How Do Community and Technical Colleges Build Cross-Sector Collaborations?

Federal and state policies increasingly call upon community and technical colleges to collaborate with industry and other outside stakeholders in order to improve career and technical education programs. We apply a framework from the public administration literature to understand how these collaborations are built. Using data from in-depth interviews with 49 participants engaged in building collaborations to improve workforce education and training across Tennessee, we find that productive networks rely on dynamic individuals that act as boundary spanners, facilitating communication across sectors. In addition, successful collaborations make use of meetings involving multiple interest groups to bridge, rather than reinforce, boundaries between stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]