Industry-Led Postsecondary Partnerships
To strengthen students’ pathways through postsecondary education and into in-demand careers, employers and colleges must work more closely together. Industry-led public-private partnerships have tremendous potential to build and grow these employer-college relationships, but little information is available on these partnerships and their postsecondary initiatives.
This project highlighted the features of industry-led public-private partnerships’ initiatives with postsecondary institutions and provided lessons and opportunities for developing, sustaining, and scaling these initiatives.
Map
We want this study to help build connections between active and potential partnerships to share lessons learned. We created an interactive map so that partnerships could identify other partnerships focused on the same region, pursuing similar activities, or working in the same industry.
Report
Mapping the Opportunities: How Industry-Led Public-Private Partnerships Are Engaging Postsecondary Institutions to Benefit Employers, Postsecondary Institutions, and Employers captures the key features of 23 active postsecondary initiatives run by industry-led postsecondary partnerships.
View the report
View the executive summary
Recommendations
Studies indicate that most jobs offering a living wage today require some level of postsecondary education. Community colleges are well-positioned to provide this education, given their widespread presence across the U.S. and their strong ties to local communities. However, recent findings suggest that community college programs do not always align well with local labor market needs, and fostering collaboration between community colleges and employers can be difficult. Responding to the call from scholars and policymakers for stronger partnerships, AIR interviewed three employers and two community colleges with successful collaborative relationships to gather their recommendations.
Building Strong Partnerships with Employers: 7 Recommendations for Community Colleges (PDF)
Building Strong Partnerships with Community Colleges: 6 Recommendations for Employers (PDF)
Directory
We created a directory of initiatives that contains further details, including contact information, to help partnerships connect with and learn from each other.
Download an Excel version of the directory
Webinar
Growing Industry-Led Public-Private Partnerships’ Postsecondary Initiatives
Acknowledgments
This report's coauthors are Alexandria Walton Radford, Helen Muhisani, Kathy Hughes, Jasmine Howard, and Lauren Mason. That said, this project could not have been completed without the assistance of numerous colleagues at the American Institutes for Research. Drawing on their own work with and at industry-led public‒private postsecondary partnerships, Wendy Brors, Erin Duckett, Chris Herzog, Joe Quick, Gretchen Sullivan, and Stephanie Veck offered great advice and connections as we engaged partnerships. Multiple staff members also shone in their leadership of different aspects of this project's dissemination activities, including Joanne Blank (report design), Joyce Garcia (editing), Caitlin Deal and Lee Nethercott (interactive map), Anand Kumar and Meghan Rivera (project website), and Emily Loney and Sofia Bowman (webinar and social media campaign).
We also would like to acknowledge the contributions of the American Association of Community Colleges, Business-Higher Education Forum, National Association of Workforce Boards, National Governors Association, National Skills Coalition, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. Staff at these organizations provided valuable perspectives on industry-led postsecondary initiatives as well as suggestions of specific initiatives to include in our study.
We want to express our appreciation of the staff who, while leading industry-led postsecondary initiatives, took the time to participate in interviews and/or complete this project's survey. The information and lessons learned that we are able to provide through this project would not have been possible without your involvement.
A very special thanks to Shannon Rowan of Walmart for her thoughtful suggestions and feedback as we developed this project. We are also grateful to Walmart for its financial support, which made this work possible.
