Trenton, New Jersey. -- A fundamental shift has occurred in the way our society develops and maintains an educated populace. Today, colleges represent a minority sector in providing post-secondary education. There are more students, faculty, dollars and facilities engaged in post-secondary education within corporations, unions and the military than in all of this country's colleges and universities put together.
Twenty 20 years ago, I attended an American Association for Higher Education conference on ''The New Learning Society.'' It projected a society where learning, training and education would be a process without end, with diverse providers. To paraphrase a now-retired football coach, ''That future is now.''
In 1987, $80 billion was spent on traditional post-secondary education. But $210 billion -- $30 billion in direct, formal training and $180 billion for on-the-job training -- went for post-secondary education in the corporate sector. While traditional higher education is seeing declines in student enrollment, employer-based training and education is growing at 10 percent to 20 percent a year. The new business of business is indeed education.
Through a recent series of national reports and books, various providers of post-secondary education have discovered one another. Candidly, the revelation has occasioned some discomfort among these new business-collegiate partners. College constituencies feel threatened by the recognition that some of the most effective teaching and research in actuarial science, banking, economics and taxation, to name a few, is occurring within the insurance and banking industries and not exclusively within our graduate business schools. Business people have been critical of the traditional academy for producing graduates lacking in practical, ready-to-use career skills.
Territorial concerns of the schoolhouse, the campus and corporate education seem artificial, however. We all are engaged in different versions of the same process.
Colleges and universities excel in the study, description and analysis of ideas, phenomena and events. However, a significant shift has taken place in the way practitioners pass on knowledge traditionally studied in the academy. More often than not, the world-class experts in a discipline are concentrated within the business communities which conduct the enterprise. Economic and professional incentives tend to concentrate experts ''in the field,'' not on the campuses.
