Are the world’s best brains gainfully employed? Ask the barista with a PhD. Or the well-qualified international graduate with a Business Analytics Master’s Degree working in a series of unfulfilling part-time internships. Or the engineering graduate who is rejected by an applicant tracking system for a spelling error on her CV. I think we all […]
Read More Investing in the Future of (Highly Skilled) UnderemploymentTo the naked eye, India looks like an oasis in the middle of a wrenching emerging market economic downturn. In 2015 Indian GDP grew by 7.2% with the IMF projecting 7.6% growth over the 2016-17 period. FDI reached a record US$63 billion in 2015, exceeding China for the first time. And despite more recent concerns […]
Read More India’s Race Against TimeThis article was published at Educelerate on March 7,2016. Have foreign education companies “cracked the code” for educating the rest of the world? Earlier this month the online education company Udemy reported that over 10 million students had taken “at least one of its courses” and that growth overseas was surging. While this milestone should be applauded, such a […]
Read More Do Emerging Markets Want Their Education Disrupted?With so many emerging market economies and currencies on the boil, it might be counter-intuitive to explore investing in markets that are even less developed. But in the realm of education, there are increasingly compelling reasons to do so. Within Asia, so-called Frontier Markets began as a classification for financial portfolio investors and the indices that […]
Read More Edunomics Focus: Pushing into Asia’s Education FrontierEmerging market currencies are plummeting against the US dollar. What will be the impact on the international education market? If we are to judge by the amount of discussion within the industry on this topic, the answer would lie somewhere between not much and who cares. Which may be extremely short-sighted. Recall that the 1997 Asian financial […]
Read More Sinking: How Emerging Market Currencies May Roil the International Education SectorWe can only get our continent to have inclusive growth if we are educated and change our mindsets — Doreen E. Noni, World Economic Forum, 2014 It doesn’t take a great deal of macroeconomic digging to understand the profound development opportunities that are emerging across Africa, which by 2013 was receiving $57 billion in foreign direct […]
Read More Opportunities in African Education: A Brief Glance at the DataThis post previously appeared as an article in Edsurge on April 14, 2015. In the world we live in, unprecedented opportunities to learn co-exist with enormous inequality. Today there are over 100 more children enrolled in primary schools in lower-middle income countries than a decade ago, and early childhood education is skyrocketing–a fantastic outcome in such as short […]
Read More How EdTech Companies Can Invest in the Educations of All StudentsEditor’s note: This post first appeared in the online publication EdReach. From A Nation at Risk to US Education Reform and National Security, education and economic competitiveness have long been part of America’s geopolitical calculus. But with an emergent China gradually moving toward deeper innovation and a smarter workforce, the stakes have suddenly become higher. In a recent New York Review of Books article, educator Diane Ravitch reassures us that China’s educational […]
Read More Will China be the Next Education Superpower?By 2030 Asia will witness intensifying urbanization, rising disposable incomes, a shift to service sector training needs, millions more students studying abroad (within and outside of Asia), and extended student lifecycles focused on adult and continuing education. These trends were present first in Japan in 1970s and 80s, then the “Asian Tigers” of Korea, Hong […]
Read More Asia's Brain Race II – Investment Returns and PitfallsAmerican MOOCs (massive open online courses) have always been geared toward large emerging markets so it is no surprise that leaders such as Coursera and EdX are now hurtling into China. It seems deceptively easy: MOOCs deliver course content from US universities through free or low-cost alternatives. They partner with Chinese University counterparts or ISPs […]
Read More MOOCs in China – Dream On?