Expanding Institutional Capacity for Credential Innovation through Business and Community Partnerships
By Aaron Brower, Ph.D.
Higher education is rapidly changing. The 2025-26 academic year will be the first in which the number of fully online undergraduates surpass those who are fully residential.1 In particular, interest and innovation in workforce-related programming and credentials continue to surge, with this market emerging as one of the fastest growing in higher education. Two-thirds of colleges and universities are making significant investments in this area,2 with more than one-third also embedding professional certifications into their online degree and nondegree programming.3 It’s no longer that higher education is facing a sea change – we are deeply in it!
Expanding Business Partnerships to Generate Good Workforce Education and Training
We are pleased to release this third and final report from UPCEA’s two-year project on improving the capacity of colleges and universities to develop and deliver workforce-related programming. Prior research showed that limited business and community partnerships were one of the biggest obstacles to this programming; therefore, this Walmart-funded project zeroed in on how best to cultivate effective partnerships. I want to personally thank the ten institutions who joined us on this project (seven of whom continued into the second year) for their excellent work that not only advanced workforce programming in their own institutions but helped advance this critical area of higher education and training.
In addition to summarizing findings, the report contains seven institutional case examples of what it takes for colleges and universities to overcome obstacles and produce good workforce-related programming:
- First and foremost, it takes multifaceted working relationships between the institution and its business and community partners; relationships that go beyond asking representatives to review program direction and content.
- It takes laying out, and committing to, clear program and enrollment goals that build on the curricular and reputational strengths of the institution and that best meet the needs of the local, regional, and statewide community.
- It takes the creation of a business plan that incorporates realistic costs, revenues, and growth projections, all based on clear-eyed market opportunity research and objective competitor/market-saturation analyses.
- It takes staffing and other resources dedicated to the multi-year efforts required to meet goals and execute plans.
- And it takes ongoing central administrative support to help address competing institutional priorities and the challenges of legacy operational systems.
Leveling Up Business Partnerships
The first point, about engaging businesses in multifaceted ways, deserves more discussion. Almost all colleges and universities partner with businesses by adding representatives to advisory and fundraising boards, with these boards sometimes reviewing program direction and content. Make no mistake: these are important roles for business reps! But we also found that the most productive partnerships, those that generated the most robust high-demand workforce credentials, went well beyond board representation and program review.
Businesses should also partner on program identification (including review of market research). They should be integral to curriculum development to assure that the right skills are taught. And ideally, business and community partners co-teach to embed learning in the day-to-day realities of the workplace.
These additional types of business engagements significantly increase the likelihood that the right programs are offered to the right audiences.4 In addition, these deeper business engagements have the practical advantage of generating enrollment pipelines and funding opportunities.
Again, I urge readers to take a look at the seven institutional case examples in the report. Each wrote about the biggest challenges for that institution and how they were addressed.
Strong and multifaceted partnerships between institutions of higher education and businesses/communities are truly win-win: Businesses and communities gain ever-more skilled employees, and institutions gain new learners and additional stakeholders invested in the institution’s success.
Support for Sustainable Change
Because the modern workforce undergoes constant change, one of the greatest challenges for higher education will be how to ensure its workforce-related education and training keeps pace. A key to this challenge lies in the types of support our institutions found most helpful to sustain their efforts.
- Engage high-quality benchmarking research on employer needs and institutional responses, highly customized to your institution’s local, regional, and statewide community. For half of our institutions, this led directly to new partnerships and curriculum; for the other half, it provided needed reinforcement for decisions.
- Seek direct support and guidance for the unique challenges your institution will face –things like financial modeling, program identification (including institutional self-assessments), and leadership coaching and problem-solving. All our institutions greatly benefited from that direct support.
- Clearly understand and articulate, internally, your institution’s reasons to provide workforce-related programming, and clearly articulate your goals to your partners.
- Finally, seek peer support and develop your own cohorts. Make use of UPCEA’s networking opportunities! Not only did the institutions in our project nurture each other, they felt part of a larger “movement” that kept them on track.
More than ever, our fast-changing world requires citizens who are continuously trained and educated. This project demonstrated what’s possible when higher education and businesses partner to create workforce-related higher education and training. We know what these partnerships should look like, and we are stronger together.
Aaron Brower, Ph.D. (co-Principal Investigator for this Walmart-funded project) is a Strategic Advisor with UPCEA, a Fellow of the John N. Gardner Institute for Academic Transformation, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Aaron was formally a Provost, an Interim Chancellor, and the Senior Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs within the University of Wisconsin System, where he was also the founding Executive Director of UW Extended Campus. To learn more about UPCEA Research and Consulting, please contact [email protected].
1 https://www.qualitymatters.org/qa-resources/resource-center/articles-resources/CHLOE-10-report-2025
2 Ibid
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