I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. For more than two years, I’ve been curating this weekly Re:Learning newsletter. Now I’ll be using it to share my observations on the people and ideas reshaping the higher-education landscape. Here’s what’s on my mind this week:

Facebook goes to college.

Something rang both haphazard and familiar in the announcement Facebook made last week, promising to create as many as 15 partnerships with community colleges by the end of 2018.

The company is creating those partnerships alongside its larger “Community Boost” program, which is designed to train more than one million people in 50 cities in digital skills. Both moves come as Facebook faces increasing public criticism for how it has allowed members’ private data to be shared with outside companies and political operatives.

In the past six weeks it has announced partnerships with Des Moines Area Community College, Central New Mexico Community College, and Greenville Technical College, in South Carolina; on Friday it unveiled two more, at Bunker Hill and Roxbury Community Colleges, both in Massachusetts.

Exactly how those institutions were chosen — or how future ones will be — is unclear. Parisa Sabeti Zagat, the Facebook manager overseeing the college program, told me that there are no set selection criteria but that the company was “open to conversations with anyone.” She added that she expected some of the institutions would be tapped based on the relationships Facebook has with public officials around the country. (The bottom of this announcement includes information on how to contact the company about partnerships.) Facebook won’t necessarily be limited to institutions in the 50 Community Boost cities, Zagat said, and the company will take into account such factors as the depth of need in the college communities and the diversity of their student bodies.

That doesn’t exactly narrow things down.

As for what the partnerships will entail — well, that’s a bit vague too. Zagat said each would look a little different. At Central New Mexico, whose collaboration with Facebook is furthest along, officials are already planning to develop a new certificate, and perhaps eventually a full degree, that combines digital media and marketing. It will cover a range of digital skills, not just how to use Facebook. The degree was already in the works, and the college teaches most of those skills now, according to Donna Diller, dean of business and information technology. The college has access to Blueprint, Facebook’s free online tutorial for how to use Facebook, but that’s true for anyone, anywhere.

Nonetheless, Diller says she’s excited to have Facebook involved in the design of the program. Its personnel can help the college identify how best to use Blueprint, she says, and the company can introduce the college to national figures with industry expertise who can identify if “we’re missing a few competencies,” she says.

Facebook has also agreed to give scholarships to 32 students at its five-year-old Deep Dive Coding boot camp, whose offerings include a 12-week immersion course for which students can pay as much as $10,000 each.

Facebook has also been upping its efforts to become a tool of choice for colleges in their student-recruiting campaigns, but the company maintains that the Boost program is separate from that. It says its college partnerships are designed “to help business owners and individuals with the tools they need to advance in today’s fast-moving (and increasingly digital) economy.”

But as officials at Central New Mexico recognize, Facebook will clearly benefit from having more people trained to use its advertising and marketing tools — not to mention the PR boost it might get at a time when its reputation is under attack. “Everyone’s fully aware of what they have to gain,” says Deborah Johnson, director of education, entrepreneurship, and economic development at the college.

Whatever its motives, Facebook’s actions recall the decades-old rhetoric of another giant tech company that sought to make higher-ed inroads amid questions of ulterior motives. The company was Microsoft, whose donations of software and training, among other moves in academe, were seen by critics as suspect.

“Our job is not to create market share,” Christopher E. Jones, who handled Microsoft’s gifts to higher-education institutions, told The Chronicle back in April 1998. “It is to do things that help communities.” (The comment appeared in one of several stories my colleagues and I produced for a package of reporting on “Microsoft’s Reach in Higher Education.”)

At the time, the anxiety about Microsoft focused on whether it was acquiring too much of a monopoly. These days the concerns over Facebook — how it has been used to suppress voting, and whether it is subverting public discourse — make those earlier fears feel almost quaint.