The Win-Win
How university-business partnerships boost growth
Nuno Fernandes is starting to see the tipping point. With more than 4,000 universities and colleges in the United States, he has found that many educators are beginning to realize they can no longer just offer certain programs and courses. The truth is that students don’t want to learn the same way they did decades ago.
The visionary leader of the American Public University System (APUS), which includes American Military University and American Public University, Fernandes has been a pioneer in making online higher education more affordable and accessible. As president of APUS, he continues to drive innovation across the higher education, technology and business sectors.
Take TuitionWise, the program the Charles Town, West Virginia, university system created to foster collaborative education benefits programs that highlight the value of a college degree and the U.S. workforce’s needs. The program was created with organizations top of mind, specifically helping them to recruit, retain and upskill employees. TuitionWise also includes a grant that is open to U.S.-based organizations who meet minimum tuition assistance standards. “We fully realize today’s digital world, led by AI and other technologies, is pushing boundaries faster than ever, which might leave some employees needing to learn new skills or augmenting existing ones.”
APUS set out to address this skills gap by providing relevant education that is helping enterprises upskill and reskill their employees while they’re still employed. “We value real-life experience, and help students earn degrees on their own terms, whether it’s a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, or even a doctoral degree,” Fernandes says.
The beauty of TuitionWise is that it helps lower the potential costs for eligible participants and offers the possibility of no out-of-pocket tuition costs when combined with their employer’s tuition-assistance benefits. When students take advantage of the program, they sit in virtual classrooms with monthly class starts, learning from industry practitioners immersed in fields such as cybersecurity, IT, business management and healthcare. “APUS was founded to reduce the challenges of time and location that many working adults and military students face while pursuing degrees,” Fernandes says. “We continue to focus on solving those problems while we embark on a global digital journey offering ever-growing digital and differentiated services at no cost, including integrated coaching and mentoring services.”
These are increasingly evolving times in the higher education space—an evolution that includes rapidly increasing tuition and fees (almost 180% at public, four-year colleges over the last 20 years), according to the Education Data Initiatve. This has forced higher education administrators to evolve, and evolve quickly. APUS is one of those universities that believes in high-quality, affordable and accessible higher education, which is why it offers 200-plus programs to a wide range of students in 50 states and more than 80 countries.
One of its missions is partnering with 100-plus organizations to offer tuition savings and other educational benefits to their employees, including many associations, businesses, government agencies, and healthcare organizations. For example, APUS has a research grant with NASA, which it received for its Spirulina Algae Group, part of the university’s Supernova Search Group. The research grant enables APUS to study the use of spirulina, a blue-green algae, for growing plants in space environments. “It is an exciting project where NASA benefits from our experts, and our experts get exposure and are funded to work on cutting-edge projects like this one,” Fernandes says.
APUS also has grant programs like its unique Employer Partnership Grant, which help lessen student costs. Two additional programs are the Veteran-Owned Small Business Grant, which enables a tuition grant to veteran small business owners and their eligible family members, and the Everyday Heroes Grant, which is for public safety professionals and their families.
“We approach partnerships in a deliberate manner and use a criteria model with a rating scale to ensure we can achieve success,” Fernandes says. “We look for key cultural matches such as mission and vision alignment, population size, and program needs. We pay special attention to organizations who are investing in their employees’ success with things like financial assistance and fostering learning and growth.”
The Art of Powering Success
During the height of the early part of the pandemic, Motlow State Community College in Smyrna, Tennessee, and T-Mobile set out on a partnership to provide a manner and method for continuous connectivity and unlimited access leveraging 2,100 Samsung A32 mobile phones.
Under the parameters of the partnership, Motlow State successfully integrated its learning management system, web access, support services, engagement and retention strategies, connecting students to available food, living and healthcare services. The result was a semester-to-semester 6% increase in Black male retention, among other highlights. The continued services—one year in duration—provided student access in real time to OER, hybridized delivery learning modules, and continual progress toward their educational goals.
“The institution’s benefit is simple—the students’ success is our success,” says Motlow State President Michael Torrence, Ph.D. “The bottom-line impact has been in the fact that we have seen our operating budget increase double year to year.”
Motlow State has a number of longstanding relationships with industry leaders and companies, which help ensure its value alignment through reiteration of values, goals and the execution of agreed upon work built on years of experience and trust. The nature of teaching, training and learning has manifested itself to go beyond the serial approaches universities like Motlow State have accumulated in the past.
Torrance says that delivering quality, high skill, competent graduates is important for the future of academia. “If the academy does not meet the needs or expectations of its business and industry partners, those partners will pivot. The academy has already seen significant shifts in delivery modality and stackable short-term earned credentials will continue to play a role of significant assertion in the world of employable skills and durable skills for the marketplace. As my elders continue to remind me, ‘Root little pig, or die,’ which is not as sorrowful as it reads, but it does place the onus of innovation, matriculation, preparation, and execution on the backs of our programs to evolve.”
That is why Motlow State internship programs are delivered in many formats. The university currently uses both informal and formal methods. Informally, it has more than 500 employees and their recognition of talent in the community continues to benefit its institutional partners.
“We have leveraged volunteerism alongside internships, on-the-job training, and seen the apprenticeship model have some success across our state, too,” Torrance says. “The appreciation of skill is most learned in situ. The integration of the ‘workforce is what we do’ mantra within our programs is gaining traction. Every single one of our students leaves our institution with awareness, adoption, and new skills. Our business and industry partners help us create and recreate learning scenarios in the classroom and within their places of operation, the expectation of safety first, teamwork, effective and efficient effort, and troubleshooting stations.”
The Motlow State model also includes new revenue streams, like the creation of its flight simulation training in Shelbyville, Tennessee, and subsequently, a Motlow State Advisory Board for the workforce-centered program. “We have seen new and broader revenue opportunities in the aviation industry,” Torrance says. “Of note is our work conducted at the Automation and Robotics Training Center (ARTC) in McMinnville, Tennessee. In the last 18 months, we have established professional training relationships with 150 new partners across the United States.”
Many of its collaborating partnerships are with well-recognized industry giants like Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, NASA, and others. The increase in awareness of what it delivers, industry-recognized training, and its multiplicities of having the world’s three largest robot manufacturers as partners, has been broadly impactful. “We have now begun to finish the addition to our foundational training location,” Torrance says. “The aforementioned revenue streams have continued to increase our institutional college financial index or CFI. The CFI indicates the fiscal health of an institution and we are Olympic-level healthy.”
In a time where innovation drives progress, university-business partnerships continue to emerge as a vital force for mutual growth and societal impact. By combining academic research with industry expertise, these collaborations foster groundbreaking advancements that propel businesses forward while enriching educational institutions.
