Sweet Briar College reaches to China in new partnership for students
In the midst of a year of rebuilding, Sweet Briar College has entered a new partnership to recruit Chinese women to the school. It’s teaming up with the National Center for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit based in Washington D.C. and in Beijing. The agreement launching the new program came this month after Sweet Briar President Phillip Stone and other leaders from the college visited Beijing in late February. “I was not just looking for an opportunity to go run to China for a week, but this was developing very quickly and in an interesting way,” Stone said. The National Center for Sustainable Development (NCSD) will recruit high school students for a women’s leadership program, with hopes of attracting at least some students for the next school year. Sweet Briar will help compensate NCSD for its efforts and the college vet the students through its own application process and conduct Skype interviews to get to know the women and check their English proficiency. Students in the program would attend Sweet Briar College for four years to obtain a bachelor’s degree in whichever major they chose, just like other Sweet Briar students. During the summers, though, NCSD is working to arrange special classes, programming and internships in Washington D.C. aimed at familiarizing Chinese students with how U.S. government works. Notably, this is NCSD’s first foray into recruiting Chinese students for a U.S. school. The organization is focused on building bilateral relations between American and Chinese people via demonstration projects related to the environment, energy and education. NCSD president Mitchell F. Stanley, who founded the organization in 2001, has an interesting and varied background. Among many other government positions, he said he worked as a staffer in the Reagan White House for a couple years, and then led and organized the first presidential […]