Two Boston University colleges are working with a statewide coalition of schools and defense contractors with the goal of building Massachusetts into a “global leader in the defense technology industry.”
Metropolitan College and the College of Engineering have programs that cater to the Mass Defense Technology Initiative’s goal of corresponding university curricula to meet the needed skills in the defense workplace.
Several BU programs were already in place when the initiative was created in 2004, but allow defense contractors to send employees to MET for higher education and prepare students to potentially become employees of defense contractors through graduate programs at ENG.
“One of the special strengths that we have at BU is that ENG and MET work with employers, but we work internally as well,” MET Student and Corporate Outreach Assistant Dean Judith Marley said.
Marley said MET has been working with Mass DTI for about six months.
“We are uniquely positioned in that we would not need to make any adaptation [to our program],” she said. “BU’s MET College has a strong background of serving working adults in defense industries.”
MET allows companies to use tuition reimbursement to send employees to BU. The most common types of companies sending employees to MET, including Raytheon and BAE Systems, are also involved in recruitment of new employees at BU’s Career Fair.
“Relationships are multi-faceted, sometimes looking for new employees,” Marley said. “In other situations, they are looking that their existing employees [have a greater skill set] . . . We are often identified in having excellence in academic programs and an understanding of particular company needs.”
While MET works with project management and information assurance training for defense corporations, ENG’s graduate program involves Design for Manufacture Ability in Manufacturing Engineering, a program aimed toward initially designing products so they can be produced in the fastest time at the lowest cost.
ENG Corporate Relations Director Deborah Elsea said most of the “part-time programs are designed for working professionals.”
“This is a project geared toward how you make operations more efficient,” she said. “What the state is trying to do is really new. The state has tried to act as an agent who looks at what the Boston-area universities already have and try to match those together. The hope is that relationships would be built.”
The Economic Development Office created Mass DTI in 2004 to coordinate Massachusetts’ effort to prepare for Base Realignment and Closure. BRAC occurs periodically as the Defense Department examines existing military installations to decide if they should be closed to use their funding for other operations, Mass DTI Executive Director Alan Macdonald said.
“The central argument we made to demonstrate the value of the military installations was highlighting . . . the technology mission of Hanscom Air Force Base and Natick Labs, which are non-traditional operational bases,” he said.
Mass DTI’s central argument in favor of keeping the bases open was the need to keep them integrated with the greater Boston technological community. The “truly competitive advantage,” he said, was the bases’ proximity and integration with excellent technology talent.
“The first step [was] back in June,” he said. “[We] worked with four member companies of Mass DTI . . . The long-time hope is that a relationship evolves that keeps education curricula in tune [and that] we are generating enough of the right-skilled engineers in Massachusetts.”