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."