General Motors and McDonald's pioneered the corporate university concept. Now an estimated 1,600 corporate colleges exist at companies like Motorola, Walt Disney, Carpet One, Verizon, Sears Roebuck, and Microsoft. Many other corporations, even small to midsize businesses, are establishing corporate schools. Like the traditional college or university, corporate universities have buildings, classroom courses with instructors, catalogs, and even course numbers. In some cases, students receive degrees or certificates for such training. Some companies are having their programs accredited so employees can convert some in-house course work into college credits for graduate degrees. Robert Brado, senior vice president of Strategic Management Group, a consulting firm that specializes in helping companies develop training programs, stated as follows: "You think that employees are attracted to companies because of how much they pay. But typically, excellent training programs, such as corporate universities, are always in the top three reasons why people are attracted and why they stay."

Ford Motor Company has taken a different approach to some of its training. In 2003 Ford announced that it would offer its technical training classes to global suppliers via a new Web link to the Michigan Virtual University. The courses are the same ones used by Ford to train their engineers and provide the supplier companies the added benefit of knowing that their approach is the same one followed by Ford. The courses provide many of the core tools required to implement Ford's Six Sigma-training.

Source: Amit Shah, Charles Sterrett, Jerry Chesser, and Jessica Wilmore, "Meeting the Need for Employee Development in the Twenty-First Century," S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal, Spring 2001, pp. 22–28; and "Ford to Offer Training through Michigan Virtual University," Vocational Training News, March 2003, p. 2.