Schooling for Survival

By Ezra Bowen

The institute's main building is a white mansion perched on a hillside in Charlottesville, Va. The two-year work-study program is as demanding as any other in the U.S. New students go through a kind of Outward Bound rock- climbing ritual. "You get a sense of who you can depend on," says Don Alexander, a second-year student. Building that sort of group working relationship is precisely what the institute has in mind--that and the graduate education of the future leaders of the textile industry. Every year Charlottesville's Institute of Textile Technology (I.T.T.) turns out a new crop of masters of science imbued with the latest high-tech manufacturing and management skills. "It's a lot different from other graduate programs," Alexander says of I.T.T.'s curriculum. "It's more industry related." Not affiliated with a university, the institute is completely supported by some 35 textile companies that it serves as a supplier of the kinds of cutting-edge team players regular schools of higher education have not been turning out.

As such, according to a report last week by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, I.T.T. stands as a prime example of the growing commitment by U.S. corporations to education for the workplace. At a time when galloping technology can render an engineer's training obsolete within five years, the study notes that "America's business has become its own educational provider." Says Del Lippert, vice president for educational services at Digital Equipment Corp.: "It's a matter of survival."

The 224-page study, called Corporate Classrooms: The Learning Business, represents more than two years of research by Carnegie Trustee Nell Eurich on what has been a disconnected and poorly observed educational behemoth. U.S. companies, Eurich reports, are training and educating nearly 8 million people, close to the total enrollment in America's four-year colleges and universities. According to Carnegie President Ernest Boyer, the corporate classroom has quietly become "a kind of third leg of the education system in the U.S." And it is one of the strongest forces for continuing adult education. Courses range from remedial English to nuclear engineering. Some subjects, such as language and accounting, overlap those in the nation's traditional schools. Others compensate for gaps in the conventional curriculum. General Electric's manager of management education, James Baughman, for one, says, "There is vast illiteracy on business-school faculties" in both the mechanics of advanced technology and its management implications. Says a Texas Instruments executive: "As technology changes, universities tend to lag one to three years behind what's happening in the workplace."

In their scramble to educate employees, corporations spend upwards of $40 billion a year (vs. $60 billion-plus for colleges and universities). That kind of money has bought some magnificent facilities, of which the most awesome is Xerox's 2,265-acre complex outside Leesburg, Va. Here an average of 1,200 students a year take company training programs one to seven weeks long. When not in class, they luxuriate in the outdoor pool; racquetball, squash, tennis and basketball courts; beauty parlor, bar and dance floor. Almost as impressive is AT&T's center near Princeton, N.J., with 23 classrooms, seven laboratories, four conference rooms, library, auditorium and 300-bed residence hall. This fall IBM, whose reported $700 million annual education expenditures probably lead those of all other corporations, plans to consolidate its four corporate technical institutes at a 250-acre supercampus in Thornwood, N.Y.

At such facilities, and humbler ones, corporations educate in ways that "surpass many universities" in the judgment of the Carnegie study. Courses have clear goals centered on getting results. "I'm going to take what I learn here Monday and Tuesday," says a Digital Equipment student, "and apply it Wednesday or Thursday." Faculties work on contract, with performance monitored, rather than enjoy the sometimes soporific security of lifetime tenure. Study hours and program lengths are set for efficiency and accessibility, instead of lockstep 50-minute daytime classes in four-month semesters.

Corporate programs have acquired "an academic legitimacy of their own," says the study. The same regional accrediting associations that endorse course work at conventional colleges have approved corporate classes taught by company instructors or by university professors on corporate teach-ins. In- house education and training in company practices and products make up the majority of the 12 million courses paid for by businesses. But whether class is down the hall from the office or on a campus, employee-students usually get much or all of their schooling free, and some get a full salary while learning. Some high-tech companies may soon budget 15% to 20% of a worker's paid time for training and education.

Of the 18 business-launched colleges and universities that grant degrees, half have earned that status since 1977, and they are growing stronger. Three years ago, for example, when General Motors spun off its 66-year-old General Motors Institute, in Flint, Mich., G.M.I. launched its first master's program. G.M.I. already was educating 2,500 students for bachelor's degrees in engineering and industrial administration. "Academically it's just as tough as, or better than, other institutions," says G.M.I. Sophomore Kris Lang, 19. Northrop University, an offshoot of the Los Angeles aeronautical corporation, gets much the same rating from many of its students. By 1988, eight more companies plan to develop 19 degree programs. In so doing, corporations aim to provide students with what a Xerox executive calls "the competitive edge." Four examples of corporate schools where that edge is already being honed:

-- The Wang Institute of Graduate Studies in Tyngsboro, Mass., opened in 1979 to offer the first full-time master of software engineering degree. Started by An Wang of Wang Laboratories, Inc., the hugely successful computer company in nearby Lowell, the institute aims to educate a new breed of executive scientist who can create models of order in the individualistic and chaotic computer-software field. Wang believes that its integrated regimen of planning, design and testing of new systems, guided by written instructions, can be an answer. Set up in a former Marist Brothers seminary, the institute is an independent nonprofit school. Only ten of its 50 master's candidates come from Wang Labs; the others come from the likes of AT&T, Digital Equipment and GTE. Says one student: "I'm finding just the right mix of technological and management courses."

-- The American Graduate School of International Management in Glendale, Ariz., is known worldwide for its preparation of global business managers, and about 25% of almost 1,000 full-time master's candidates are from foreign countries. The school provides instruction in eight tongues, among them Mandarin Chinese and English as a second language; the courses emphasize business terms used in macroeconomics and cross-cultural management. The school also tailors short programs for the special needs of multinational companies like Mitsubishi Electric, which recently sent nine managers and engineers for a 14-week program on English language and American management.

-- The DeVry Institutes, a Bell & Howell subsidiary, are at the trade-school end of the spectrum. A profit-making enterprise, DeVry sells "education for the real world." It is a tough-minded, no-frills outfit with about 30,000 students, enrolled in eleven institutes across the continent, studying for bachelor's, associate's and technician's diplomas in various electronics fields. The school operates twelve months a year in three shifts, morning, afternoon and night. Along with their technical courses, degree students must satisfy some requirements in psychology, English, history and literature. But DeVry makes no bones about the fact that it is preparing people for work, not contemplation. That is just fine with the students. "We know we'll get jobs," says Computer Student Pamela Ramey, 23. It also works out fine for DeVry. Profits for the first nine months of 1984: $7.1 million on revenues of $105.5 million.

-- The National Technological University is the newest and most exotic of the degree-granting corporate classrooms. Started five months ago in Fort Collins, Colo., N.T.U. organizes the videotaping of advanced engineering classes at 16 cooperating universities. The tapes are sent to business sites owned by seven sponsoring corporations. Working engineers "attend" the lectures on VCRs, and mail their course work to the school where the lecture originated. N.T.U. then assembles the credits toward a master's degree. This fall N.T.U. plans to start using satellite transmission. Teleconferencing may occasionally be added so that students can participate in classroom dialogue. So far 270 are enrolled all over the U.S. The goal is 5,000. If it all sounds like Brave New U., one N.T.U. official is confident that the satellite will be the key to expansion: "The universities are waiting to sign our dance card."

Much of the technology N.T.U. plans for national transmission has been operating regionally in other programs for several years. Texas Instruments and a number of other companies participate in interactive video-phone lectures with several colleges under the auspices of the University of Texas, Dallas. Stanford pipes lectures to as many as 160 nearby corporate classes. And last week Hewlett-Packard, which owns the nation's largest industrial satellite, completed a nationwide two-way, two-week TV class in computer programs designed by M.I.T. and broadcast to eight locations around the country from a San Jose, Calif., studio.

) The Carnegie Foundation's Boyer is openly dazzled by satellite learning, saying that it may represent "the space-age model for the future." In fact, the report has a tendency to stand in awe of the whole phenomenon of corporate learning. While it acknowledges the difference between education for profit by a corporation and for life preparation by a university, there is a strong implication throughout that higher education should embark on a careful self- reappraisal based on the corporate classroom.

Many in academe, however, have a more guarded reaction. Emory Business School Dean George Parks worries about letting "technology drive the educational process instead of the other way around." As for the corporate tendency to teach a specific set of facts and practices, Parks says, "Sound practices need to be based on sound theory. Otherwise you're not going to be able to adapt to a world that's constantly changing." Director Erich Bloch of the National Science Foundation notes that very often "companies want universities to train people. This is not their mission."

For all the cautionary concerns of traditional academies, both camps inevitably will be drawn together in many areas and will have much to learn from each other. In fact they are already busy doing so, at places like N.T.U., whose entire concept is to carry university learning over jointly developed technological systems into corporate classrooms, where it will be put to practical use.

With reporting by Emily Couric/Charlottesville and Meg Grant/ Los Angeles, with other bureaus %