University partnerships and their models for enhancing educational opportunities

Complexity of Partnerships in Higher Education

When universities partner with other universities in foreign lands, good things can and do happen. And when universities partner with communities and other social agencies within the United States, positive things also happen. This paper reports on several partnership models from the available scholarly literature.

University Partnerships are Complex and Productive

According to a peer-reviewed article in the International Journal of Educational Management, the objectives of forging ahead with relationships between institutes of higher learning in the UK and international universities focus on benefits for both students and faculty (staff). Since the 1990s there has been no shortage of student mobility, student recruitment, and staff recruitment internationally, and in fact 73% of universities in the UK report having an international strategy that includes the recruitment of international students (Al-Habaibeh, 2006).

The authors of the article believe that through "policy borrowing & #8230; and research collaborations," and also through the enhancement of the international dimensions in UK universities, the door is now open to better alliances between nations (Al-Habaibeh, 381).

In Australia, universities are being "…challenged to address the educational needs of their own communities" because communities can be burdened by successive generations of citizens that have not had access to higher education (Butcher, et al., 2011). Both transformational and transactional relationships between universities and communities are being forged in Australia. Transformational partnerships are those with a moral dimension (parties partner to "create the possibility of generative growth and change through mutual interaction"); but in transactional partnerships both parties remain "fundamentally unchanged" while each party achieves individual goals (Butcher, 31).

Meanwhile, three universities in the upper Midwest (North Dakota State University, Valley City State University, and Minnesota State University) decided to partner and bring their resources into a collaborative, team effort, to: a) recruit high quality teacher candidates; b) prepare highly effective teachers; c) place graduates into partner schools; and d) "support graduates in their first years of teaching" (Duffield, et al., 2013). Notwithstanding instructors' initial reluctance to share strategies and resources, this partnership was effective in meeting the goal of recruiting and training top-notch teachers for the region.

Elsewhere, in the Southeast U.S., a state child welfare agency partnered with seven universities to create a consortium, which greatly enhanced the training and competencies of students entering the field of child welfare (DeHart, 2013). The consortium -- using funds from Title IV-E of the Child Welfare and Adoption Assistance Act of 1980 -- formed a broad leadership team with program directors from each university. In turn, program directors interacted with classroom instructors and "field instructors at county child welfare agencies," and regular participation / interaction by those key leaders has led to a movement "…beyond bureaucracy to energize the public child welfare workforce" with commitment and professionalism (Dehart, 750).