2013-2019

First Woman President

Kerry Healey made history in 2013 as Babson College’s first woman president. After leading Babson into its Centennial year, Healey will step down from her historic post in June 2019 at the end of her second term.

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“At a time of great disruption in higher education, Kerry Healey has strengthened and expanded Babson’s programs, increased access and affordability for students, and elevated the College’s profile globally.”

– Marla Capozzi MBA’96, Chair of the Babson College Board of Trustees

Dr. Kerry Healey

Kerry Healey
Dr. Kerry Healey took office as President of Babson in July 2013, following nearly three decades of service in academia, government, and humanitarian work both in the United States and internationally.

Healey is the 13th President of Babson and the first woman to hold this title. Under her leadership, Babson has strengthened its reputation and position as the recognized global leader in entrepreneurship education, consistently ranked the No. 1 undergraduate school and No. 1 MBA program for entrepreneurship, and No. 1 college for international students.

President Healey has worked to expand global access to entrepreneurship education on campus and around the world. She created and launched Babson’s prestigious Global Scholars program, a full-tuition, need-based scholarship for exceptional international students. During her tenure, Babson has expanded its presence in Boston and Miami, and brought free, online entrepreneurship courses to more than 100,000 students in 200 countries and territories worldwide. Through the creation of Babson Connect: Worldwide, the College’s annual entrepreneurship summit, President Healey has coalesced Babson’s global community of 41,000 alumni and friends in 119 countries. Since she took office, alumni participation has increased 100 percent.

Healey has presided over many Babson milestones: welcoming the most diverse and well-qualified students in Babson history, celebrating the historic successes of Babson Athletics, and taking unprecedented steps to enhance higher education access and affordability.

Under Healey’s leadership, Babson is now preparing to commemorate its Centennial in 2019. The College’s Centennial Strategy is focused on preparing entrepreneurs of all kinds to lead in a new way, creating social and economic value simultaneously, and, in doing so, transforming lives, businesses, and communities for the better. To help achieve this vision, Babson is building a campus for its next 100 years. Several major construction projects are currently underway or recently completed, including the new Babson Recreation and Athletics Center, Centennial Park, Babson Commons at Horn Library, and Weissman Foundry.

Prior to Babson, Healey served with distinction as the 70th lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. During that time, she introduced, enacted, and implemented a wide range of policy and legislative initiatives for the Romney-Healey administration, highlighted by a successful bipartisan effort to craft first-in-the-nation healthcare reform legislation.

Healey has led numerous philanthropic initiatives in the United States and abroad. In 2008, she was appointed as a founding member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. State Department’s Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan (PJRA). She also spent more than a decade as a public policy consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice for Cambridge, Mass.-based think tank Abt Associates. She has been a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership.

Healey is a trustee of the American University of Afghanistan and the Prince Mohamad Bin Salman College of Business and Entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum expert network. She serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, and Taubman Center for State and Local Government. Healey is also a member of the advisory council for Concordia and the Junior Achievement USA Board.

Healey holds an AB in government from Harvard College and a PhD in political science and law from Trinity College Dublin.

In May 2018 Healey announced that she would be stepping down as President in June 2019 at the end of her second term.

President Healey