The latest in corporate-college partnerships: businesses are hooking up with universities to ramp up learning. Here are some criteria for selecting the right partner

T+D, Oct, 2003 by Jeanne C. Meister

The days when corporations passively fund tuition-assistance programs are coming to an end Now, businesses are managing educational needs through collaborative relationships with universities.

There are several success factors in building a partnership with a university. The first is communicating a shared vision for success. For a corporation, that means strategically managing the investment in education. Once that vision is created, the next step is to define the degree of customization and flexibility required from a university. Designing new online courses is one way to customize. Another is to integrate company-specific readings, discussions cases, and examples within courses, as well as design a delivery schedule to fit the business calendar. The next goal is to mutually devise a recruitment and marketing program to communicate the benefits of a partnership.

The metrics for success must be defined early and managed throughout the partnership. Once the goals of the corporate-college partnership are set, the company is ready to select a university according to such criteria as financial status, accreditation, program, track record, use of technology, and faculty.

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The days when corporations passively fund tuition-assistance programs are coming to an end. Now, businesses are managing education through strategic relationships with universities to meet their needs for high-quality management education. Corporations are becoming the customers of education and, as such, are managing university partnerships to meet very specific requirements. I have called these requirements the five Cs of corporate-college partnerships:

Customer service and e-learner support services. These make it as easy to enroll in an online program as it is to buy a book at Amazon.com.

Cohort-based learning. This is defined as intact groups of adult working students (usually capped at no more than 30) who go through learning programs together, network with each other, and participate in teambuilding experiences.

Customized programs. They are tied to pressing business challenges.

Content. It should be engaging and self paced, and it should build a strong community of e-learners.

Cost-effective pricing. That includes a special rate for cohort teams and possibly extends this rate to other key stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and even family members.

The demands from the corporate marketplace are for universities to be flexible, relevant, and accountable to business needs. These corporate demands are coming at a time of unprecedented growth in adult continuing education. Research from Eduventures, an education research firm, estimates that over the next 10 years, the growth in the number of adult students over the age of 25 is going to double compared to the past 10 years, with more working adult students going back to school than at any time in history. Working adults already constitute the majority of college enrollments. More than 45 percent of all U.S. college and university students are 25 years or older. What's more, this growth is occurring in online universities. Eduventures estimates by the year 2004, more than 5 percent of all post-secondary enrollments in the United States will be for online degree programs.

Success factors

Before a company embarks on creating a partnership with any single university or a consortium of universities, it's important to be clear about the success factors.

There are several success factors that can be used by a corporation in building a partnership with a university. The first is communicating a shared vision for success. For a corporation, that means strategically managing the investment in higher education and making that investment fit a specific set of business goals. Gillian Scholes, director of Ingersoll-Rand HR and responsible for Ingersoll-Rand University as well as all tuition-assistance programs, says, "While Ingersoll-Rand has nurtured a network of universities to recruit new hires, our goal is now to strategically manage our investment in higher education. This starts with developing a set of selection criteria and then systemically determining the optimal network of universities for recruitment and the creation of customized degree programs." Scholes is leading an effort to develop a carefully honed process to select and manage university partners who share the Ingersoll-Rand vision for growth.

Once the vision behind creating university partnerships is created, next the corporation must define the degree of customization and operational flexibility required from a university. For example, when John Deere wanted to partner with a business school for an eMBA program for a cohort of finance executives, the company required the development of nine new customized online courses before it entered into a partnership with Indiana University Kelly School of Management. These nine new online courses became electives in the Indiana University eMBA program. The remainder of the eMBA program consisted of courses Indiana University already had developed but were able to modify based upon direction from John Deere management. While designing new online courses is one way to meet the customization needs of corporation, there are others.