The impact of higher educational institutions on Asian economies and business landscape is hard to overstate. Ask almost any CEO or startup founder in Asia where they studied, and the list of answers is surprisingly short.
NUS, Tsinghua, the IITs, Tokyo, Seoul National. These campuses have become the place where several of the region’s future business leaders get their start.
A good university provides students with much more than a degree. It gives them a network of fellow students who will in the future become co-founders, investors and clients. It puts them in labs and incubators where an idea can turn into a real company.
And it exposes them to people from other countries and backgrounds, which matters a lot when your business will probably sell, hire and raise money across borders.
The scale of the change is difficult to miss. Asia now has 565 universities in the QS World University Rankings 2026, more than Europe, the Americas, Africa or Oceania. In India, the number of students in higher education rose from 3.42 crore in 2014-15 to 4.50 crore in 2023-24. Behind that jump are millions of young people, many of them the first in their families to go to college, who now have a shot at careers their parents couldn’t have imagined.
That’s where economic growth really comes from. Every extra graduate is another engineer, analyst, manager or entrepreneur adding to the economy. Governments have noticed, which is why so many across the region keep pouring money into universities and research.
None of this happens overnight, of course. Quality still varies a lot from one institution to the next, and plenty of graduates struggle to find good jobs. But the direction is clear. The people who will run Asia’s companies and shape its policies over the next twenty years are sitting in lecture halls right now, and the universities teaching them will have a big say in how the region’s story turns out.
In the same vein the current edition of CEOInsightsAsia magazine highlights some of Asia’s top alumni leaders from distinguished countries from across the Asian region.
Read more about them and their success stories in the current magazine edition.
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