In response to a statewide economic crisis resulting in a 9% funding cut for Texas community colleges, the presidents of nine Houston area community colleges formed a consortium to pool their resources and aggressively market the colleges. Since 1986, the Gulf Coast Consortium has mounted late-summer television and radio advertising campaigns to…

The Off-Campus Degree Program at Linfield College (Oregon) provides quality coursework to a group of part-time adult students who would not otherwise have access to a four-year degree program. In 1980, Linfield joined six other institutions to form the National University Consortium (NUC), the first national organization of colleges and…

This issue focuses on support and cooperation among various components of the educational community, specifically as this has been achieved by the Willamette Valley (Oregon) Education Consortium, a research-based organization of school districts, educational agencies, and an institute of higher education. The first article describes how schools…

A variety of consortial arrangements in higher education are discussed noting advantages such as savings realized through the cooperative efforts, enrichment of academic programs, improved student services and community outreach, as well as obstacles (organizational, procedural, and cultural). Success factors identified include presence of…

To determine if a state-supported program of educational cooperatives would be beneficial to New Mexico's small schools, a review of the literature from 1960 was conducted and questionnaires were sent to selected New Mexico educators, followed by interviews. Approaches to shared services used by Texas and New York were investigated through the…

Directed primarily toward small school administrators and school boards, this publication describes a consortium of five rural school districts in central Missouri and how they used a traveling teacher to facilitate incorporation of microcomputer capabilities into the school systems' operation and curriculum. The paper describes the use of the…

The Leadership Institute for a New Century (LINC) began in 1989 as a consortium formed by Iowa State University, the Iowa Association of Community College Trustees, and the Iowa Association of Community College Presidents. The mission of LINC was to increase the diversity of upper-level administrators at community colleges through developing and…

The Strategic Planning Evaluation of Curriculum Assessment of Performance (SPECAP) project was designed by Texas Tech University to assess the implementation of programs by 25 tech prep consortia in Texas. This report describes the most effective tech prep practices discovered by SPECAP through analyses of consortia planning and implementation…