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MNEs’ subsidiaries in Vietnam are confronted by a dramatic skill mismatch on the labor market. In recent years, a couple of MNEs have set up collaborations with local universities through sponsoring of scholarships, equipment donations and training programs as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The goal of this chapter is to examine to what extent MNEs act as institutional entrepreneurs through CSR projects at partnering universities, thereby contributing towards an upgrading of Vietnam’s higher education system. Data have been derived on the basis of 25 in-depth interviews with firm managers and university representatives as well as secondary statistical data. The authors draw the following conclusions. First, the largest benefits of CSR projects are shared between the directly involved partners. Second, the diffusion of skills and technologies across the different departments and institutes within the cooperating university is substantially small.

In the US, trustees have linked universities to industry for at least a century. We extend existing research on this topic by exploring the ways in which “The Great Recession” reshaped trustee-mediated relationships between university and industry. We analyze university trustees’ ties to corporations at two elite universities, the University of Pittsburgh and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), by considering the number and type of affiliations that trustees held before (2005), during (2010) and after (2015) the Recession. Findings suggest that trustees of both universities remained highly connected to firms even after the Recession. However, MIT’s position was far stronger than Pitt’s after the Recession, as indicated by total ties and by the types of firms to which trustees linked the two universities. This indicated that university governance in the US reflects not only economic conditions but also factors within the field of higher education such as institutional stratification.

The Morrill Act of 1862 created the American land-grant universities and reshaped higher education in the United States. The legislation greatly expanded the number of public universities in the nineteenth century, creating the foundation of leading global universities like Cornell University, the University of California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Wisconsin. This chapter traces land-grant universities evolving role in national, state, and regional development from origins until today through four domains: the national development framework, the local development framework, the human capital framework, and emergent frameworks in an era of privatization and commercialization. The chapter highlights the critical role that land-grant teaching, research, and knowledge dissemination have had on economic development strategies in the United States.