Joel Podolny, the dean of the Yale School of Management since 2005, will join the Cupertino, California-based computer maker as vice-president and dean of Apple University in early 2009, the newspaper said.

Yale Daily News reported that Podolny's work would "focus on executive education within the company''.

Corporate universities are a growing trend in the United States, the Wall Street Journal noted, one of the best known being Hamburger University run by McDonald's to train employees.