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Which countries have restructured professional education and what institutions led the changes?
Executive summary
Major international reporting and policy reviews in 2025 document widespread shifts in professional and tertiary education, with the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2025 and Trends Shaping Education 2025 identifying structural reorientation toward skills, digital competence and closer labour‑market links [1] [2]. European Union initiatives — the Union of Skills Package and the European Education Area agenda — are cited as driving a coordinated restructuring across many EU member states [3] [4].
1. OECD frames the global story: tertiary focus and system restructuring
The OECD’s Education at a Glance 2025 places a special emphasis on tertiary education and presents cross‑country data showing how nations are restructuring higher education to improve completion, labour‑market alignment and skill outcomes; the full report was produced under an OECD team led by Abel Schumann and underscores that indicators can help governments re‑shape systems [1]. Complementing that, the OECD’s Trends Shaping Education 2025 presents megatrends — AI, digital tech, labour‑market change and inequality — that are prompting countries to redesign professional and vocational pathways to be more future‑proof [2].
2. European Union: coordinated policy leadership and institutional action
From a European perspective, the EU has not left restructuring to individual universities: the College of Commissioners adopted the Union of Skills Package in March 2025 (including a Basic Skills Action Plan and a Strategic STEM Plan) and the European Education Area agenda set targets like raising lifelong learning participation to 25% by 2025, signalling an EU‑level institutional push to reconfigure curricula, teacher development and cross‑border recognition [3] [4]. The 2025 European Education and Skills Summit documents public‑private partnerships and networks — for example Katapult and Science on Stage Europe — as actors bridging education to industry and teacher professional development [5].
3. National reforms and actors referenced in reporting
Reporting in the set of sources highlights that governments and ministries are core drivers of restructuring: the EU Commission and College of Commissioners are explicit institutional leaders for European reform [3] [4], while the OECD operates as the analytics and policy adviser shaping comparative diagnosis and recommendations [1] [2]. Specific national examples in these sources are limited — for instance, the Philippines is described in secondary reporting as pursuing major reforms and connectivity targets for schools (DepEd aims to connect all public schools to the internet by end‑2025), but this item comes from a non‑OECD outlet in the selection and is framed as reporting rather than an OECD analysis [6].
4. United States: regulatory and accrediting institutions driving change
U.S. restructurings in professional and postsecondary education show institutional leadership from federal agencies and Congress: the U.S. Department of Education set seven priorities under FIPSE for FY2025 — including encouraging accreditation reform and supporting creation of new accrediting agencies — and engaged in negotiated rulemaking for Title IV programs, indicating federal policy and accreditors as central levers of change [7] [8]. Legislative proposals such as the Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act illustrate Congress’s role in reshaping accreditation and fiscal accountability [9].
5. Think tanks, universities and conferences as change agents
Think tanks and research centres — from Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research to policy outfits like AEI and ExcelinEd — are prominently reported as influencing reform agendas through research, policy design and advocacy, while major conferences (SHEEO Higher Education Policy Conference, AACTE meetings) serve as loci where institutional leaders and states share and scale reforms, positioning these actors as secondary but influential institutional drivers [10] [11] [12].
6. What the available sources don’t say (and why that matters)
The provided materials do not offer a comprehensive, country‑by‑country list of who led professional education restructurings (for many nations, specific ministries, universities or private institutions leading reforms are not named in these snippets), so a definitive catalogue of "which countries and which institutions" is not present in current reporting (not found in current reporting). Nor do these sources present systematic evaluation of outcomes for every reform referenced; OECD indicators are meant to inform policy but do not, in themselves, attribute success to any single institution [1].
7. How to interpret institutional “leadership” in restructuring
Institutional leadership appears in three patterns in these sources: [13] supranational policy leadership — EU bodies and OECD set agendas and targets [3] [1]; [14] national governmental leadership — ministries and departments (e.g., DepEd in the Philippines, the U.S. Department of Education) set reforms and regulatory priorities [6] [7]; and [15] research, accreditation, and convening institutions (universities, think tanks, accrediting bodies and conferences) that translate policy into practice or press for change [10] [11] [7]. Each has different levers and incentives — political, economic, reputational — that shape the direction and pace of restructuring.
If you want, I can compile from these sources a country‑by‑country table showing which organizations are explicitly mentioned as reform leaders in the available reporting and flag gaps where sources are silent.