The Metropolitan College of New York (MCNY) takes a novel approach to higher education. In what it calls “Purpose-Centered Education,” it emphasizes the application of knowledge and skills acquired in the classroom to the workplace and the community.

In order to offer its students an opportunity to interact with business leaders, the MCNY School of Business is presenting a series of panel discussions sponsored by Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday evening at MCNY’s campus at 75 Varick St., Paul Steiger, managing editor of The Journal, moderated a panel discussion on “The Opportunities and Challenges of Globalization.”

Introduced by MCNY’s president, Stephen R. Greenwald, the panel included Indra Nooyi, president and chief financial officer of PepsiCo; Carl Spielvogel, chairman of Carl Spielvogel Associates, Inc., an international investment and management company, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Slovak Republic; Harvey Weinstein, cochairman of Miramax Films, and John Bussey, editor of WSJ Asia.

Ms. Nooyi, who studied physics and mathematics and took a master’s degree in finance in India and another in management from Yale, said that PepsiCo, 120,000 of whose 160,000 employees are based outside the United States, is by its nature a globalized company. She said that she liked the revenues returning to the United States. from international sales, but sometimes found it difficult to explain to U.S. employees that PepsiCo products could be increasingly afforded by an international public, for example in India, precisely because of the prosperity generated abroad by the outsourcing of U.S. jobs. Ms. Nooyi is disturbed, however, by the fact that those most severely disadvantaged by it are often the ones least able to adapt. She opposes protectionism, but would like to see the government help the displaced and adapt the education system to cope with the changes brought about by globalization.

Ambassador Spielvogel, who started his career as a copy boy at the New York Times and rose to head Backer Spielvogel Bates Worldwide, Inc., one of the world’s largest advertising companies, said that many U.S. companies are now American only in terms of domicile, while their management structure and employee basis are international. He acknowledged the threat to American jobs but said that the entrepreneurial spirit is one of the great American traditions, and that, on the whole, life in America is better today because of globalization. He sees as problems the growing U.S. deficit and the fact that the country is largely financed by foreign investment.

Mr. Weinstein, whose Miramax Films has won 54 Academy Awards and 249 nominations, said that his company has reaped the benefits of globalization by buying and marketing films made abroad. He realized the value of foreign films when, as a teenager, he first saw Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” and has since looked for interesting films in other countries. “We in America really control the movie industry,” he said, “so it is our onus to support the industry in other countries.”

Mr. Bussey, who is based in Hong Kong, said that he saw firsthand the benefits of globalization when he was in Indonesia covering the tsunami disaster and realized that aid was reaching victims with unprecedented speed, and aid agencies were communicating quickly and efficiently because of ties forged by globalization.