Brenau University and Anhui Business College recently signed a contract that will result in about 30 Chinese students each year completing undergraduate degrees in business administration on the Gainesville, Georgia, campus.
The agreement – signed in Gainesville by Brenau President Ed Schrader and Anhui Business College President Zhong Li – enables Chinese students who have completed the three-year program at their home institution to transfer to Brenau as juniors and complete Bachelor of Business Administration degrees in two years. The students will select specialization in finance, organization management or accounting.
Terms of the so-called 3+2 agreement specify that Brenau will enroll into the program up to 30 students per year who meet the university’s admission requirements, including English language proficiency, and qualify for standard U.S. student visas. That means there could be up to 60 Anhui Business College students per year on a steady rotation to the Brenau campus.
Completion of the contract also means that the first cohort of between 15 and 30 students from the 100-year-old Chinese institution is scheduled to arrive on the Gainesville campus in time for the fall term in August 2018.
Anhui Business College, based in WuHu, is the third institution from Anhui Province in eastern China, near Shanghai, to become a Brenau “+2 Partner Institution.” Brenau enrolled the first students majoring in early childhood education in a 2+2 agreement with Anhui Normal University, also based in WuHu, in the 2016-17 fall term. The second cohort from that program is expected to arrive in Gainesville in August. Brenau also has a 2+2 agreement with ANU for English majors, scheduled to begin in 2018, and a separate agreement with Anhui University of Chinese Medicine – based in Hefei – for an undergraduate nursing program. And Brenau recently won approval from the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities Commission on Colleges to offer an undergraduate degree in environmental design – an offshoot of Brenau’s long-standing interior design undergraduate and graduate programs – for students who do not require U.S. interior design professional certification in their careers; ANU plans to begin enrolling students for the China portion of the program – the first two-year period– as early as the fall 2017 term.
“The Chinese students that we have had thus far from our +2 Partner Institutions perform outstandingly well in the classroom,” said Schrader. “All of them made the Dean’s List or the Merit List in their first semester – most of them with 4.0 grade-point averages. They’re engaged in campus and community activities and they seem to be adjusting well to the small college environment that is vastly different to what they experienced in their home universities.”
Anhui Business College formed in 2000 with the merger Anhui Business School and Anhui Business Professional College, as a state-run, full-time, three-year vocational college.The college now has about 10,000 students and about 600 faculty and staff – many of whom, like faculty and staff at Brenau, have professional experience outside of the academic world.
“This is a top-rated business college in China,” said Schrader. “It is a testament to the strength of the Brenau faculty and to the quality and prestige of the university’s academic programs that they want to prepare their students to work in a global society by sending them to Brenau to complete their undergraduate studies.”
During the program, Brenau will periodically send members of its faculty to China to teach preparatory courses in English with ABC faculty.
The ABC transfers, like those from other +2 Partner Institutions, all are tuition-paying students at Brenau. “What is exceptional about this agreement,” Schrader added, “is that President Zhong Li told me that his institution will give some scholarships to his students when they qualify to enroll at Brenau.”
Schrader said that an additional benefit for the Chinese students’ enrolling in the Brenau undergraduate business program is that they will be positioned to move seamlessly into the university’s highly regarded accelerated Master of Business Administration program – ranked as the No. 1 MBA program in Georgia in enrollment by The Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Along with President Zhong Li, other members of the Anhui Business College delegation at the agreement signing ceremony were Provost Wei Wang, Dean of Students Wei Zheng, Department of Accounting Dean Zengwen Ding, Department of Economics and Trade Associate Dean Shengyou Wang and Director of Foreign Affairs Xing Ye
