Category: Public Private Partnerships

Internationalisation – the key component of Employability

Posted on by Tim O'Brien

Earlier this year McKinsey, the global consulting firm, produced a hard hitting report on Education to Employment. The report describes a global paradox: crippling levels of youth unemployment around the world – close to 50% in Southern Europe and the Middle East, yet 40% of employers surveyed claiming an equally dangerous shortage of appropriately qualified staff. The report also forecast a global shortage of up to 85 million skilled workers by 2020. To quote from their report:

“Employers, education providers, and youth live in parallel universes. To put it another way, they have fundamentally different understandings of the same situation. Fewer than half of youth and employers, for example, believe that new graduates are adequately prepared for entry-level positions. Education providers, however, are much more optimistic: 72 percent of them believe new graduates are ready to work..

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It Ain’t What You Do

Posted on by Tim O'Brien

During a lull in a long meeting over the summer, a couple of colleagues at INTO were wrestling over our “elevator pitch” – what makes us distinctive. And we then broadened it out to think about ways in which universities can communicate their distinctiveness, a word appearing on many people’s lips across the sector. It’s difficult  when there is so much change and much analysis is unremittingly bleak.

The first years of this decade have brought us funding challenges on both sides of the Atlantic, the emergence of the discerning customer, disruptive market entrants to higher education, confusing and poorly executed government policy on student visas and so on.  It’s not easy being a traditional university in this environment. Moreover, after years of steady and quota-secured growth in tertiary enrolments, universities are facing serious structural challenges as various quasi-markets are created by government policy. The squeezed middle is very real.

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Comprehensive internationalisation: the power of partnerships

Posted on by JoAnn McCarthy

internationalisationINTO’s Director of Academic Affairs for the USA, JoAnn McCarthy, has recently co-authored a paper on internationalisation in the educational industry. In this blog she gives an overview of the paper and her thoughts on international study.

A complement to John K. Hudzik’s earlier publication, “Comprehensive Internationalization: From Concept to Action”, this most recent joint effort, entitled “Leading Comprehensive Internationalization: Strategy and Tactics for Action,” provides practical guidelines for starting, sustaining, and evaluating a comprehensive internationalisation agenda in a wide range of institutional types. Continue reading “Comprehensive internationalisation: the power of partnerships” →

Engineering change in US higher education through public/private partnerships

Posted on by Danny Bartlett

INTO USFAn increasing number of higher education institutions in the United States are now financially unsustainable and debt-ridden according to a new report that surveyed almost 2,000 private and public schools from consulting company Bain & Co. and Sterling Partners, a US-based private-equity firm.

University debt in the US is increasing annually at 12 per cent per year with the report attributing gross financial mismanagement and a lack of sustainable business models as two damaging factors. Continue reading “Engineering change in US higher education through public/private partnerships” →