Education

The year is half over and we can already safely say that it will be another record year of investment in the education-technology sector -- online tutorials and textbooks, cloud-based classrooms, mathematics apps and so forth -- from venture capital firms. Ed-tech entrepreneurs and investors had plenty of reasons to cheer by the end of 2014, considering the level of interest and the amount of money invested in the sector. Investment analysis firm CB Insights tallied up the amount of money that venture capital firms poured into ed-tech in 2014, settling on a then-record figure of US$1.6-billion, up 71 per cent from US$944-million in 2013. This year will be even bigger. CB Insights figures that the first half of 2015 has seen venture capital firms invest a little over US$1.4-billion in ed-tech.

Opinions on independent private colleges and on public universities in our work focus on the systems involved, but we often find that the big decisions for families involve more basic questions: where should children go to school and university, and how to support education and be remembered through legacy gifts? This column looks at the second question, as guidance on this larger context may be more difficult to find online.

Following five years as the University of Toronto’s Dean of Faculty of Arts and Science, Canadian Meric Gertler took the president’s office in November 2013. Since then, he has focused on three priorities: (1) leverage urban location; (2) deepen key international partnerships; and (3) reinvent undergraduate education. I recently caught up with President Gertler to talk about how the university is progressing on those three fronts, particularly the University of Toronto’s affiliation with Chinese partners.