Higher education was built for a world that has already moved on.
Nariway is an independent research firm focused on education and work. It studies how the two fit together and what the institutions between them should become.
It is made for deans, provosts, career-services and employer-relations teams, as well as the employers who hire their graduates.
The name comes from the Japanese word nariwai, which combines the characters for life and work into one idea. English has no word for it, and neither do the institutions built around work. They still treat a person's job and the rest of their life as two separate things.
The research rests on several hundred entries tracing where the practices, words, and systems of working life came from. Together they show how recent the present arrangement is, and how much of it was put together by particular people at particular moments. What one generation built, another can build differently.
The collection is organized into four categories.
The collection traces how the present arrangement was built. The studies measure what it is becoming. Each one is first-hand research into parts of higher education that no one has counted before.
Dr. Alina Okun is an independent researcher and analyst working at the intersection of the future of work and higher education. She spent two decades in corporate finance, starting at Arthur Andersen and continuing through UBS, tech startups, and angel investing, before turning to research on how 150 years of inherited practice shaped the way whole populations think about their working lives, and on what the institutions between education and work need to become next.
She has conducted executive interviews on the future of work, published peer-reviewed research in the International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, and co-authored two bestselling books. She is based in the New York metro area.