Advisor | Institutional Outcomes & Technology in Higher Education
Start with the outcome. Then ask what will actually move it.
I advise higher education institutions, the companies that sell to them, and the investors behind those companies, on which outcomes are worth pursuing and what it really takes to move one.
The argument
Higher education is judged on a small set of outcomes, each with published measures, known weights and non-obvious sensitivities. Ranking position. Accreditation standing. Graduation and placement results. Intake quality. Cost per enrolled student.
Those outcomes decide what a Director or Vice-Chancellor defends at a board meeting, what a promoter funds, and what a vendor's product is ultimately judged against. Yet they are rarely examined at component level, not by the people building technology for the sector, and often not by the institutions themselves.
That is the gap I work in. The question worth asking is mechanical rather than rhetorical:
What would this initiative have to do, specifically, to move placement success two points, or Graduation Outcomes three?
Answer that and you have a roadmap, an investment case and a measure of success at once. It is the same answer three times.
Read at component level
- FT MiM
- Weighted salary, salary increase, placement success, careers service rank, international course experience, alumni response rate
- NIRF
- Teaching, Learning & Resources; Research & Professional Practice; Graduation Outcomes; Outreach & Inclusivity; Perception
- AACSB · EQUIS
- Assurance of learning, faculty qualification and sufficiency, societal impact, continuous improvement review evidence
- Admissions
- Enquiry to application to offer to acceptance yield, waitlist conversion, intake quality across dimensions, cost per enrolled student
Why this combination is unusual
I have been on both sides of the table.
Close to fourteen years leading business schools, with the profit and loss, the rankings, the accreditation and the placement numbers on my desk. Five consecutive years in the FT Masters in Management global top 100, one of only four Indian business schools to achieve this.
Accreditation work with AACSB and EFMD: peer review, initial accreditation, and mentoring schools through the process. I know what evidence survives scrutiny and what gets a deferral.
Thirteen years in the software product industry before that, as CTO of a derivatives risk business and founder of a product engineering company. A doctorate in computational optimisation.
Plenty of people understand higher education. Plenty understand software. The useful position is the overlap. It is what lets me tell a founder which two roadmap items actually change their win rate, or tell a Director which of their AI proposals will survive contact with their own data.
Advisory
Who I advise.
Institutions
Rankings at component level, accreditation readiness, student outcomes from admissions to placement, curriculum transformation, and where AI belongs in academic operations.
For promoters, boards, Vice-Chancellors and Directors →Education technology companies
Product management, especially product design and user experience from an end user's perspective. Roadmap and ideal-customer definition, why pilots stall at procurement, and how to price against outcome impact rather than seats.
For founders and product leaders →Investors
Commercial due diligence on education technology: whether a target's institutional return-on-investment claim survives contact with how schools are actually measured.
For private equity and venture funds →AI
Most institutions now have more AI proposals than they can fund or absorb. The question worth asking of each is the same one as above: which outcome, moved by how much, and what has to change around the technology for that to happen.