Program offers global degrees

The University of Michigan and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University have jointly launched a global degree pathway plan as part of their partnership agreement to build an international educational platform.

The plan will allow graduates from the UM-SJTU Joint Institute to take on master programs at UM and other colleges in the United States.

Under the program, students will be recommended to UM and other universities, such as the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, for further studies.

Speaking about the program, Mark Schlissel, the president of UM, says: "It is good to see students study and gain degrees here. I'm also glad to see the implementation of the global degree pathway, which provides opportunities for more students to study in world-class universities."

The UM-SJTU Joint Institute, established in 2006, currently has 17 dual-degree majors, 11 frontier research areas and two engineering majors.

According to the institute, the goal of this partnership is to build a world-class teaching and research institute in China to nurture leaders with a global vision.

In 2015, the institute began its first scientific research project and has since completed about 100 more, with about half of them selected as municipal and national-level innovation and entrepreneurship projects.

In 2016, two majors from the institute were approved by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, the most authoritative international certification. And more than 80 percent of UM-SJTU's graduates have entered top universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Speaking about UM-SJTU, Huang Peisen, the dean of the joint institute, says: "It is a rare higher education platform for reform and innovation. And we hope to combine the concepts and features of both countries' education systems to cultivate world-leading engineers and leader-type innovative talents."

Besides the global degree pathway plan, the agreement also involves the setting up of an international joint laboratory, an artificial intelligence research center focusing on smart sensors, a wireless network, an intelligent information management system, machine learning and AI platforms.