Gregory P. Crawford is President of Miami University of Ohio.
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My role as a university president entails keeping in touch with company CEOs and presidents across the country. For the past year, amid considerable economic uncertainty, the consistent refrain I heard from those leaders is that they must recruit and retain more top talent in a highly competitive labor market. The pandemic disruption has altered much of society’s understanding of work as employees seek more flexibility, growth and balance in their jobs and lives.
To meet the modern needs of both students and employers, I think universities must evolve new ways of partnering with industry. This engagement has deep roots, including the 1862 Morrill Land Grant College Act that established land grant universities to support farmers and engineers. We need even greater integration and collaboration today. We must teach together, learn together and invent together. Then we can thrive together in the emerging economy.
Opportunities For Teaching Together
The theoretical and practical knowledge abundant at universities and companies complement each other in ways that can benefit both current employees and students, i.e., future employees. That includes bringing industry experts to campus and university faculty to companies.
Company leaders could bring their wisdom to students for one-off guest lectures, full courses as adjuncts, or team-teaching with faculty. Our new comfort with distance learning tools facilitates such engagement. In addition, practitioners can enrich education beyond the textbook when they speak from experience about end-to-end product development, including design thinking and commercialization; leadership skills required to manage billion-dollar companies; the nonlinear path to entrepreneurship success; the demands of safety, compliance and sustainability; the value of diversity and inclusion; and much more.
In all these situations, students and company employees have rich opportunities to get to know each other and consider ongoing relationships, such as internships or employment.
Many industries already bring faculty experts to their operations so they can learn the latest research thinking in fields important to their product success. Beyond the research relevant to their product, companies could also tap faculty for wisdom in important organizational topics such as DEI, sustainability, public health, working with Gen Z, big data and emerging areas such as esports, cybersecurity or artificial intelligence.
A recurring employee lunch-and-learn program could include topics of general interest such as K-12 mental health, inspiring artists, poetry, ethics, world religion, archeological discovery, history and medical research, exposing employees to ideas important to their lives and work. This mini-education in human-centered issues could stimulate a broader vision, fruitful discussions, team camaraderie, higher productivity and a more collaborative culture.
Opportunities For Learning Together
The accelerating pace of knowledge and change means learning must continue beyond college graduation. Some major companies and other employers are relaxing bachelor’s degree requirements for certain positions.
That means the market could grow for microcredentials—short, targeted programs that measure competence in specific areas. Some microcredentials can be stacked to earn a degree eventually. For example, the NEA has created over 175 such courses for teachers. Microcredentials can be especially powerful when industry and university collaborate to design a curriculum tailored to what the company seeks regarding knowledge and tangible and intangible skills.
For example, my institution has partnered with companies to create microcredentials in data and analytics, and sales. I’ve found this approach can be especially effective for upskilling workers, an increasingly valuable offering for recruitment and retention. It can also benefit students who seek to supplement their degree with practical skill sets of current importance to industry while they are still in school.
Employers can also provide vital learning experiences—and get to know students—through internship and co-op experiences. In addition to the traditional summer internship, I’ve noticed some university-company collaborations are creating micro-internships, such as a few weeks over winter break, and reverse internships, where students work on a company project while in school.
All these experiences lead students to spread the word on campus about the organization and provide opportunities for employers to assess students’ skills and fit for their company.
Opportunities For Inventing Together
Partnerships between industry and higher education can produce intellectual property and intellectual growth. Companies can provide a real-world project for a class that both elevates students’ learning and yields meaningful benefits for the business. For example, engineering programs at my institution use such material for their capstone design projects. We have instituted a robust first-year integrated core for business students who tackle a challenging business project seeded by a partner company.
Corporations could also sponsor research projects on campus. Extending beyond research funding, university students, faculty and staff can consider conducting research alongside company employees in a shared space, sometimes called a “collaboratory.” While traditional technology transfer agreements are valuable, this approach can sometimes accelerate commercialization when working side by side.
Also, sabbaticals for university faculty to work at companies, and even reverse sabbaticals for industry professionals to work at universities, can enhance and advance a university-industry collaboration.
Another approach to intellectual property development is to pull a company’s idle intellectual property, perhaps not fully developed or not targeted to a large market, onto campus. Student teams can seek alternative markets or applications for the idea or develop it further in entrepreneurship and STEM programs. This pull strategy gives students a great experience learning about a patented invention and gives the company a fresh look at possibilities. One collaboration at my institution led to the selection of five of the partner’s more than 1,000 patents for students to research alternative applications for capstone projects and entrepreneurship competitions.
Collaboration between industry and higher education has been a win-win for years. Now, I believe it matters more than ever. To leverage these benefits for your company, I recommend engaging the university at the highest level, rather than piecemeal contacts with career, research or other offices, to initiate a robust, all-encompassing and cohesive relationship. A comprehensive approach with maximum engagement can become a valuable stream for the top-tier talent and solutions you seek.
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