Philip Regier, interim dean of the W. P. Carey School of Business, met with nearly 200 students Tuesday about how community affects business as part of the school's Freshman Lecture Series.
"We have rapidly expanding urban populations that are typically combinations of high socioeconomic individuals that create a lot of wealth," Regier said.
Phoenix, the sixth largest city in America, grew by more than 1 million people during the 1990s. The city also has the 46th largest economy in the world, according to Regier.
The urban populations are built "around exploding core populations of relatively poor, uneducated, predominantly young people who have little sanitation and unpurified water," Regier said about the global threats new business students can help fix.
"He gave us a lot of goals and objectives and showed us what we needed to do as far as how hard we have to work," accountancy freshman Dan Anderson said.
By 2025, some 2.5 billion people will not have access to fresh water, and only one in every three will have access to adequate sanitation, according to a Global Environment Facility projection that Regier referred to in his lecture.
"You are assisting the global community at large by addressing issues that profoundly affect the quality of our community," he said.
Regier stressed that education at the business school would provide students with the tools necessary to improve their communities and confront population increases.
"I'm looking forward to making a lot of connections with other students, then using them once we're all out of school and looking to get the right type of education that employers are looking for," said marketing freshman Danyel Robinett.
Regier said the vision of the school is an important one, which will serve as the key topic of the lecture series.
Reach the reporter at michael.miklofsky@asu.edu.
