According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025. This implies that by-large, our current education system has yet to develop the skills necessary to succeed in this Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world. As per the same report, among the top 10 skills of 2025 are critical thinking and analysis, leadership and social influence, and resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility. Given this, the need for experiential learning – the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience – is even more pressing. This is exactly  what international education provides.

As students fly out to other countries to study, they are exposed to other cultures and experience living independently and away from home. They learn how to adapt, take initiative, and build resilience. This is what international education offers – an opportunity to hone the top skills of 2025 inside and outside the classroom. As one of Thames’ sayings goes, “The world is your classroom.” Despite this undeniable need for international education, this remains largely inaccessible due to the high investment necessary to avail it.

This opportunity is what Thames International School has been providing to Filipino undergraduate and graduate students for more than 20 years. Through Thames’ Twinning Program – where students study 2 years in the Philippines, finish their degrees in 1-2 years in the UK, Singapore, or Australia, and garner a foreign diploma – 150 students have been prepared for a VUCA world and have successfully finished foreign degrees in business, entrepreneurship, and the arts. As the pandemic comes to an end and borders reopen, Thames is excited to offer the Twinning Program to more students and expand its country coverage.

Welcoming the next academic year in just a few months, Thames has partnered with its first ever university in the United States – the University of North Carolina in Pembroke (UNCP). UNCP is a part of the University of North Carolina (UNC) System, a high-ranking public university system, which includes prominent universities like UNC Charlotte and UNC Chapel Hill. The latter is home to the basketball legend Michael Jordan who finished college there.

Owing to the similarities in the education system of the US and the Philippines, and the fervent desire of both institutions to provide accessible international education; they are offering partial scholarship to 41 undergraduate degree programs across STEM, business, music and the arts, and humanities and social sciences at 20% of the cost of a typical undergraduate program in the US. This will cost just as much as an SUV in the Philippines for a more worthwhile investment – our children’s future!