
Executive, company: Waiyin Lai, Director, Primax Industries
Country: Malaysia
Year: 1993, USC *
Executive, company: Kin H. Ng, Manager, Rakyat First Merchant Bank
Country: Malaysia
Year: 1975, UCLA *
Executive, company: Takami Takeuchi, Director, Nippon TV Network
Country: Japan
Year: 1990, USC *
Executive, company: Vilaiwan Techapaibul, Vice president, Proform International
Country: Thailand
Year: 1979, UCLA *
Executive, company: Seung Woo Nam, Managing director, Kukje Pharmaceuticals
Country: Korea
Year: 1988, USC Sources: John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA; International BusinessEducation and Research Program at USC’s School of Business Administration
