Demonstrates that there are many different approaches to community colleges' partnering with the private sector and that when partners are actively engaged in tailoring education, training, and learning to their students, everyone is the beneficiary. Today as the need for information and workforce competency increases, it is especially important that community colleges embrace the opportunities inherent in collaborations with business and their local communities. These partnerships are particularly successful when each partner brings a different skill or experience to the relationship so that together they achieve, often more effectively, what separately they might be unable to accomplish. This is a true symbiosis. Appropriately, the focus of all these connections is students and learning, in one form or another.

This is the 119th issue of the Jossey-Bass series New Directions for Community Colleges.