By Colin Young and Zac Estrada, News Staff
Monday’s opening of a Northeastern satellite campus in Charlotte, N.C. is the university’s first step in a long-range plan to set up regional sites across the country.
Students this week on the university’s main campus, however, had mixed reactions to news Northeastern would spread to places outside the northeast. A new campus will open next year in Seattle, with other locations across the US being studied.
Some also expressed fear that the university’s attention would be taken away from improving the quality of life on Huntington Avenue.
The University of North Carolina Board of Governors, N.C.’s higher education licensing authority, approved Northeastern’s regional campus Monday and President Joseph Aoun, new Charlotte Dean and Executive Cheryl Richards and other officials attended an opening ceremony at the campus as workers put up the Northeastern seal and signs.
Northeastern officials said the university hired Richards this summer to bolster the university’s presence there. Previously, she served as campus and academic dean at the city’s Central Piedmont Community College.
Nishanth Voss, a business graduate student said he thought the Charlotte move was a good one.
“Northeastern has a unique brand, especially with the six-month co-op,” he said. “This is a good way to expand. Northeastern is not one of the top-25 schools in the country, but maybe this will help it get there.”
Aoun said Monday in a press release the Charlotte campus is the first step in the university’s pivotal plan to grow beyond Boston as he foresees a drastic shift in the American system of higher education.
“Our existing college campuses are based on a model that we imported from England in the 17th century,” Aoun said in Monday’s release. “This model cannot meet the full demands of contemporary society. We need to develop truly modern campuses – regional platforms for graduate education and collaborations between higher education and industry.”
The regional campuses will offer graduate-level degrees only and officials said the programs will be tailored to meet the needs of each local economy.
In Charlotte, “the university will offer a master’s degree in health informatics, which aligns with the growing heath-care sector in the region,” according to Monday’s release.
All regional programs will be based on what the university calls “a hybrid delivery model,” or a combination of classroom and online learning. Current Northeastern faculty will teach courses both at the new campuses and online.
The university’s regional campus plan is to strengthen research opportunities through partnerships they create in specific areas.
“The university is actively discussing a research collaboration with Duke Energy and Center City Partners, a Charlotte-based civic organization,” according to the release. “The collaboration will focus on the impact of sustainability efforts within the local labor market.”
The Charlotte campus, set in the city’s uptown financial district, will be the university’s first expansion outside Massachusetts.
Charlotte was selected out of a national search because of the city’s economic growth and educational opportunity, Senior Vice President for External Affairs Mike Armini told The News in August.
“Charlotte is a great opportunity for us because there is a high percentage of people with bachelor’s degrees, but not a high percentage of people with master’s degrees,” he said.
Seattle was selected as the second regional campus because of its high amount of computer science and information technology jobs, Northeastern senior strategist and market observer Sean Gallagher told The Seattle Times Tuesday.
“What you’ll see in our plans is we’re really looking to complement what’s in the region already rather than offer things that overlap with … other institutions in the area,” Gallagher said in the Times’ article.
Although the regional campuses will not offer undergraduate degrees or a co-op program, the university said both will benefit from the new programs.
“The regional campuses will deepen relationships with current co-op employers and help to develop relationships with new employers,” the release read. “The sites will also serve as a local resource for undergraduates on co-op placements in a selected region.”
One undergraduate isn’t convinced Northeastern has its main campus sorted out well enough to be thinking about branching out to the West Coast.
“I feel like there are enough things that they should perfect here before expanding, not only to make the main campus better, but also to make sure that any satellite campus can be the best that it can be,” Kristen Ferguson, a junior communications major, said.
Ferguson said she thought Seattle and Charlotte are “decent locations,” but that since they are major cities that already have major colleges, Northeastern might have trouble attracting students. She said she thinks there are better locations they could have picked.
President Aoun, however, has consistently made mention that Northeastern can no longer be confined to Boston and producing more regional campuses is the way forward for all higher education institutions.
“Today a college or university increasingly is not just one place, but many places — a main campus, a satellite branch in a different city or state, an international outpost and a virtual-learning environment,” Aoun wrote in a May 8 article he wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “This major evolution is likely to proceed further as the demographic changes and competitive pressures facing our sector continue to intensify.”
In the article, Aoun said a university is no longer bound just by a physical campus and must diversify the ways it delivers its services.
“Now the rapid march of technology, customers with new needs and global opportunities are driving the evolution of the new delivery system that we see today in higher education,” he said.
– News Correspondent Melissa Werthmann contributed to this story.
