The following is an excerpt from my book, Learning Assistance at the Crossroads. More information about obtaining a copy of the book is provided in the upper left-hand column. It may already be in your school library.

About 20 percent of institutions provide developmental courses and noncredit workshops for local business and industry. Two-year institutions are ten times more likely to offer these services than their four-year counterparts (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). About 50 percent of two-year colleges offer these services, compared with only about 5 percent of other types of institutions. Of the institutions that provide services to local business and industry, the most popular are in mathematics, followed by reading and writing (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003). Although course objectives and content are similar, these courses are repackaged for the business community, when they are often called professional development and job readiness workshops. For example, a Fundamentals of English course might be called a business communications workshop, and a Fundamentals of Reading course might be repackaged as power reading. Commonly these workshops and courses are offered at the business site (89 percent) and to a lesser extent on the institution’s campus (74 percent) (National Center for Education Statistics, 1985, 1991, 1996, 2003; Lederman, Ryzewic, and Ribaudo, 1983; Wright and Cahalan, 1985).