After bumpy start, ASU-backed university network picks up pace

If timing is everything, Cintana Education has had a tough run of it.

The launch of the for-profit company, which establishes and supports private universities around the world, was initially delayed by the Covid pandemic, opening belatedly in 2021.

The following year, it established a new university in Ukraine, American University Kyiv, holding an opening ceremony on 4 February. Less than three weeks later, Russia invaded the country.

“Getting that university up and running during the war was quite challenging, but now there are several hundred students at the university,” said Rick Shangraw, Cintana’s president. “It’s doing well.”

Despite the company’s bad luck in terms of timing, Cintana – which was set up in collaboration with Arizona State University (ASU) – is beginning to make a mark. In around four years, it has secured 28 university partners, including some institutions launched from scratch, such as the one in Kyiv and the American University of Technology in Tashkent, where Professor Shangraw is now founding president.

What the challenges of the past few years have taught him is the importance of being “incredibly flexible”.

While the Kyiv institution initially opened online before transitioning to in-person classes, given the increase in Russian attacks on Ukraine in recent months, the challenge of running a campus with a limited electricity supply and the difficulties getting faculty to work in a war zone, Professor Shangraw said it was now planning to return to a hybrid model. 

In Tashkent, a different kind of flexibility is required. “We were lucky, we got a presidential decree to start the university,” he said, explaining that this was granted in July 2024, under the agreement that it would open in autumn. However, the licence to operate wasn’t granted until September. 

“We only had a couple weeks to actually market the university,” he said. Today, there are 72 students at the institution, enrolled across two undergraduate programmes: software engineering and international trade. The university plans to launch graduate programmes and four more undergraduate courses in 2025.

Cintana was founded by Douglas Becker, founder of Laureate Education, in collaboration with ASU – a public university known as a giant of online education – and its president, Michael Crow.

Mr Becker has spoken of hoping to establish a network of 50 to 100 universities supporting more than 1 million students, with the Egyptian government-founded Galala University, one of a new model of national universities, also among its new “start-up” institutions.

Cintana is also working with existing institutions aiming to significantly grow their scale, with the latter group including Istanbul Bilgi University, Almaty Management University in Kazakhstan and NorthCap University in India.

Professor Shangraw spoke to Times Higher Education at a conference in Delhi, where new institutions are all the rage, with Australian universities having already opened branch campuses and British institutions set to follow.

However, he said, Cintana has no plans to start opening new campuses in the world’s most populous country, where for-profit universities are restricted. Instead, the focus is on partnering with India’s booming private university sector. 

“Our model today, which is working well, is to embed a college within an Indian university, so we call it an international college model,” he explained. 

One of the key ingredients that is likely to convince institutions in countries like India to work with Cintana is its partnership with ASU, which founded the company with Douglas Becker, founder of for-profit university company Laureate Education.

Under the “international college model”, students at Indian universities can take dual degrees, allowing them to spend the second half of their studies in Arizona. “It’s something that I think the Indian market is really interested in because you sort of get the best of both worlds,” he said, including, crucially, Indian tuition rates for the first half of the degree programme. 

“It has this added advantage of not only being able to come to the States but then being able to stay in the States on a work visa,” he said. 

Cintana partners also have access to ASU curricula and content.

Professor Shangraw was previously the chief executive of ASU Enterprise Partners, an organisation that focuses on raising funds for ASU. He still holds a number of positions at the university, including as a professor of practice in the institution’s School of Public Affairs. 

Today, being on the road much more has shone a light on the varying attitudes towards universities in different parts of the world. 

“We’re in an unfortunate situation now in the United States where there’s some people questioning the value of higher education,” he reflected. “You don’t see that in Ukraine. You don’t see that in Uzbekistan.

“I think people understand the value of higher education and they’re willing to make investments in higher education.”

However, continuing to convince people about that value proposition is one of the biggest challenges universities will face in the future, he believed.

“Many people associate quality with cost. You know, to go to a high-quality university you have to pay a lot more money,” he said. 

“Quite frankly, in the States, there has been a little bit of this misalignment where the cost has reached such a high level in some universities that the students are questioning that value proposition.

“As we go around the world, I want to make sure that we have a value proposition that students see as continuing to be important for their future and that employers see is of value in terms of getting those students to come into their organisations.”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com