New for-profit institutions are aggressively competing for the educational and training dollars of our businesses and our citizens. The advent of web-based instruction has dramatically increased competition for our students. Along with these external challenges, we live in an era where shrinking funding has substantially hampered our ability to innovate and change. We can choose to embrace these major trends and seize this opportunity to change or risk becoming casualties of our own conservatism. Partnerships with private and public sector organizations locally, regionally, and globally provide the strategic advantage that we need to leverage our resources to respond to the call.
Cooperative partnerships provide a wide range of benefits that are valuable to our institutions.
They give us the opportunity to leverage our resources that will result in benefits to our students, our partners, and our institutions. In return for our investment of time and resources, partners provide substantial expertise and resources that allow us to undertake initiatives that we could not pursue alone. Partnerships also strengthen our ties to the community thus assuring that we are responsive to their needs. These partnership opportunities are not limited by program type or geography. They are not limited by subject matter area.