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Higher Education

Amidst extraordinary uncertainty, BCG is helping higher education leaders build resilience, seize opportunities for growth, and discover new ways to differentiate their institutions.

Colleges and universities are facing declining enrollment, financial instability, and prolonged educational disruptions. A recent BCG survey found that 72% of college presidents are concerned about the perceived decrease in value of higher education. In short, colleges and universities are facing an existential crisis.

The changing nature of the higher education industry demands a strategy that is inclusive, collaborative, and resilient. BCG helps today’s leaders stay competitive by navigating key trends in higher education, such as:

A growing need for higher ed-employer collaboration . An estimated 1.3 billion people have competencies misaligned with the work they perform, fueling a rapidly growing skills mismatch across the globe.

A shift in student expectations . Gen Z students are demanding to be treated as customers and to realize value commensurate with the investment they’re making.

New business and delivery models. Competency-based models, massive open online courses (MOOCs), “boot camps,” and microcredentials are all emerging. But shifting from in-person to online instruction—while maintaining quality—is not a simple task.

An expanding ecosystem. The corporate sector is increasingly involved in academic programming, research programs, and apprenticeships.

Our Approach to Higher Education Consulting

BCG's higher ed consulting teams have decades of experience helping public and private institutions around the world to become more sustainable and resilient. We work shoulder to shoulder with clients during all stages of planning, enablement, and growth:

• Planning. We support leaders as they set a strategic direction, develop a roadmap for growth, ensure racial equity and economic access, and discover new ways to differentiate from competitors.
• Enablement. We offer new strategies to ensure maximum cost efficiency, improve student outcomes, simplify administrative structures, streamline governance, and drive effective fundraising.
• Growth. We ensure that institutions are leveraging cutting-edge technologies and innovative solutions, launching new initiatives, and scaling up the most successful programs.

Our Higher Education Consulting Work with Clients

Improving Access to Higher Education . BCG worked with a university to increase enrollment with a specific focus on access for low-income and minority students.

Preparing for Effortless Expansion. BCG worked with a large innovative public university to build and implement a successful growth strategy.

Reinventing the University Experience. BCG worked with a leading business school to transform its university experience for students and faculty alike.

Lessons from Fulbright on Developing the University of the Future. A new liberal arts institution in Vietnam found that including students and faculty in the school’s development was a major driver of success.

Our Higher Education Tools and Frameworks

We leverage a wide array of proprietary tools and analytical frameworks to create transformative change in the higher education industry, including:

BCG's Future Skills Architect Tool

Helps colleges and universities gauge the skills mismatch in their country’s labor supply, understand its root causes, and identify the policies that can erase the mismatch by promoting reskilling and lifelong learning.

BCG's Higher Education Strategy Development Process

Analyzes dynamic trends in higher education—including financial, technology, and competitive pressures—to help schools measure their performance across key dimensions, such as academic excellence, student outcomes, financial insights, brand or reputation, access, and economic impact.

Explore Our Insights on Higher Education

How Higher Ed and Employers Can Partner to Power Talent Pipelines

Relationships with colleges can help businesses land great talent, but they can be tricky to establish and navigate. Taking seven actions can make them work.

Education as a Catalyst for Climate Progress

Education is a powerful means of spurring behavioral change and collective action, cultivating green skills, ensuring a just transition to a sustainable economy, and building communities’ adaptive capacity.

Higher Ed Must Go All In on Digital

By investing in the cloud, data, and analytics, institutions can improve student success, operational efficiency, and innovation in research and learning.

Meet BCG’s Experts in Higher Education Consulting

BCG’s higher education consultants provide expertise across regions and industries. They are led by a global team of premier thought leaders in higher ed.

Managing Director & Senior Partner; Global Leader, Education, Employment, and Welfare

Managing Director & Partner

Washington, DC

Managing Director & Partner; Global Leader, Global Advantage Practice

Managing Director & Senior Partner

Partner and Associate Director, Education and Employment

Explore Related Services

A Future Skills Assessment Advances Lifelong Learning and Labor Productivity

K–12 Education

Education consulting services

Innovating the experience for students, alumni and employees

• Two Parallel Realities in Higher Education: Atoms and Bits
• Case Studies
• What We Think
• Our Leaders

Two parallel realities in higher education: atoms and bits

Universities are at an exciting precipice of technological innovation, one that is not just digitizing operations but putting that digital foundation to work. However, educational institutions must provide active leadership to ensure that there are guidelines to interacting with these technological innovations in a responsible manner.

Accenture named a Leader in Higher Education Cloud Professional Services

Helping transform education from a place to a digital platform

The digital transformation of education continues to accelerate at breakneck pace. Digital tools and platforms are unlocking new ways to connect, learn, research and administrate. Education is being transformed from a place to a platform.

To keep pace with rapidly rising student expectations, colleges, universities, and departments and ministries of education, are using digital technologies to improve experiences and outcomes for learners.

Education leaders know their profession is also on the cusp of a revolution in learning models. Virtual and augmented reality will provide more immersive and engaging ways to explore concepts, visualize complexity, collaborate on research, and bring learning to life in digital environments.

How we serve our clients

We help transform institutions’, student and employee experiences through process and technology innovation.

Student experience

Redesign the student journey from recruitment to graduation and beyond, focusing on the moments that matter to each individual.

Learning experience

Prioritize a portfolio of learning experience initiatives to make learning more accessible, as well as improving student persistence and success.

Growth strategy

Re-envision new opportunities for growth and innovation.

Security and data management

Operationalize data, identity and security practices to improve organizational agility, reduce friction and risk, and drive insights to inform better decisions.

Operations optimization

Help education institutions and agencies transform to more effectively deliver on their mission.

Unlock the promise of immersive tech at scale to improve learning efficacy, student success, learner and alumni engagement, research collaboration and more.

Case studies

Public Service

Macquarie University futureproofs HR with Workday

The university transformed its HR and workforce experience, replacing manual processes and three legacy.

Boosting enrollment with moments that matter

University of Cincinnati redesigns the student journey to maximize the moments that matter to them.

WPI amps up its technology with Workday student

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) transforms critical functions, ensuring a clear view of its students.

What we think

Public service experience through a new lens.

Learn how public service agencies can reframe experiences in the changing context of people's lives.

Serving all students: A study of learner mindsets

Accenture research has identified six learner segments. Explore the segments and how colleges and universities can better serve them.

Accenture Life Trends 2024

The visible and invisible mediators between people and their world are changing.

Technology Vision 2023: When Atoms meet Bits

Public service as a career of choice, our leaders, samantha fisher.

Jessica Roy

James Surgeon

Careers at Credo

Join Our Team

Join our mission to impact the success of students nationwide.

Open Positions

Architectural intern.

Location: Whitsett, North Carolina or De Pere, Wisconsin.

Get To Know Us

Credo is a dedicated team building a culture of innovation, vibrance, and inclusivity. We believe the limitless potential of our team and in higher education.

• About Credo
• Meet Our Team

Life at Credo

Credo’s culture promotes work/life balance, celebrates diversity, and offers professional development opportunities throughout the year.

Benefits and Perks

Health, dental, vision and disability coverage.

Comprehensive plans to suit your needs

Invest in your future

Flexible PTO

Time off when you need it

Health savings account

Includes annual HSA contributions

Personal and professional growth

Become a lifelong learner

Employee assistance program

Additional support as you need it

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

As we live out our mission to help higher education thrive in order to impact the success of students, Credo seeks to nurture a vibrant, inclusive workplace where the limitless potential of our team and our partners is honored, valued, and elevated to accomplish great things.

• We are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion across the intersections of age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical and mental ability, and background.
• We believe diversity in the workplace helps us grow stronger as a company and positions our team and our partners to have an increasingly lasting, positive impact on learners, leaders, and communities.

We Embody Our Values

Courageous leadership.

Credo speaks truth with courage, confronting challenges with grace and pushing ourselves and our clients toward growth and innovation.

Heartfelt Service

Credo believes that caring and responsible service is at the heart of our work and that rich and long-term relationships grow from this value.

Limitless Potential

Credo celebrates the limitless potential of people by empowering them to bring themselves authentically into the spaces in which they learn, work, and live.

Risk with Trust

Learning in action.

Credo enters interactions with the humility of constant learners, continuously applying research and data to catalyze action and amplify results.

Ethical Stewardship

Credo models ethical accountability through careful stewardship of the funds invested in us by trusting clients, ensuring the financial health of the firm in service of our mission.

McKinsey is committed to improving lifelong learning opportunities and outcomes around the globe by collaborating with clients on their top-of-mind issues while always keeping equity at the forefront. Our teams include former teachers, institutional leaders, policymakers, and researchers with deep expertise across all levels of education from early childhood and K-12, to higher education and workforce development.

We serve education institutions and systems, governments, philanthropists, investors, service providers, and vocational training providers, complementing our hands-on work with original research to allow us to better understand the sector’s toughest challenges, and build new capabilities to help solve them.

How we help clients

Early childhood education and K-12 school systems

Higher education

Workforce development

Investors, philanthropists, and service and technology providers

Strategy and implementation, organizational and performance transformation, education venture building, partnerships and mergers, examples of our work.

Launching a large-scale online learning initiative for a leading public university system

Partnering with UNESCO to help school systems respond to COVID-19

Good to great transformation for a flagship state university

Featured insights.

How COVID-19 caused a global learning crisis

COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning

How to transform higher-education institutions for the long term

Reimagining higher education in the United States

Jake Bryant

Partnerseattle.

Wan-Lae Cochran

Partnerwashington dc.

Felipe Child

Partnerbogotá.

Senior Knowledge ExpertBay Area

Senior PartnerMiami

Jonathan Law

Senior partner.

PartnerKuala Lumpur

Duwain Pinder

Partnerohio - columbus.

Jimmy Sarakatsannis

Senior partnerwashington dc.

Dirk Schmautzer

Partnerdubai.

McKinsey’s work for social sector, healthcare, and public entities

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Higher Education Consulting

Innovative strategies to help your institution grow and thrive academically, operationally, and financially, we’ll help you strengthen your financial position .

Bridging Healthcare and Higher Education with a broader perspective, Kaufman Hall offers leaders a range of expertise and solutions to optimize performance and organizational decision making and sustained financial performance. We’ve helped colleges, universities, academic medical centers, schools of nursing, and allied health across the nation with plans to adjust to higher education’s rapidly changing environment.

Connect with Our Consulting Team

Grow and diversify revenues through online and non-traditional academic programs.

Besides facilitating multi-year institutional strategic plans, we help universities examine current models and explore opportunities to diversify curricula, modalities, and revenues, such as through online and open learning and corporate partnerships. Attracting new students through innovative programs and alternative revenue sources can help grow institutions’ financial positions over time.

Aligning People, Processes, and Information to Drive Transformative Change

Kaufman Hall partners with institutions and administrative units to assess and design an optimized future state administrative model, including organizational design, staffing numbers, operating models, and leading practice business processes. We support our clients in breaking down silos, maximizing collaboration, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and minimizing duplication of efforts.

Structure Financial Processes for Optimal Financial Decision Making

We have assessed current practices for resource deployment across the strategic planning, financial planning, capital planning and budgeting, operating budget, and year-end forecasting processes and recommended scope, participants, governance, data requirements, timing, and technical support for each. We take a holistic approach that clearly defines the points of integration between each financial process to establish a single decision-making framework that is both effective and efficient.

Leverage Creative Partnerships to Strengthen Business Models

We believe that every transaction or partnership is premised on a broader underlying strategy. We work with you to understand your objectives and ensure that your mission, vision, and values guide your journey toward finding the right partner. Our team delivers everything from board education, development of key terms and negotiation of agreements, to assisting in the due diligence process and supporting the transaction close.

There are approximately 4,700 degree granting higher education institutions in the U.S., of which approximately two-thirds are four-year institutions. These institutions provide education for over 21 million students, or approximately 5 percent of the U.S. population. Over the last decade, due to technological transformation as well as a changing overall job market, Higher Education institutions are facing unprecedented challenges to their traditional business models. This is playing out with a backdrop of aging facilities, evolving physical plant needs and growing pressures on historic funding sources.

We provide advisory services related to how real estate assets could be owned and/or developed. If appropriate, we will provide transaction services related for new real estate development projects and the monetization of existing core and non-core real estate holdings.

Managing Director

Contact Expert

Senior Vice President

Vice President

Listen to higher education sector leaders from Fitch Ratings, Moody’s Investors Service, and S&P Global Ratings for an in-depth conversation on trends affecting rating actions in higher education today.

Financial Literacy: A Leadership Prerequisite

Do You Really Know Your Institution’s Financial Position?

Takeaways from Our Conversation with the Rating Agencies on the Outlook for Higher Education

Beyond the Outlooks: Our Second Annual Conversation with the Rating Agencies Webinar

Kaufman Hall offers college and university leaders a range of resources and solutions to optimize performance and organizational decision making and sustained financial performance.

Do you have questions about our products, consulting services, or overall solutions?

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Advancing inclusive excellence in the higher education workforce

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ENRICH MINDS AND SHAPE FUTURES. EXPLORE HIGHER ED JOBS.

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• Search tens of thousands of faculty, staff, and executive positions
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• Create a profile and upload your resume/CV for increased visibility to recruiters
• Access free career resources, including articles and eBooks

ARE YOU AN EMPLOYER?

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Are you reaching qualified professionals? Do you have strategies for supporting an equitable workplace? Leverage HERC to:

• Reach talented and diverse candidates on HERCJobs.org, our job board and career resources website, that we promote using inclusive outreach methods
• Access tools and a community of practice to reduce bias in your recruitment, selection, and retention efforts

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The Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC) is a nonprofit consortium committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the higher education workforce. With over 550 colleges, universities, hospitals, research labs, government agencies, and related organizations, HERC works to ensure member institutions are sites of belonging, where all faculty and staff can thrive. HERC provides resources, networking, and outreach programs to attract, hire, and retain a diverse and qualified workforce.

We believe an inclusive higher education workforce depends on systemic change best achieved through institutional collaboration, the development of innovative tools that can be shared and leveraged, and an engaged network of committed faculty and staff.

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Advisory Solution Consultant-Higher Education

• Chicago / United States

Company Description

At ServiceNow, our technology makes the world work for everyone, and our people make it possible. We move fast because the world can’t wait, and we innovate in ways no one else can for our customers and communities. By joining ServiceNow, you are part of an ambitious team of change makers who have a restless curiosity and a drive for ingenuity. We know that your best work happens when you live your best life and share your unique talents, so we do everything we can to make that possible. We dream big together, supporting each other to make our individual and collective dreams come true. The future is ours, and it starts with you. 

With more than 7,700+ customers, we serve approximately 85% of the Fortune 500®, and we're proud to be one of FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For® and World's Most Admired Companies™.

Learn more on Life at Now blog and hear from our employees about their experiences working at ServiceNow.

Unsure if you meet all the qualifications of a job description but are deeply excited about the role? We still encourage you to apply! At ServiceNow, we are committed to creating an inclusive environment where all voices are heard, valued, and respected. We welcome all candidates, including individuals from non-traditional, varied backgrounds, that might not come from a typical path connected to this role. We believe skills and experience are transferrable, and the desire to dream big makes for great candidates.

Job Description

As a member of our Higher Education Solution Consulting team, you will have a major impact on our future success by supporting [Employee Experience, Customer Workflow, ITX] Solution Sales. You will guide revenue for one of our products with the support and partnership of Sales, Product Management, and the executive team. This is a hands-on technical consultant who can go wide and deep on solution delivery and solution positioning during sales cycles.

What you get to do in this role:

The Solution Consultant is a technical consultant with the advanced ability to develop, position and provide product-specific solutions during sales cycles while achieving quarterly and annual sales goals for an assigned territory.

• Support product sales as a technical and domain expert of a client-facing sales team
• Lead discovery workshops to determine customers' challenges and give product demonstrations to align our solution with customer needs
• Answer product feature and technical questions from customers, channel partners and ServiceNow colleagues
• Provide feedback to product management about product enhancements that can address customer needs and provide additional value
• Share and learn best practices and re-usable assets with other Solution Consultants to enhance the quality and efficiency of the team
• Stay current on competitive analysis and market differentiation
• Support marketing events including executive briefings, conferences, user groups, and trade shows

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you have:

• 7+ years of pre-sales solution consulting or sales engineering experience
• Proficiency with the ServiceNow platform or technical expertise with cloud software solutions
• Higher Education Solution Software sales
• Experience working collaboratively with product management, product marketing, partners, and professional services
• Territory management skills, including pipeline building and working with Sales counterpart to guide execution excellence
• Travel, as necessary

Additional Information

ServiceNow is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status or any other category protected by law.

At ServiceNow, we lead with flexibility and trust in our distributed world of work. Click here to learn about our work personas: flexible, remote and required-in-office.

If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are limited in the ability or unable to access or use this online application process and need an alternative method for applying, you may contact us at [email protected]  for assistance.

For positions requiring access to technical data subject to export control regulations, including Export Administration Regulations (EAR), ServiceNow may have to obtain export licensing approval from the U.S. Government for certain individuals. All employment is contingent upon ServiceNow obtaining any export license or other approval that may be required by the U.S. Government.

Please Note: Fraudulent job postings/job scams are increasingly common. Click here to learn what to watch out for and how to protect yourself. All genuine ServiceNow job postings can be found through the ServiceNow Careers site .

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