The Achievements: As a result of these efforts, Long Beach has developed highly successful self-support degree and professional education programs. Through these programs and increasing industry connections, it has created research and teaching opportunities for full-time tenure-track faculty. It has thus earned a reputation as a center for scholarship in international trade and transportation. Enhancing its research and teaching capacities, Long Beach partners with a major research university in the Los Angeles area and jointly runs a University Transportation Center. Long Beach’s programs now serve ever widening constituencies, making it a valuable resource for the major regional industry and for California’s ability to grow this industry as a component of the state’s emerging global economy.

On campus, off campus, or online, and with the use of self-support, Long Beach offers the premier noncredit professional designation (Global Logistics Specialist) in the field of supply chain management and global logistics. It also offers a master of arts degree in global logistics, with student-support structures designed to serve midcareer professionals. Long Beach is a resource for industry training in fields such as marine terminal operations, and has hosted important conferences such as the international urban freight conference, the first ever NAFTA meeting at a CSU campus, and the regional transportation workforce development summit. Long Beach also offers training and development webinars in the transportation field and online training programs in specialties such as hazardous materials management.

Long Beach’s research projects provide a significant resource for the industry in the region and the nation. The Center for International Trade and Transportation, which receives both federal and state grant funding for its research, programs, and services, supports the campus’s work. Indeed, Long Beach has achieved academic distinction in the field, as well as adding to its resources, by strategically combining grant funding with self-funding. In the past year, for example, Long Beach students were awarded over $37,000 in industry and professional-association support scholarships, and an endowment has been created to further such support.

The Model Extended: The self-support capacity of each campus can be used effectively in combination with state-funded capacities to develop areas of significance to the campus or the region. Attracting strong faculty and creating a seamless portfolio of programs and services related to a given field, a campus can offer strong state-funded undergraduate programs in that field, funded and contracted research, graduate programs and certificate programs, conferences and workshops, and digital and traditional publications. The reach can be global, and excellence of that kind at any CSU campus confers inestimable value to students, region, and state.