The University Innovation Alliance, a collection of eleven prominent research universities throughout the country, are working together to reach an ambitious goal of graduating an additional 68,000 low-income undergraduates by the year 2025, and according to data released this week, they are on track to fulfill their hope. At the universities, the rate of low-income graduates has increased nearly 25% in the past three years.
Bridget Burns, UIA’s executive director, said the results indicated collaboration and dialogue between the participating universities was helping them achieve their goals.
“That’s the biggest value of being a part of this group, because everyone has friends that they can call,” she said, noting overburdened administrators in the Alliance have an opportunity to reach out to other school leaders who may have previously dealt with similar challenges. “It’s one of the most valuable [deliverables] of the Alliance.”
From Oregon State University to Arizona State University, and the University of Kansas all the way to Georgia State University and the University of Central Florida, the alliance represents a broad swath of institutions around the country. Many of the participating institutions work with first-generation students or students from lower-income backgrounds. The UIA launched three years ago, and has increased the number of total undergraduate degrees from 79,170 to 86,436. Burns said the institutions benefit from cross-collaboration at off-the-record sharing sessions, where representatives from institutions can frankly discuss innovations and challenges they have encountered on their own campuses. To date, there have been seven such conferences.
However, Burns said the ability to measure the group’s progress in comparison to other universities throughout the nation was stymied by the lack of a federal database on Pell grant recipients, which is often used as an indication of the percentage of students on campus from a low-income background. Burns hopes the willingness for the eleven institutions involved in the UIA to share data voluntarily would serve as a bellwether and inspiration for other schools.
“We think it’s important to model what the industry needs to see more of,” she said. “I think it’s happening more and more.”
Burns also noted that the UIA was planning additional initiatives, including new research funded with a $8.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education that will be focused on the efficacy of proactive advising. Burns said the research on the subject was sparing, and the UIA hoped to work with its institutions in order to accumulate further evidence and when and how advisors should intervene with low-income students, and what the outcomes of those interventions would be. Burns said the collaborative aspect the universities brought to each challenge made it easier for administrators in the UIA, as well as industry-wide, to benefit.
“Overburdened administrators don’t have time to investigate every single option, and they are looking for which ideas, projects or innovations are worth their energy, because they have limited resources and limited time,” she said. “We’re giving people shortcuts on what to do and how to move quickly.”
In April of next year, the Alliance will also host a meeting of representatives for colleges and universities both in and out of the UIA, which would offer institutions not involved as a participating member of the Alliance an understanding of the methods and practices that have worked for those schools who have been members. Burns reiterated the importance of offering time-taxed administrators clarifying and concrete ideas on how to transform campuses into places where students had a greater chance for success, and she also expressed hope that the meeting could act as a venue for other institutions to develop partnerships similar to the UIA.
Burns noted that many were skeptical that the UIA would work when it was initially launched, and she hoped the success the Alliance had seen thus far could be taken as a positive sign that collaborative measures between institutions could be beneficial for all, and would become all the more necessary in the face of the broader challenges facing the industry.
“The message is not that we’re so great, and that we figured it out,” Burns said. “The message is that anyone can do this. We hope it inspires others people to try and take up this work.”