The great and good of Hollywood crowded into a white tent off Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard on March 8 as paparazzi snapped photos and well-dressed speakers braced themselves to take the stage. But they hadn’t gathered to witness honours, accolades or gold-plated statuettes being bestowed. The object of their interest was, in fact, a hole in the ground.

The event was being held to celebrate breaking the ground on the site for a $110 million (Rs.605 crore) branch of Boston’s Emerson College — an East Coast university putting down roots on the West Coast. The new Emerson College Los Angeles Center will allow the university to expand the internship course it already runs in the city for visiting undergraduates from its Boston campus, who hope to work in the entertainment industry.

Emerson is one of many US institutions opening satellites far from home in search of students, status and partnerships with businesses keen to hire their graduates or licence their patents. “For many schools, it’s an opportunity to attract new students and create new revenue streams,” says Lee Pelton, president of Emerson College. “Higher education is a very competitive market, and individual schools are always seeking ways to differentiate themselves, and this is a way to do that.”

The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania has a new facility, too — the institution’s San Francisco operation across the country from its main campus in Philadelphia, has a new and bigger home overlooking the bay. Carnegie Mellon University, based in Pittsburgh, operates a branch in Silicon Valley. Bentley University in Boston is also opening a programme there, in January, focusing on technology design.

But by far the most ambitious new campus is being opened in New York City by Cornell University in collaboration with Technion Israel Institute of Technology. Classes will begin later this year in leased space; the $2 billion Thom Mayne-designed campus, which will focus on technology, will open in 2017. By 2043, Cornell’s NYCTech Campus is projected to have an enrolment of 2,500 students and 280 faculty members.

Having a New York base will give Cornell access to the city’s technology sector, just as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has Boston’s Route 128 belt and Stanford is in the heart of Silicon Valley, says Lance Collins, dean of engineering at Cornell’s main campus in upstate New York. “Cornell produces (new technology) at the level of all of the top schools, but we’re located in an economy that can’t really commercialise it at the rate that we produce it,” says Collins.

Emerson’s move into Hollywood is also ambitious. It, too, has hired Mayne, in its case to design a landmark 10-storey building to house classrooms and apartments for faculty and students, plus alumni and admissions offices. Scheduled to open in early 2014, the building will be big enough for Emerson to add graduate and professional programmes and host industry events and conferences in a part of the country where there is demand for university graduates, but where public higher education has suffered deep cuts, and where universities are turning away students. The college “has a very strong brand in arts and communication, and this is an opportunity to strengthen and expand that brand in Los Angeles,” says Pelton.

The satellite campuses are the next incarnation of distance education, says Bill Gribbons, director of the Masters course in human factors in information design at Bentley University. Bentley estimates that around 800 positions in technology design exist in Silicon Valley for which companies cannot find employees. Students could fit themselves for those jobs by studying online — but Bentley has found that distance learners crave for some face-to-face instruction. “A lot of universities are wrestling with how you deal with that online space,” says Gribbons. “We’re beginning to see the leading edge of a time when a university is no longer defined by bricks and mortar at a set location with a set faculty. This notion of learning communities not defined by place is the way the market is going to go.”

Intensifying education purpose debate

Ryan Hoyle has one of the toughest tasks in Detroit. His job is to hire engineers and other skilled employees for an IT (information technology) company named GalaxE Solutions. In the midst of high unemployment, and in a state where joblessness has long been above the national average, his and two neighbouring tech companies have a total of 500 openings they cannot fill. “There’s just a shortage of supply,” says Hoyle. “I don’t think you’ll find a technology recruiter who would say we’re in a recession right now.”

As many as 3.9 million high-skilled positions are vacant across the US at a time when nearly 13 million Americans are unemployed. Now President Barack Obama — who has called the situation “inexcusable” — and employers are pressing higher education to do a better job of matching graduates’ skills to the needs of industry. They claim universities are not producing workers with the right skills, are too slow to respond to labour trends, and don’t keep up with vocational requirements. As tuition fees rise, students and parents are also demanding to know what jobs they are likely to be offered for their investment.

It’s a high-stakes confrontation over the very purpose of higher education — knowledge or vocation? And universities are returning fire by stating what employers really want from workers are the things they already teach, such as innovation, creativity and the ability to write and speak well. “This notion that it either has to be a focus on knowledge or a focus on vocation is a false dichotomy,” says Ronald Crutcher, president of Wheaton College and co-chair of a campaign called Liberal Education and America’s Promise, or LEAP, which is trying to promote the value of liberal arts education. “You have to be able to think critically, and narrow training for a specific job doesn’t do that.”

Universities argue what they provide is the capacity to adapt — something more important than ever, since employers’ needs have never changed so quickly. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest the average university graduate will change jobs 11 times by the time he or she is 38.

“You don’t get a degree for a job. You get a degree for a lifetime,” says Jay Halfond, dean of Boston University’s Metropolitan College and Extended Education, which teaches adult learners returning to college to retrain in search of new jobs. “It’s short-sighted of students to think that a degree is really for that next rung.”

But Lisa Baragar Katz, director of the Detroit-area Workforce Intelligence Network, argues the shortage of skilled workers shows every sign of getting worse, not better. “The urgency around having workers who are ready to (be employed) now is only going to increase,” she says. “So there is going to be increased tension between what our academic institutions think they should provide and what employers say they need.”

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)