Higher Ed Leaders.
Global Strategy.
Real Experience.
Universities have extraordinary people. But complex institutional decisions—particularly those that cross national borders—require dedicated time, comparative experience, and perspectives that cannot always be assembled internally. Cross Borders brings together senior university leaders and locally grounded specialists who have built and led institutions across the world. We help universities evaluate opportunities, navigate complexity, and move from strategic ambition to informed decisions and implementation.
Start a conversation ↗Explore our expertiseWe understand what it takes to make a university work.
International ambition raises practical questions. How will a partnership operate? Who will teach? What will students experience? How will academic quality, institutional identity, and financial sustainability hold together?
Cross Borders brings together senior university leaders with experience across academic affairs, student life, governance, finance, admissions, and international partnerships. We connect strategic decisions with the realities of implementation.
Institutional credibility
University leaders who understand academic governance, faculty, students, and the daily work of implementation.
Global and locally grounded perspective
Colleagues who have worked within host-country institutions and alongside international partners can test a proposal from both perspectives.
Dedicated capacity
A focused team undertakes the interviews, research, and planning while your faculty and administrators continue to run the university.
We Have Built and Run Global Universities and Global Sites
These institutions represent substantive leadership, employment, institution-building, and advisory work across our wider network, including colleagues whose profiles are private. The examples are representative, not exhaustive.
Professional affiliations do not imply institutional endorsement or a Cross Borders client relationship.
From institutional ambition
to practical decisions.
Global Growth &
Transnational Education
Assess where, why, and how to establish an international presence. We help leaders test the strategic case, evaluate partners and entry models, and understand what a sustainable operation will require.
Institution Building
& Transformation
Design the structures that enable an institution to deliver its mission. From new universities to established institutions in transition, we connect governance, academic planning, organisational design, and implementation.
Academic &
Student Experience
Build the conditions in which students and faculty can thrive. We bring academic and student affairs together, with attention to institutional culture, belonging, advising, wellbeing, residential life, and preparation for work.
Education Systems
& Partnerships
Develop collaborations that work across institutional and national boundaries. We help universities, governments, and cultural organisations align their priorities, define shared responsibilities, and turn promising relationships into substantive work.
A peer review for consequential decisions.
A new president can commission a confidential, accreditation-style peer assessment of institutional priorities. A board or project sponsor can ask us to stress-test a proposed campus, partnership, or operating model.
We agree on the question, review the evidence, and listen to faculty, staff, students, and leadership. A constructive red-team review tests assumptions and presents the sponsor with strengths, risks, and decisions to address. This is an advisory review and carries no accreditation authority.
Understand → Assemble → Develop
A Cross Borders engagement lead agrees the scope with your institution and brings the team’s findings together. Faculty and leadership retain responsibility for the decision.
Start with the question.
We listen to your leadership team and clarify the opportunity, the decisions ahead, and the context in which they must be made.
Bring the right experience.
We build a focused team with the institutional, functional, and regional expertise the engagement requires.
Make the next steps clear.
We develop options, explain the tradeoffs, and agree on next steps. When needed, we support implementation with your team.
Global questions.
Institutional realities.
Selected contributions include ongoing advisory work and proposal-stage work.
Planning for expansion into India
Cross Borders supported Deloitte as it advised the University of Western Australia on expansion into India. Our contribution included university operating models, student experience, technology, and planning.
Testing a first-mover opportunity
A U.S. research university was considering a market with no existing U.S. branch campus. At the proposal stage, Cross Borders brought forward three consulting firms as possible collaborators for market research and financial analysis. This gave the university options for combining specialist analysis with academic and regional judgment.
Working across three university partners
Alongside Kearney, we contribute to ongoing work on a higher education institution in development with three university partners. The team is addressing governance, curriculum, operating structures, institutional culture, and the practical demands of implementation.
Assessing international partnerships
Cross Borders is advising a professional school at an Ivy League university on international strategy and partnerships. The work is under way.
Choose how to engage us.
We know both sides of the consulting table. As university leaders, we’ve worked with the major consulting firms from inside the institutions that hired them. Several of us have also worked on the consulting side, including founding partner Kyle Farley through his work with Kearney and Deloitte. That experience helps us understand what university leaders need from an engagement and what consulting teams need to deliver it.
Hire Cross Borders directly
Commission an independent review, campus assessment, or implementation plan. We assemble the team and lead the work.
Include us in a proposal
Ask your preferred consulting firm to name Cross Borders on its bid when you want institutional and regional expertise alongside its analytical team.
Compare potential partners
Ask us to identify and evaluate firms for market research, financial modeling, technology, or larger-scale implementation. We explain relevant working relationships and help you decide which partner fits.
University leaders.
A shared commitment to education.
Led by Kyle Farley, Cross Borders assembles teams around the needs of each engagement. Our network brings together people with complementary expertise and first-hand experience of institutional leadership.
Kyle Farley, Ph.D.
Kyle Farley is the founding and managing partner of Cross Borders Education. He brings more than 20 years of experience inside universities, including leadership roles at Yale, Yale-NUS College, NYU Abu Dhabi, and Schwarzman Scholars at Tsinghua University. He has lived in five countries: the United States, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and China.
Over the past four years, Kyle has advised on higher education strategy, international expansion, and institution building. His consulting work ranges from focused assignments lasting a few months to multi-year engagements. He has worked as a subject matter expert with firms including Kearney and Deloitte, helping university leaders assess where to expand, how to structure partnerships, and what it takes to turn those plans into operating institutions.
Kyle is also co-editing American Higher Education Abroad: Lessons in Culture, Curriculum, and Community, forthcoming from Routledge. The book examines what universities learn when they bring their academic and institutional models into new national and cultural settings.
Kyle holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania.
Contact Kyle ↗LinkedIn ↗Our network
Our public profiles represent part of a network of more than 30 senior leaders and specialists. Some colleagues—including Emiratis and colleagues in India, the United States, and elsewhere—contribute to individual projects without a public profile. We build each team around the institution’s needs.
Our relationships span thousands of university colleagues across more than 50 countries, alongside former students from nearly every country. Built through years of living, learning, and working together, these connections bring local knowledge into each engagement. Where we need new connections, we build them quickly—working alongside people who know the institutions and communities firsthand.
Explore by expertise and regional experience, or combine both filters. Regions reflect professional experience—including leadership, advisory work, research, and institutional partnerships—and are representative, not exhaustive.
Built around the
work you need to do.
We established Cross Borders to bring the experience of university leadership into the decisions that shape higher education. Our work begins with your institution’s mission, ambitions, and constraints.
Many members of our network have worked together in universities. That shared experience helps us bring different perspectives into a coherent team, with a practical understanding of how decisions affect students, faculty, staff, and partners.
Public profiles represent a selection of the wider network. Colleagues contribute in their personal capacities, subject to availability and any employer requirements.
Learning from the institutions we build.
Global universities offer important lessons about academic ambition, local context, institutional culture, and the communities that make a campus work.
These questions inform both our advisory work and a forthcoming edited volume bringing together perspectives from leaders of international institutions.
American Higher Education Abroad: Lessons in Culture, Curriculum, and Community
Practical perspectives on institutional culture, pluralism, and student belonging, drawing on experience at global campuses.
Co-edited by Kyle Farley, Bryan Penprase, and Sara Amjad. Forthcoming from Routledge.
Ask about the book ↗What is your institution working toward?
Whether you are leading a university initiative or advising a university client, we would welcome a conversation about the institutional expertise your work needs.
Contact Kyle Farley
Co-Founder & Managing Partner