Colleges and universities continually struggle with providing a high quality education to students with dwindling financial and other resources, with traditional sources of funding dried up or stressed to near breaking. Academic leaders have been forced to search for innovative ways to keep their programs viable.

One such innovation is the Mechanical Electrical Academic Consortium (MEAC), an alliance of academic institutions, industry associations, contractors, foundations, and manufacturers. These stakeholders work together "to create a quality pool of university-educated managers to enter the mechanical/electrical construction industry by fostering and improving mechanical/electrical university programs." Significantly, MEAC has been recently been added as a committee of the Associated Schools of Construction (ASC).

For several years, with resources provided almost entirely by the Mechanical Contracting Education & Research Foundation (MCERF), MEAC has:

• Provided a collaborative forum for sharing concerns about the future of teaching construction management programs, ideas for addressing them, and solutions that work;
• Developed curriculum covering the basics of construction management (and made that curriculum available online at no cost to faculty or school); and
• Planned and held the first-ever Faculty Training Camp for faculty who teach or will teach mechanical systems, but who have minimal knowledge of the subject matter (the second training camp was conducted April 17 - 19, 2006 in Ft. Collins, CO).

For more information about MEAC, please visit http://www.ascweb.org/ or contact Daryl Orth.