Corporate educators are fulfilling educational needs of nontraditional students, often before colleges and universities respond. Corporate education is structured similarly to collegiate instruction, facilitating transfer and student mobility and making possible a variety of cooperative efforts. Corporate programs have also opened channels of communication between business and schools concerning educational content and methods. The growth of corporate education is a stimulus to both internal collegiate debates and public policy-making. Many profitable educational ventures have begun with employers' recognition of their responsibilities to employees.
Corporate education is well-established, a large enterprise, and increasingly professional.
There is room for accommodation and cooperation that will serve both learners and their educational providers. This report discusses the extensive education and training programs established and run by corporations and other organizations, largely profitmaking enterprises whose primary purpose is something other than education, in the context of traditional higher education. Corporate education is an extensive, multifaceted endeavor, costing billions of dollars, educating millions of people, and absorbing many working hours annually. As colleges and universities strive to respond to the needs of nontraditional students, they often find that corporate educators have preceded them. Corporations, with the assistance of the American Council on Education and the New York Board of Regents, have had their courses evaluated, frequently leading to the granting of credit for corporate coursework by colleges and universities.