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Instead of taking time off to attend classes and complete their projects in Pittsburgh, the GM employees viewed lectures delivered on campus via CD-ROM disks that were sent to Michigan, and communicated with CMU faculty and fellow students via e-mail, telephone and Internet sites. At test time, the students went to sites near their homes or offices where a proctor supervised the exam.
Customized degree programs such as the one CMU developed for GM are "the Mercedes of the education industry," said Vicky Phillips, founder and chief executive of GetEducated.com, a Vermont-based Web directory and information center for distance learning and online degrees.
The automaker scouted several schools before it settled on CMU for a master's degree designed to give students management as well as technical skills, Mr. [Chris Tipton] said. Neither the university nor GM would disclose tuition, but Mr. Tipton said it was "competitive" with other graduate programs.
Joyce Gannon can be reached at [email protected] or 412-263- 1580.
The following CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION appeared on December 3, 2005. The name of Bala Murthy, a General Motors Corp. employee who earned a master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University in May, was misspelled in Thursday's editions. ** This story has been modified to reflect the correct spelling of Mr. Murthy's last name. **
For the past two years, Bala Murthy has spent at least one evening a week at class and countless hours on his computer completing homework and projects for his master of science degree in information technology from Carnegie Mellon University.
And he did it without ever having to set foot on the Oakland campus -- until last May, when the Michigan resident showed up for his graduation ceremony.
The 42-year-old global program manager at General Motors Corp. in Warren, Mich., was one of 22 GM employees who graduated last spring from CMU with a degree created specifically for the automaker's technology managers.
Instead of taking time off to attend classes and complete their projects in Pittsburgh, the GM employees viewed lectures delivered on campus via CD-ROM disks that were sent to Michigan, and communicated with CMU faculty and fellow students via e-mail, telephone and Internet sites. At test time, the students went to sites near their homes or offices where a proctor supervised the exam.
"I live and die by Web meetings," said Mr. Murthy.
Customized degree programs such as the one CMU developed for GM are "the Mercedes of the education industry," said Vicky Phillips, founder and chief executive of GetEducated.com, a Vermont-based Web directory and information center for distance learning and online degrees.
"For universities, it's a huge, growing and lucrative market because if they can partner with a corporation, then the corporation actually agrees to underwrite the program. It's very expensive for a college to go out and try to recruit students one by one."
Tuition can range from $50,000 to $125,000 per student for the 10 to 12 courses normally required to complete a master's, Ms. Phillips said, citing Wellesley, Mass-based Babson College as a pioneer in the customized distance degree business. The suburban Boston college created a fast-track MBA for employees of West Coast computer chip maker Intel Corp., and now offers its distance MBA to the public.
"Particularly in the business schools, faculty like to partner with a large corporate brand because it reflects better on their [school] brand," said Ms. Phillips. "Whether it's GM or Intel, it's brand affiliation."
Corporate partnerships with universities aren't new. Businesses have operated "corporate universities" for years to provide employees with professional training and development. But most of those programs aren't tied to a degree.
Pittsburgh-based law firm Reed Smith, for instance, launched Reed Smith University in 2004 with the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business to offer courses to its attorneys and employees in law, business development, leadership, professional support and technology. Reed Smith staffers attend some courses at Wharton's Philadelphia campus, while some are taught via Web-based instruction or by video conference.
GM began thinking about ways to beef up its information technology skills in the late '90s after its IT subsidiary, Electronic Data Systems, was spun off into an independent business.
"They were our in-house IT provider, so our IT capability, or the majority of our capability, went with that spinoff," said Chris Tipton, director of human resources management for GM's Information Systems & Services at its Detroit headquarters.
The automaker scouted several schools before it settled on CMU for a master's degree designed to give students management as well as technical skills, Mr. Tipton said. Neither the university nor GM would disclose tuition, but Mr. Tipton said it was "competitive" with other graduate programs.
Classes began in 2001 and to date, 68 GM employees have earned the degree. Another six are expected to graduate at the end of the current semester.
About 15 new students enroll each year, and while most work for GM in North America, a few are based in international locations such as China and Australia, said Karyn E. Moore, associate dean at CMU's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management.
The relationship with GM has been so successful and lucrative that CMU hopes to sell the concept to other corporations.
"It's part of our long-term strategy," said Ms. Moore. "We would like to replicate the corporate partnership," adding that the university had held discussions with companies in the financial, health care and information technology consulting sectors. She declined to name them.
Distance degrees are just one aspect of CMU's recent efforts to sell its brand nationally and globally.
Others include a campus in Silicon Valley; a venture in Athens, Greece, launched in 2002, through which CMU offers a distance master's in information networking to students at Athens Information Technology; and a residential campus in Doha, Qatar, that opened a year ago and offers undergraduate courses in business and computer science.
Earlier this week, CMU also said it planned to open a branch of its Heinz school in Adelaide, Australia.
The curriculum for the GM program, which also has attracted a group of about 15 independent students who don't work for GM and pay their own way, includes e-commerce, telecommunications management, Web page development, database management, software development management and information security management.
A critical requirement for each student is a project directly related to his job at GM.
For his project, Mr. Murthy, a 20-year veteran of the company, designed an IT delivery process with assistance from staff at CMU's Software Engineering Institute.
Other student projects have included designing a process to create reusable software components, and a prototype software tool for tracking software quality assurance.
Since GM employees began working toward the CMU master's in 2001, Mr. Tipton estimated their projects had saved the automaker $200 million.
"That's a very significant number. We see a lot of direct benefits from the project component."
Though it created and funds the program for its employees, GM expects them to do most of their school work off-site.
"We allow them to participate in phone calls or Web meetings [on work time]. But on the other hand, it's set up around a full-time working situation. So students go in with the anticipation they'll do a lot of it on their own time."
DRAWING; Caption: DRAWING: By Stacy Innerst/Post-Gazette
Copyright Post Gazette Publishing Company Dec 1, 2005