Capstone Education Celebrates 14th Anniversary

Since the celebration continues, please join me in raising a glass of your favorite beverage to Capstone Education, one of Vietnam's premier full-service educational consulting companies. I'm already looking forward to what the next year holds in store for us, our partners, and our clients, as we prepare to celebrate our 15th anniversary.

Warm greetings from Vietnam! Last month, we officially celebrated Capstone Education's 14th birthday at a welcome dinner in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) for colleagues joining our fall StudyGlobal Education Fairs that kicked off the following day. In my remarks, I paraphrased from a 2017 interview with me entitled Capstone Vietnam: Why This Education Entrepreneur Is Excited About Vietnam's Future (I'm still excited!) by mentioning one of the reasons I decided to co-found Capstone after serving for four years as country director of the Institute of International Education in Vietnam. (For the uninitiated, IIE is a US nonprofit best known for its administration of the Fulbright student and scholar program on behalf of the US State Department and, at the time, EducationUSA advising services.)

 
I noted that "While I have spent most of my career as an international educational entrepreneur and while I had a lot of freedom of action in the public and nonprofit sectors, there were always obstacles along the way that I considered to be a waste of my precious time. In short, there are things I wanted to do that could only be done by having my own shop. Being your own boss means that your clients are your bosses. You have more freedom to chart new directions and blaze new trails. This is why Capstone’s business model is unique in the industry." 

Charting new directions and blazing new trails is precisely what my colleagues and I have been doing over the past 14 years with all of the usual ups and downs, including the pandemic. I'm proud of what we've accomplished together with hundreds of students and educational institutions, including maintaining full operations during COVID-19 with no salary reductions or layoffs.

Leading Capstone Education has been a supremely challenging yet richly rewarding experience. While other companies have copied our business model, which is to be expected, proof that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, one drawback of copying, rather than creating or innovating, is that you're always one or two steps behind the competition. While other companies have had to close their doors, Capstone is still here and going strong! 

We look forward to continuing our important work with students and helping them identify best fit institutions at which they will be successful as students and individuals.

Since the celebration continues, please join me in raising a glass of your favorite beverage to Capstone Education, one of Vietnam's premier full-service educational consulting companies. I'm already looking forward to what the next year holds in store for us, our partners, and our clients, as we prepare to celebrate our 15th anniversary.  

In the meantime, here's to another 14 years of Reaching New Heights! Please let me know how we can help you, dear colleagues, recruit (more) Vietnamese and achieve other Vietnam-related institutional goals. 

 
Mark A. Ashwill, Ph.D.
Managing Director & Co-Founder