Bridget Burns, Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance
The University Innovation Alliance (UIA) is a consortium of 11 public research universities committed to increasing the number and diversity of college graduates. Its members’ commitment to innovate together and fully share what they learn to improve student success makes it a unique example of higher education collaboration.
The founding members are Arizona State University, Georgia State University, Iowa State University, Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Oregon State University, Purdue University, University of California at Riverside, University of Central Florida, University of Kansas, and University of Texas at Austin. Financial support for the Alliance is provided by several private foundations.
I recently interviewed Bridget Burns, UIA’s Executive Director, about the Alliance’s ongoing work.
When it launched in 2014, UIA set goals for increasing the graduation of students of color, first-generation students and low-income students. Are you on track to reach your numbers, or are they being revised?
In 2014, we committed to collectively producing an additional 68,000 high-quality graduates (beyond the current trajectory) by 2024. At least half of those graduates would be low-income. We’re poised to surpass that goal with the class of 2020. Over the past six years, our campuses have worked incredibly hard to redesign themselves around student success. In the process they’ve increased low-income graduates by 32%, and graduates of color by 56%. We’re not satisfied with this progress; instead, we want to build on our momentum and potentially add new partners who share our ambition, commitment to collaboration, transparency, and passion for student success innovation.
Which policies have had the greatest impact in this effort?
UIA didn’t begin with the premise that policymakers had to force institutions to do things. Our campuses’ own appetite for innovation vastly exceeds the pace of policy. Our last project had 11 universities scaling chatbots and sharing what they learned to serve students better. Before that, we launched a project with employers to reimagine and create a 21st century transition, or “handoff” between college and career.
Proactive advising is another example. Advisors now play offense instead of defense. As soon as students hit certain thresholds showing they may be in trouble, advisors reach out to them before they ask for help. Predictive analytics has also been important to identify when students need extra support or intervention. Offering completion grants — sometimes as small as $1,000 — during students’ final years has helped many students cross the graduation finish line.
We ask hard questions of ourselves. How might we be the problem? What can we solve only by working together?
How do you disseminate effective policies among the members?
We build real relationships across our campuses through thoughtfully designed convenings, increased capacity building, and work that’s always designed around shared challenges and goals. The professionals on our campuses set the agenda. They identify the next ambitious project, and we help secure seed funding and resources to get them out of the starting blocks and amplify the great things they are doing for students.
We believe in sharing what we learn from failure. You only share hard things with those who’ve earned the right to hear them (inspired by Brene Brown)- so we are very intentional about protecting the trust between our campuses.
You feature five policies as particularly important – predictive analytics, UIA fellows, proactive advising, completion grants, and college-to-career pathways. Do these five constitute the core of UIA best practices?
Those are the first five innovations we scaled across the Alliance. We also followed up with Chatbots in year five. But we don’t view any of them as one-size-fits-all solutions. Member schools take guidance from one another, but they don’t simply copy/paste another institution’s solution. The key is to work closely within a trusting community of practice where you share what isn’t working, ask hard questions, and get the help you need from someone one step ahead of you.
Are there plans to expand membership in the UIA?
Our board wants to impact the lives of far more students. To do that, it likely means expanding our network. We’re talking through what expansion might mean, and look forward to sharing more on that soon.
To what extent has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your operations and timeline?
It hasn’t affected our timeline, but it did make our work more relevant than ever. For example, when the pandemic hit, we knew we’d see the need for “emergency aid” increase among our students.
A key UIA initiative has been deployment of completion grants — emergency aid for students who are near graduation but face relatively small financial challenges threatening their ability to persist and graduate. Each UIA institution has a completion grant team and a process for identifying students who have a financial need and providing them with “micro grants” to ensure they can complete their degree. In the last three years—prior to the pandemic—our institutions awarded nearly 3,000 students with completion grant aid. Over 80% of all grantees over the last three semesters have either graduated or are on track to graduate.
So, when COVID-19 hit, we already had the muscle in place to support students quickly. In the last month we’ve raised and awarded $350,000 in flexible emergency grants for our students. Even before this crisis, thousands of low-income students, otherwise in good academic standing, were at risk of not graduating because of outstanding expenses of $1,000 or less. It’s a challenge that will only grow as the effects of COVID-19 continue.
We’re also in the process of raising funds to support virtual, paid internships for the 2020 graduating class, whose work plans have been disrupted by COVID-19. Our goal is to provide a bridge between college and careers for students; virtual internships can provide meaningful work-based experience and ensure they’re prepared for their first job.
Have the members collaborated in any unique way in their response to the pandemic?
They’ve been sharing solutions in real time, offering digital resources and support for each other, and we’ve been working to raise funds for vulnerable students as well as work to create the virtual paid internships.
We see incredible need in this moment — ranging from plane tickets home to wifi hotspots, from tablets to places to live (if dorms are no longer an option). Given our previous work on emergency grants, we’re able to quickly deploy proven solutions to support our students in this difficult moment. Prior to the pandemic, we were developing a playbook for other institutions; and, of course, our learnings from this unprecedented moment will be part of what we share.
