Students must think globally, business college chief says

12:00 AM CST on Friday, December 2, 2005

By BRENDAN M. CASE / The Dallas Morning News

Kathleen Cooper took over this fall as dean of the University of North Texas' College of Business Administration, bringing some heavyweight credentials from the worlds of industry and government.

The Dallas native previously served as the U.S. Department of Commerce's undersecretary for economic affairs.

She was also Exxon Mobil Corp.'s chief economist from 1990 to 1999.

"We have a strong agenda for change over the next few years," she says. "I hear people describe the University of North Texas as one of the best-kept educational secrets in North Texas. We want to change that. We want to make sure people understand what a wonderful university this is."

This week, Ms. Cooper discussed her plans for the College of Business Administration and the state of the economy with The Dallas Morning News.

What are your plans for the UNT business school?

Our plans are very much aligned with what the university is trying to do, and that is to recognize that we need to be prepared for the 21st century. We need to have our students prepared for the workplace that they will face. We know that there's been a lot of change, and we are trying to prepare them for that.

How does a business school better prepare its students to face a changing economy?

Without question, we know that they need to be prepared technologically. As I understand it, we have more computers per student at UNT than at any other North Texas public university.

We know that students have to learn how to work in teams, to work collaboratively. The classes they take need to have them working on projects together, because that's the way they'll work.

A third item that's important is focusing them on the global economy, on what's going on around the world. We know we want to focus them globally even more than we have in the past.

How do you see the business school's role in the local private sector?

We have a very large number of our alumni in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. It's a dynamic work area, a dynamic area of the country. There's lots of demand for good workers and business graduates.

We have specializations in all the right places, a lot of IT focus and management science focus. So we think that will be very helpful to the local economy. And actually our graduates go all over the country and all over the world.

You are a Dallas native, and you worked here throughout the 1990s. What's different now compared to when you left?

The biggest change that I saw was not after leaving for four years and going to Washington, but after having been gone for some 20 years and coming back in 1990. The whole metropolitan area was not only much larger but much more sophisticated, much more interconnected with the rest of the country and the rest of the world than it had ever been before.

Which indicators do you follow most closely in analyzing the economy?

The broadest and most important number is gross domestic product. We got a very good signal [this week] that the U.S. economy is performing very admirably, at 4.3 percent for the third quarter despite all the concern with [Hurricane] Katrina.

But underlying the GDP number are some others that come out on a monthly basis. Unemployment would be the major indicator that I would use to gauge what's happening in the economy.

Employment and income. And there, too, we've seen a lot of improvement. We see a lot of momentum in the economy.

E-mail bcase@dallasnews.com