Northeastern University announced on Monday its plan to launch a series of educational hubs embedded directly in select companies in Silicon Valley.
The announcement comes a few months after the Boston-based university opened a branch campus in tech-heavy Seattle.
There is a reason colleges rarely open branches on the opposite side of the country. They tend to be expensive and hard to pull off. But that is not stopping Northeastern.
“When you have people who are in the workforce already, then we don’t expect them to come to Boston, we have to go to them,” says University President Joseph Aoun. “People who are in the workplace who want to retool or advance and their knowledge is becoming obsolete.”
Northeastern has partnered with the San Jose company, Integrated Device Technology (IDT), to offer a mixture of long-term internships and classroom instruction.
Scott Jaschik is the editor of Inside Higher Ed. He says it’s still too soon to tell how students will respond.
“We’ll either be seeing a lot of people going into the program and coming out and getting good jobs and having their careers advance, or not,” says Jaschik.
Jaschik says other schools might offer similar programs at a lower cost but might not have the same industry connections that Northeastern has.
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