U.S.-Philippines Delegation Visits ASU Tempe campus among UPSKILL Program Launch

The University Design Institute (UDI) welcomed 12 higher education leaders from the Philippines on June 21 and 22 to connect with leaders from Arizona State University.

The trip was part of the USAID’s U.S.-Philippines Partnership for Skills, Innovation, and Lifelong Learning Program, or UPSKILL, which is a multiyear, multimillion-dollar effort to transform higher education on a nationwide scale in the Philippines.

The UPSKILL program is a five-year, roughly $30 million initiative that will bring together multiple U.S. universities, Philippines government agencies and private sector partners to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in higher education institutions through faculty and staff training, program improvements and increasing community outreach and technology transfer, with the funding support of  USAID, or the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The two-day benchmarking mission consisted of engaging sessions facilitated by the University Design Institute and senior leadership from ASU. There were officials from the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), as well as five leaders from Philippine universities. The event focused on many themes including capacity-building for transformation, forging strong corporate partnerships, community engagement, and finding innovative solutions for universities in the Philippines. The delegation explored practical strategies to integrate technology into education, discovered creative ways to tackle modern challenges, and discussed how to build effective collaborations between universities and the communities they serve.

The visit, as well as the larger UPSKILL initiative, comes at a time when the Philippines is focusing on developing deeper global connections across its higher education ecosystem. The country’s Commission on Higher Education, which is the governing body for higher education, has placed an emphasis on strengthening internationalization initiatives of which includes advancing international reputation and visibility of Philippine higher education, and aligning with global standards and practices.

Commission on Higher Education Chairman J. Prospero De Vera III referenced the benchmarking mission in an interview with the Philippines News Agency, saying that he sent Philippine university presidents and CHED officials to Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Arizona State University to seek out programs that can be partnered with or replicated in the Philippines.

The University Design Institute is coordinating UPSKILL’s Higher Education Innovation Leaders Fellowship Program, which launched in May and focuses on closing the gap in access and educational attainment in the Philippines. The Fellowship will train more than 120 higher education leaders across the Philippines over five years. UDI will also lead a transformation accelerator program to develop capacity for community impact in 40 universities; a Design Collaboratory that will act as an evergreen knowledge hub for more than 2,000 higher education institutions; and the development of a new entity that will sustain these projects beyond the five years of this program. ASU, through the University Design Institute, is one of three U.S. universities participating in UPSKILL.

The University Design Institute was established in 2019 to act as a catalyst to higher education worldwide. As ASU is continually recognized as one of the most innovative and transformative universities globally, UDI brings experience from two decades of transformation at ASU to support innovation and new designs at other higher education institutions, systems, and countries to drive social and economic impact through education.  The University Design Institute collaborates with a worldwide network of fellows, policy and design experts to deliver higher education strategy implementation.

To date, the University Design Institute has worked with more than 100 institutions in 24 different countries, including the United States, Mexico, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Ghana, Rwanda, Ethiopia and much more.