Are College Towns The Antedote To Offshore Outsourcing?
Southern Business: Company seeks to keep jobs in rural America Fed up with the flight of technology jobs to India and beyond, Kathy White is trying to get companies to see the advantages of sending those jobs to the wide open, rural places right here at home. Her Rural Sourcing Inc. already has offices set up in places such as Jonesboro, Ark., and Portales, N.M., off-the-beaten-track college towns where there’s a steady supply of trained workers who can perform basic programming and information technology tasks at 30 to 50 percent less than the labor costs of most domestic firms. Its next office is slated to open this spring in Greenville, home of East Carolina University, where officials believe technology outsourcing could help replace the thousands of traditional jobs that have dried up in tobacco and textiles. In fact, Rural Sourcing’s office will be housed in a shuttered textile plant. “If you can be in India, you can certainly be in Greenville, N.C.,” said John Chaffee, director
