At the Edge of a Cliff, Some Colleges Are Teaming Up to Survive

This article is part of our Learning special report about how the pandemic has continued to change how we approach education.

Dylan Smith went to high school just two miles from Adrian College but wasn’t interested in applying to the Michigan liberal arts school of just over 1,600 undergraduates. As much as he liked the idea of a small campus, he didn’t think a liberal arts degree would do much to help him land a job.

Even when Adrian recruited him to wrestle and play football, Mr. Smith kept his sights set on Michigan State University, which has nearly 50,000 students. He planned to major not in history or English, but in the high-demand field of supply chain management.

Then, supply chain management suddenly showed up among the offerings at Adrian.

“I couldn’t say no to getting the degree I wanted from a smaller school, instead of at a big university where you’re looking at 200 students in a class,” said Mr. Smith, now an Adrian sophomore.

The school is among a fast-growing number of mostly small liberal arts colleges that are adding explicitly career-focused programs through a little-noticed innovation called course sharing.

It’s a sort of Amazon Prime approach to higher education that lets majors in the humanities and other disciplines “stream” classes, often taught by star faculty from top universities, in fields such as coding — without leaving their home campuses.

Using technologies that made major progress during the pandemic — most notably, the delivery of education online — course sharing generally teams up universities and colleges that have extra space in online classes with partner institutions that want to add new programs but can’t afford the time or money to develop them alone.