Nithya Vaduganathan
Managing Director & Partner
Boston
Nithya Vaduganathan is a BCG Fellow and a core member of Boston Consulting Group’s Education, Employment, and Welfare leadership team and the Public Sector practice. Before coming to the Boston office, Nithya worked in the Chicago, San Francisco, and Houston offices. She has deep experience across the entire education value chain, including early education, K-12, higher education, and education technology. Nithya has functional expertise in growth strategy, strategic planning, Smart Simplicity, agile operating models, shared services, organizational redesign, and change management.
Within higher education and education technology, Nithya has deep expertise on student success strategies and the role of digital learning. She has supported higher-education institutions with growth strategy, operating model and organizational redesign, and merger support. She has helped publishers and ed tech firms understand key market trends and reimagine their operating models in the face of digital disruption.
Nithya coleads BCG’s education work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has involved developing a model for large-scale transformation in higher education, analyzing the ROI of digital learning and student success interventions (advising, developmental education and emergency financial aid), and conducting segmentation and dissemination work. Most recently, Nithya coauthored the report Making Digital Learning Work, which highlights findings on the return of investment of digital learning across six case study institutions.
Nithya’s early education and K-12 experience includes strategic planning and organizational redesign. She has helped the Dallas and New Orleans school systems develop strategic plans for scaling personalized learning. Nithya co-led the strategic plan development and implementation support for the Memphis City-Shelby County schools merger, which led to identifying more than $100 million in efficiencies for the combined district, and she helped develop a birth-to-third-grade strategy for that district. In addition, Nithya supported rebuilding the K-12 system in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.
New research from BCG and Harvard Business School's Project on Managing the Future of Work suggests how companies can make the most of new talent models.
Digital talent platforms have matured, offering on-demand access to highly skilled workers. Given the talent problem posed by demographic changes, rapid automation, and digital transformation (and intensified by COVID-19), many companies are using digital platforms to hire gig workers with the capabilities they require—but in an ad hoc way. Now they need to get strategic about it.
Postsecondary institutions are facing calls for accountability. Smart academic advising reforms can boost graduation rates—without breaking the bank.
How can the use of digital technologies in postsecondary education impact students’ access to education, student outcomes, and the return on investment for students and institutions? What are the biggest challenges for an institution seeking to implement high-quality digital learning opportunities? What promising practices enable an institution to achieve impact at a larger scale?
Promising trends, some decades in the making, are converging to make a transformation of the US education system possible. Businesspeople have a major role to play.
Business leaders should help transform the US education system, from preschool through grade 12. BCG, Harvard Business School, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation identify effective strategies.
