Over the past forty years colleges and universities have come together to form academic consortia for a variety of reasons. The initial wave of the formation of higher education consortia occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Colleges entered into agreements to address common issues through cooperative initiatives in response to student needs, economic pressures, and federal government incentives. The institutions that form Five Colleges, Inc., in western Massachusetts, for example, originally came together in response to the large number of veterans taking advantage of the opportunities for higher education that became available to them after World War II. Later, the U.S. Department of Education provided significant financial incentives for consortia formed on the basis of shared faculty development programming. Student unrest, especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and difficult economic times also thrust college leaders together to commiserate and to discuss the value of interinstitutional cooperation. Unfortunately, many consortia formed during this wave of cooperation have not survived the loss of external motivation and external support.
The current wave of consortium formation, a phenomenon of the 1990s, also responds to a variety of conditions and incentives. The rise of information and communication technologies has increased pressures on institutions not only to be more competitive but to be more efficient. A growing understanding that organizations are not totally independent but are, in fact, interdependent and that strategic institutional management frequently entails partnerships has begun to have an impact on higher education. Board and community leadership expect that institutions will work together rather than compete unnecessarily and inefficiently. Further, the rising consumer cost of higher education (costs are rising faster than the rate of inflation) has led to national studies of the causes and cures for the rise, among which is the use of collaborative strategies to help control costs.