Eventually, the Centers may succeed well-enough in this respect to earn support from the companies in ongoing and changing efforts as the issues for each industry change over time. It is also expected that the Centers will play an important new role at their universities in bringing information and concepts on their industries to their own departments and schools and across the campuses. New courses and additions to other courses, new curricula, seminars, workshops, conferences are all taking their places presenting information on industries at these universities. In some cases, the Centers have become important industry forums. Each Center has developed its own agenda and its own collection of faculty and graduate student researchers from disciplines appropriate to its own industry.
Faculty come from science and engineering departments, business schools and the social sciences.
Ph.D. students work on theses that emerge from studies of the industries' companies but must meet the standards of their particular disciplines. At the present writing, there are approximately 200 faculty members and an equal number of graduate students involved in the Centers' programs. More than 85 Ph.D. theses have been completed since 1995. The fact that the Centers are working with key industries has also made them of special interest and use to the federal government. Since the Centers present a third party, objective view, neither company, union or government oriented, on the status of industries and their companies, they have been called upon to present specialized and general views of the industries.