What would you put on a list of North Carolina's world-famous exports?
Furniture?
Barbecue?
College basketball?

How about workforce education, as practiced in North Carolina's community colleges?

As leaders of the 59 institutions of North Carolina's community college system, you should be very proud that leaders of business, education and government throughout the world look to us as the model for the right way to combine higher education and skills training.

Thailand, for example, is in the midst of building, from scratch, a system of institutions to provide the technical education needed to move its people into the jobs of the information age. In the spring of 2001, a Thai delegation visited the System Office, Wake Technical Community College and Johnston Community College, gathering information about skills training. Delegation members were so impressed by what they saw that they asked our system to send a group to Thailand the next year, to offer an extensive series of workshops focused on the details of effective workforce development. Thanks to outside funding, I was able to lead that group, and I can tell you that the admiration for the "North Carolina model" was wonderful to see.

North Carolina's community colleges have fans in Europe, too. Just in the past year, delegations from the United Kingdom have traveled here, studying our workforce efforts and ways in which we cooperate with universities. Paul Richards of Staffordshire University then invited me to describe out state's successes in a major address to a workforce conference in Brussels for European Union countries. The year before, I spoke on workforce education as a basic right to the European Court of Human Rights. That same year, the International Congress on Vocational Training Centers in the European Union chose North Carolina to represent the United States. Dr. Steve Scott, then Executive Vice President of the System and now President of Lenoir Community College, made the address in the Basque region of Spain.

Senegal. Moldova. Russia. China. Sweden. The list of countries looking to us is long, impressive -- and important. . We have been fortunate to receive outside funding for virtually all of these efforts. Why is it important, that we both receive these requests and respond to them?

First, of course, the requests themselves are evidence that our community colleges in North Carolina are doing a great job, and people everywhere know about it.

Second, prompt and positive response means that we are helping build economic prosperity that will benefit North Carolinians now and in the future. Our economy is a global economy. Period. That reality carries with it some things we don't like -- lost jobs, cultural dislocations, language complications, and connections to economic troubles elsewhere. But it brings so many opportunities that we must help our people understand and take advantage of. International attention is a great compliment. The reason it matters, however, is that it opens the door to international partnerships of direct benefit to the people of North Carolina.

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