David Finegold, President and Founder, The National Transfer Network and Former president, Chatham University

David Finegold has more than 35 years of higher education experience, most recently as president of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He is the founder of the National College Transfer Network, a nonprofit designed to help US community college students identify and transfer successfully to their best-fit public or private universities.

Dr Finegold has worked with governments around the world on the design of education and training systems and how they relate to work organization and economic performance. He developed the concepts of “low-skill equilibrium” and “high-skill ecosystems”. 

David has experience in higher education as a researcher, author, professor, academic dean, senior vice president, chief academic officer, and president.  He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1985, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, from which he received his DPhil in Politics in 1992. A renowned scholar and educational innovator, Dr. Finegold has dedicated his career to education reform, the design of high-performance organizations, and extensive comparative research on education and skill-creation systems from around the world. He began his career as a senior research fellow in the Centre for Education and Industry at Warwick University in England. He then spent four years as a social scientist for the Institute on Education and Training, a division of the RAND Corporation dedicated to improving worldwide education policy and decision-making.