Adult Education: Industrial Universities

Half the knowledge of today’s engineering graduate will be obsolete in a decade, and half of what he will need to know then has not yet been discovered. “If you’re not studying all the time,” says J. M. Shelton, production foreman at aerospace-minded Ling-Temco-Vought in Dallas, “you’re going to wake up without a job.” Matching the pace of onrushing technology is a matter of business survival — and the reason that company-financed schooling is the fastest-growing form of adult education in the U.S.

Last week in Flint, Mich., General Motors Institute, an accredited five-year engineering school, announced a long-range expansion program that will get started with a new men’s dorm and a combination student union— conference hall for G.M.I.’s fulltime faculty of 200 and 2,400 rigorously chosen undergraduates. In G.M.’s plan, students work their way through college by alternating six weeks in class with six weeks in a plant. Similarly, the Bell System offers a four-week work-study cycle and contracts with six leading engineering schools to give courses for the company’s technical staff.*

G.E.’s 35,000 Students. Farsighted giants like IBM urge their professional workers to average one graduate-level course a year as long as they work for the corporation. General Electric spends $45 million a year, more than Wellesley’s total endowment, to support a curriculum of thousands of courses at dozens of plants across the country, with a student body of 35,000.

The boom in continuing education is biggest in the aerospace industry, where landing a Government contract requires a bidder to design the thingumbob in the first place. “We want to do our thinking before we start bending metal,” says Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. At North American Aviation, where formal educational enrollment has almost doubled to 10,000 in five years, employees can get fulltime graduate fellowships, part-time work-study fellowships, or join one of hundreds of in-plant classes that range from hypersonic boundary layer theory to environmental control systems for the Apollo moon rocket. Since 80% of North American’s business depends on the new technology of missiles, electronics, rocket engines and atomics, the company considers the money—$4,500,000 last year—extremely well spent.

Honor System. One of the newest programs is Sperry Gyroscope’s SPACE, an acronym for Sperry Program for Advancing Careers through Education. Though taught on a graduate level, it does not offer college accreditation. “But where else,” asks Director Tom Hirschberg, “can students find that today’s breakthroughs in the research laboratory are tonight’s lessons in the classroom?” “Far-Out U.,” as students call it, enrolls half of Sperry’s engineering and science staff in 34 advanced courses. For blue-collar workers eager to escape possible technological unemployment, the company designed 14 courses (Basic Electronics, for example) and several textbooks.

Though most major U.S. corporations back the need for continuing education, resentment flares over high-priced experts who get company-paid degrees and then promptly switch jobs. “This is known as the honor system,” says Grumman’s Charles E. Mack ruefully. “The company has the honor and the student has the system.” But disloyalty is not common, and most engineers hand-picked for advanced training are glad to go back to their old employers—until they need another round of schooling. It is a never-ending process. As Philosopher-Mathematician Alfred North Whitehead put it: “Knowledge keeps no better than fish.”

* Traffic is also beginning to move in the opposite direction. The Ford Foundation set aside $300,000 to give 60 professors of engineering up to 15 months of academic leave to work in industry. And Stanford University’s School of Engineering last week announced plans to expand a three-year pilot program, originally undertaken with Westinghouse, which lets graduate students at its Institute in Engineering-Economic Systems alternate their studies with working for a company.