Chief Change Officer - #359 Bridget Burns: Breaking the Higher Ed Hunger Games—Part One

Episode Date: May 10, 2025

If higher education feels like the Hunger Games, Dr. Bridget Burns is building the resistance.In Part One, Bridget shares her journey from growing up in rural Montana to becoming CEO of the University Innovation Alliance—a national coalition of public research universities working together (yes, together) to improve outcomes for low-income and first-generation students.She pulls back the curtain on the real problem in academia: a culture of competition, hierarchy, and duplicated failure masked as innovation. Instead, she offers a new model: universities learning from each other, mapping broken processes, and holding themselves accountable to real results. This episode is for anyone tired of hearing that higher ed can’t change—and ready to hear from someone who’s actually changing it.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Out of the Cul-De-Sac: Bridget’s Escape from Rural Isolation“I grew up surrounded by racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Getting out was everything.”From Student Leader to System Architect“At 22, I went from student government to hiring university presidents. That’s when I saw how broken the system really was.”The Problem Isn’t Resistance to Change—It’s Bad Design“No one resists change when it’s their idea. We resist top-down mandates that ignore lived experience.”Why Higher Ed Feels Like a Zero-Sum Game“Presidents are rewarded for beating each other in rankings, not for helping more students graduate.”Building the University Innovation Alliance“I wasn’t trying to form a club. I wanted to create a working lab for collaborative problem-solving.”The Trust-Building Work No One Sees“I flew to 11 campuses, built real relationships, and got them to sign off on data sharing and joint accountability.”How Process Mapping Saved 450 Emails and 50 Student Holds“Michigan State found it was overwhelming new students with hundreds of emails and dozens of unknown account blocks—just by putting everyone in the same room.”From Bureaucrat to Entrepreneur“Michael Crow told me I’d need to break out of my bureaucratic mindset. He was right. I had to become a builder.”Innovation Isn’t Flashy—It’s Often Inconvenient“We glamorize innovation, but it’s messy. Slower. More painful. That’s why it needs to be built around people, not power.”______________________Connect with Us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Bridget Burns  --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.17 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>160,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. I'll show it is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I welcome Dr. Bridget Burns from the University Innovation Alliance. Bridget and I met at South by Southwest when we were on the same judging panel for startups

in education technology. That was a time before COVID. Many changes have occurred ever since. Bridget has navigated these changes firsthand in higher education. She's now leading a university innovation alliance focused on improving graduation outcomes for students from low-income families, a mission tied closely to her own background. In this episode, we'll explore how she convinced 11 schools to work together, shifting the paradigm from competition to collaboration. We'll discuss the resistance to change because of poorly designed processes and how improving these processes led to much greater acceptance. We'll talk about the

importance of empathy, curiosity, and ownership in driving change. We'll also cover how AI is reshaping education and the challenges institutions face in integrating this technology. Lastly, we'll explore the crucial transition from education to employment and how her organization is helping students achieve better life outcomes. Sit back and enjoy this unfiltered conversation packed with insights and practical advice. Bridget, welcome. It's been a long time since South by Southwest.

Yeah, I'm happy to be here. And it's been a wild ride since then. South by Southwest EDU and now across the world. Yes, the world has changed so much and so quickly in the past couple of years. We'll deep dive into many of those changes in your space, higher education. But first, I always start with the guest. The focus is on your change journey over time. So let's begin with that. My journey has been one where I started with humble beginnings in rural Montana and higher education really was transformative for me.

I grew up in a very low-income family in an environment that felt like a cul-de-sac of racism, homophobia, misogyny, all that stuff, right, very rural America. And getting out was super important, getting to college, just making it there was a huge priority. And then college itself, higher education, was just fundamentally life-altering. It created incredible opportunities for me and changed my perspective myself and the world around me. And so that's where it really begins, is I got hooked on higher ed because it was so important in shifting my own opportunities and my experience.

And so that's where I fall in love with higher education. When I was a student still at Oregon State University, I was a year and a half after arriving there, I was elected student body president, and a year and a half after that, I was appointed to the state board of higher education in Oregon, which is a really rapid transition for a 22 year old.

And so I was involved in the hiring and firing of my first college president at that age. And that was when I started, I learned, I went from being a user of higher education to being aware of the complexity and challenges around governing and leading and seeing universities as organizations, as in some cases, a business, and that my complaints as a user were not because somebody had planned those problems on purpose.

It was actually organizational dysfunction. It was funding challenges. It was all these other things. First, I'm hooked on Hi-Red. Then I go from being a user to understanding how to oversee an institution. I ended up being on the board for, I think, seven institutions at the time. And later I started working at the university system and became the chief of staff. And that really turned me on to the problem of competition in higher ed and universities not working together, not collaborating.

And I just was really frustrated with this. I just could see that they all should be on the same page, that we're all working in the same direction. We need to work together for the, at the time I was in the state of Oregon, which is where I live now, but here, I have these seven institutions, limited resources, potentially millions of students,

millions of people to be served. And I just kept seeing elbows thrown, and I kept seeing unnecessary, it was just really difficult to get universities to be on the same page. So this is when I really fall in love with the, just the tension between competition and collaboration in higher ed.

And then I go through a transition where I had heard all of these things about innovation. I've been, I was ready to transition. And I just wanted to know if innovation in higher ed was real or if it was fake and marketing and PR. And in the state that I live and the institutions I've been working with for the past prior decade, I didn't see real innovation. I thought that all this messaging I saw out there, you

know, I was just curious about it. And so I left and I was able to be an American Council on Education Fellow, which is like baby president school, and you shadow a university president for a year. And I happened to get the chance to shadow Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State, which is a very transformative experience because he's the most innovative leader in higher education. And to have this background of understanding the difference between the student perspective and how to run these institutions, I've really seen this tension around collaboration and competition. And now I see this other dimension, which is why are some institutions able to drive

change and why are some not? And is it like, why are the, why do I go to institutions? And I went to more than 50 and I would ask the senior leaders about what they were doing that was interesting and innovative, but I would also ask what an institution near them was doing. And I noticed that nobody had an answer to that second question. And so it, for me, unveiled that there was a real diffusion

of innovation problem. Like we don't know what other people are doing. We don't know if what we're doing is any good. We don't know how to copy what other people are doing. We don't know how to scale it. There's not a method for scale, like all of that. And so all of those things combined really lead to where I am now, which is by the conclusion of my ACE fellowship, the idea of the University Innovation Alliance was Michael Crows, and I happened to show up with a unique skill set of telling presidents what to do and organizing them and

supporting them, because I was the former chief of staff for the university system. And so building the University Innovation Alliance was the ultimate kind of, it was like the ascension for me. It was merging this focus on user-centered design and thinking about the perspective of students and why the student experience is not what it needs to be. The complexity of overseeing institutions,

especially in a climate that's rapidly changing, rapid innovation, and figuring out how to get universities to work together and try and accelerate innovation by collaboration. So the University Innovation Alliance is what I launched by the end of my ACE fellowship. And I've been for 10 years now at the UIA, I'm the CEO. And to describe what we do is, was founded by a group of university presidents

who decided to unite around a shared sense of urgency that we were doing a terrible job as a country when it comes to graduating students, especially from low income, first generation, and student of color backgrounds. And they have four to 7,000 universities, depending on what you measure. And it sure seems like a lot of repeated experiments and tinkering in silos. And so this group decided to band together to see if we could move faster

and that going it alone was a waste of time, energy, and money. And so this is the culmination of all of my prior background into one experience, and I have the privilege of helping the most innovative universities hold themselves accountable by working together and driving rapid innovation, prototyping, scaling to try and solve student problems. And we've been able to, over the course of 10 years,

we've been able to produce over 150,000 more graduates than we were on track to, at even stretch capacity when we formed. And 89% more graduates of color, 41% more low-income graduates. So it's been wildly successful because of, I think, the willingness to hold the tension between competition, collaboration, innovation,

and how you get universities to really be serious about the painful process of change and the painful process of redesigning what they do around the students they need to serve. So you're now leading a university innovation alliance focused on improving graduation outcomes for students from low-income families. This mission ties back to your own background. You've worked within the system for a long time. You've seen the problems, experienced the frustrations,

and reached a point where you decided, this is it. You shifted the perspective from competition to collaboration. How did you go about convincing these 11 schools, their presidents and administrations to work together? How did the lobbying process unfold? It must have been like an entrepreneur hitching for investment. How did you make it happen? It originally wasn't my idea. It was Michael Crowe's, and he had already found the 11 total.

It was him and 10 other presidents. But I will say there was a baseline commitment to a willingness to figure that out together. And I think that at the time, these presidents, they were willing to see. And they signed up for the chance to figure out how they would do this together and I think that they had a shared they share interest in addressing the scale question and ultimately they realized that they were all wrestling with the same challenge of needing to improve outcomes for populations that we've historically failed. But when I got involved it was

not moving as quickly as it should. And it was because these people had not really spent time building relationships together. And I was willing to actually fly to each of their campuses and spend time. I'm pretty – if there's anything distinctive about me, it's that I'm an incredibly curious person. I find people fascinating and just from a human interest perspective, but also I find just all of this work is just endlessly interesting to me. And I find watching leaders figure out like how they lead, how they drive teams, how they advance, how they, these jobs are just so fascinating and difficult. And so each of them was like its own case study that I could observe. And what my job was at the time was to get this moving. And the way I did it though was because through my like deep curiosity about them, I could see that they had the same problems and they didn't know it. And there was no way they were going to come to that conclusion because of the architecture of the sector.

Higher education is highly competitive. It is hierarchical. We are all a bunch of people who are trying to prove ourselves to each other with our pedigree and our publishing and our rankings. And it's just very much set up that the rewards and trappings hit you against others. And as a result, there's very little space to share about shared problems and to really understand that maybe it's not you that's

the problem, maybe it's actually that these systems are problematic in their design, they were not designed around students. It turns out leading a complex bureaucracy with a multi-billion dollar footprint is like really complicated and hard and that it's also hard to be a human doing that. These people are humans, right? And so I had to do a lot of the weaving of the relationship because they don't have time to get to know each other. They would come to a meeting every three months and it was, they were interested, but I don't think that they would have kept going had I not been able to weave a sense of perspective between them and for them to know that, hey, Michael Crow struggles with that thing too. Or President, Chancellor Wilcox, they're having

that same issue at UC Riverside. And in fact, here is a, here's some anecdotes from that experience. That makes them realize that maybe there's other value in working together beyond just teaming up to see if this works. It's actually, wow, it would be nice to have some allies, some buddies. And that was a really big part, I think, that I played. And then also forming the prospectus, which was basically a strategy in what we were gonna do. And getting 11 college presidents and chancellors

in 11 states running institutions over 25,000 students to sign off on a document that was so significant, including a data sharing agreement and agreeing to match all the money that is raised, was really, it required a lot of trust building because there's no way that any one person can read every single line. But for me, I had to, and I had to come up with this consensus-based document and how this organization was going to operate. And when I first got to, you talked about like the kind of entrepreneurial aspect of it. When I first got to ASU and met Michael Crow,

he told me I was a bureaucrat and that I was going to need to become an entrepreneur if I was going to do this. And we were going to have to break out that bureaucrat. And boy did we, I don't think I, I wasn't already, I had some entrepreneurial tendencies prior to this, but it just required a willingness to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and figure it out and ask for a lot of help and advice from people. But just sitting with the stories that I had to surface of the campuses and the weaving between of what they had in common and then also what the sector really needed to see

from leaders that would be fundamentally different than everything they'd seen before. Because by the time higher ed was obsessed with college access, which is just get more people in, that was the strategy. And the other theme was under matching from President Obama, which was basically that low income kids could get into better schools,

but they just don't know it. And both of those things are right and fine for that time, but they are missing the biggest problem, which is that there are literally millions of students who are never going to go to college. If the higher ed doesn't change, how well it does, how well we serve those students. And that there are millions of people walking around who went to college and the only credential they have is a student loan because they failed out because the institution was never designed for them to be successful. And just like the scale of that and the threat that creates for the future economic competitiveness of this country. And it just it was like it's a big problem, but nobody sits with it. It's a big problem, but nobody sits with it. It's no one's responsibility to fix that.

We all need it to be solved. But when you have college presidents who are hired to run just one institution, and their board holds them accountable to move up and down in the rankings against each other, imagine what that does. It doesn't make them want to work on the same team and fight for a bigger cause than themselves. It makes them want to play defense and hunker down and focus only on their institutions.

It was just like a, it was a huge challenge to build that. And then also I needed to raise all the money for it to exist. And thankfully the idea was right. The people were right and they were responsive and excited. And honestly, it's only the momentum has just accelerated from then. Now we have 17 institutions and I say that but I stopped counting

the number of institutions who were asking to join the Alliance at 120 and I stopped counting within six months of announcing the Alliance. So it's not a question of we could be massive and have all kinds of institutions but it was about figuring out who, first we needed to actually do the thing, to actually accomplish our goals of figuring out how to innovate together and scale up what works, hold each other accountable,

and produce dramatically more graduates, especially from low-income backgrounds. But the big challenge I ran into after that was, how do you figure out who to let in when you've already built something that's successful? Because then you run into the problem of people want to be a part of something that's successful, they like the image of it, perhaps they like the PR and the marketing and it looks really great.

But we needed to figure out who else out there is a worker bee? Who else is interested in doing like the really hard stuff and not just drawn to the fact that we will have been very effective at telling our story and amplifying the importance of this work. So that's to this day, still one of the biggest problems I face is that vetting issue of who else to let in because this could continue to grow,

but we have to actually deliver on the outcomes while we're doing it. Speaking of delivering outcome, I recall from one of your recent speeches that you mentioned people are not actually resistant to change. They resist poorly designed processes. Do you have any specific examples where resistance was due to a poorly designed process? And then once the process was improved, you started seeing more and more acceptance? So I think that a lot of the time we just have no intentional strategy about change. We expect change to happen and then we don't think about the very human experience of,

okay, I come into my office every day, I've worked an entire career with the hopes of being able to see a window. I've worked in a cubicle most of my life. It's a huge deal to finally have an office that I, maybe I don't have a corner office, maybe I just have a window I can see. And now you've got to come in here and you're telling me that we're going to be moving our department because we need to do a better job.

We need to combine departments because of a need to do data sharing and also to make sure that we're aligning our systems in process with this other department. What I know is that you just told me that I'm going to have to give up this office that I've worked for. You're completely ignoring the things that matter to me,

the experiences that have been valuable to me. You haven't for a second given me an opportunity to even offer ideas based on the, let's say, 20-year career I have. Let's say I have some expertise to contribute. Instead, you just come in with this pipe dream of an idea, you know what the solution is, and you give people no opportunity to add to it to make it feel

like it's an idea that they could be excited about. They don't even get a chance to consider it because all they do is hear, I'm going to change your life, I'm going to change your daily experience, and I respect you so little, I haven't even given you a chance to be part of the process or to offer input. And then, we also, what I find is, because that's a regular experience, it's often like physical moving offices is like the most, like the worst case, every leader will tell you that's the worst, but I can talk to you about consolidating data or getting switching,

advising from being decentralized to centralized. Now you're telling me that I'm gonna have a different boss, that what I'm responsible for completely is changing, the students I serve are changing. You're not gonna even ask me for input or like I get no buy-in on this process. I get no even, I don't even get a chance to touch it. And my daily experience every day from nine to five

or whatever is gonna change. And you're surprised that I am disappointed or that I might be a little bit grumpy. We just never consider the possibility that people do not, anyone who says they like change is a liar. You only like the change that was your idea and that you actually agree with and that is usually a change that's your idea, right? But if you told me, if I came into my office today and you had moved my furniture in my office around, listen, it might be a better blow and layout.

But the fact that change happened, that I wasn't, like you didn't give me a second to turn the water temperature up slowly so that I could acclimate to it or that I couldn't offer input, We just jump over these very basic things and that change is discomfort. It is shifting things around and we glamorize innovation as though it's literally lasers and rainbows. And the truth is, innovation is messy. I've never seen an example where innovation,

we're starting something new that you don't, the time it doesn't take longer, it's more difficult, you run into unexpected hurdles. So it's bumpy. It's not smooth. It's not predictable. You can't plan your day. You can't plan. You don't know when you're going to pick your kids up. You don't know when you're going to do all these human things. It's the human stuff that gets in the way because these are human beings. And I just think that too often leaders, we don't have that genuine empathy to think about that for a second to know that at the end of the day, like, if you're trying to do something where humans are involved, the very basic understanding about human beings is that they are adverse to

pain. They don't like pain. They don't and they like pleasure. They like things that feel good. And what constitutes pain for me is probably different than you. But generally, all you got to do is be a little curious to try and figure out the things I value, the things I don't. The things that constitute pleasure for me are maybe I'm extroverted and I don't, I like to talk to people. Maybe I'm introverted and that sounds terrible if you're offering to give me a speech opportunity. There are ways though, if leaders will just care about the people that they are trying to lead and

again empathy is the first step of design. If you'll just learn about these people, you can structure an experience that feels good that actually meets their needs and so all that to say those I hope those have been like slightly tangible in terms of relatability but I can give you a real example of what the best case scenario, like a good example is, and that's do all the time. We use something called process mapping. We didn't invent it, but how the Alliance works is I bring campuses together and we do the professional development and build them as a network and a community.

So they trust each other and talk about the things that are getting in the way. And then they help each other out by here's something that worked for me, here's something you can do. In one of those experiences early on, Georgia State University shared about process mapping, which is one of the things they do before they do any new system. Because you have to understand the system that you're bringing a new idea into so that you don't just bring a new idea into a toxic system. And two people who are at that event are a professor and a person who's been working at the university for, I don't know, a couple of months,

early stage, early career person. And they got stuck in the airport and they decided that the idea of process mapping was pretty profound and they were gonna figure out how to take it back home to Michigan State. That's where they worked. So they went back, they first, they got the person who we call a UIA fellow,

she's an early career professional. They got her training process mapping. It's like a weekend experience, you go away. And they decided to invite everyone at the university who works on student success into the same room for the first time, which has never happened at the university. And they were gonna just target one period of time. They were going to map out from the day the student gets

admitted to the day they show up on campus, and they invited everyone who works together. And so the process mapping is basically put a Post-it note on the wall for every step in a process, right? You want to actually see the system for how it is instead of our fantasy of it. Anyway, so all these people are in this room. These people who work very individually, they all feel like they have a different lane. They interact with students not very often, but they all work, they care about students. And this is the first time they've ever been invited to come together to see their work connected to each other. And the way the day goes is people start putting

post-it notes up for these are when we send emails to students this is when we ask them to do this or that. And throughout the day there's things where people are like hey we should stop doing this system right here this seems like way too much or redundant or an overlap. And because the people are in the room who oversee that system they say that reports to me yeah 100% we should stop doing that and I'm gonna make that happen. Another example is are in the room who oversee that system, they say, that reports to me. Yeah, 100%. We should stop doing that. And I'm going to make that happen. Another example is someone in the room says, hey, I need this.

Clearly, I need access to this data. I don't have access to this. The person who, someone else in the room raises their hand and says, what's your email? I have access to that data. I'm going to send it to you now. And so what's happening is this magical thing where people are experiencing real collaboration and a sense of community. They're feeling like they're on the same team. They're actually being reminded of the purpose that they work for students.

They care about students. It's activating. It's very exciting. They're getting inspired because they're feeling like they have permission to actually solve problems in real time. And it's just a palpable sense of enthusiasm, like it feels like this is, oh my God, this is like the kind of experience we want to have. And at the end of that day, they take a step back and they look at the Post-it notes and the headline is, they discovered that in the email line that in those three months, they were sending every student at Michigan State 450 emails in three months, from the day you get

admitted to the day you show up, which is overwhelming and obviously not what anyone knew and not what anyone would want to do. Most universities have no idea that they do that, and most of them are sending more than 450. It's got to stop because it will stop students from registering, it will stop them from being successful. It's overwhelming if you're a first gen student. It's just, ah, you know how it is.

You unsubscribe from emails. Like, gross. They also found that there were 50 types of holds a student could have on their account that they didn't know could exist. The university didn't know. So if we don't know, how are we expecting? The net result of this is the institution is wiser.

They're able to solve problems in real time about what the student's experiencing. The community of people in that room feel like they actually own it. They get to decide what's happening. This is exciting. The president's not in the room, right? But since then, multiple Michigan state presidents have heard this story and it lives on. It's a legend. It's also inspired the other UIA campuses to map all the other things they do, whether it's major change or graduation or any college to career, et cetera. So it's an example of how you can make change feel good. Play music, choose a room that's well lit,

invite people together to be a part of a process that feels good. As opposed to a mandate that comes down from on high, where you individually are going to be negatively impacted and you get to have no input on the process. And frankly, the idea is rarely good. It's rarely actually the right idea because we know that collaboration brings better ideas.

So that's an example. It's just human beings. And if we could just have the most basic level of acknowledgement of that and care for people, we would create experiences that give them a chance to be their best selves and to give their best work and to this work should be fulfilling. And it can, I think change is incredibly fulfilling work when well done. Yeah.

Empathy, curiosity, and ownership are crucial for change. Like you said, no one really likes change unless it benefits them in some way. It also needs to generate collective benefits. People often ask, why does change? How can we make things better? Why does my contribution matter in this case or that case? How can I help? Maybe I can help more than you expected. Ownership isn't just about being informed or notified. It's about contributing to the evolution of the change and being responsible for the outcome.

and being responsible for the outcome. If the outcome isn't as good as expected, how can we work together to make it better? This sense of ownership, this power of ownership is so impactful. Yes, invite your people to like into the problem that you need to solve. People love to solve problems. People love to be helpful. But what they don't want to be is a cog in a wheel told to do X or Y.

And they also literally work in that area. They might have some ideas. And listen, I know that you can have employees that you're like, ah, they're just not going to want it. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews, check out our website, and us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media.

I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.