Yet Another New Normal

A recent INSEAD newsletter (3 March 2016) asks, "Is political turmoil the new normal?" With an increasingly weird election cycle in the U.S., a threatened Brexit vote coming up in the U.K., and rising nativist parties in France, the U.K. and the U.S., one could conclude that global politics are anything but stable. Joined with an almost decade-long run of economic volatility (anyone watching the U.S. stock market over the past three months?), political instability inside global powers has several implications for international schools:

• Current conversions will be unpredictable, with wild swings likely in the near term;
• Expat flows will swing as wildly as currency, driven as much by the business climate engendered by political rhetoric as financial conditions;
• School payrolls, historically fixed once teacher contracts are signed, will be out of sync with constantly variable enrollment patterns;
• Long-term capital "bets" on plant and equipment will seem increasingly risky; and
• There are no "safe havens", either for schools or for businesses and the people they employ.

We all will be struggling to come to terms with what this means for the industry of private, international education and for individual schools.