Chief Change Officer - Dr. Bridget Burns Breaking Boundaries: From Rural Struggles to Educational Triumphs

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

What happens when higher education is plagued by competition and a lack of collaboration? Ever wondered what would happen if higher education was more like a reality TV show? In this episode, we tackle the “Higher Ed Hunger Games,” where universities are too busy competing to work together. Dr. Bridget Burns, the CEO of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) and the host of The Innovating Together Podcast, takes us from her small-town roots in rural America to the front lines of educational reform. She’s on a mission to turn these academic rivals into allies. Bridget’s goal? To boost graduation and employment rates for low-income students by transforming higher education into a more cooperative and innovative field. Forget the drama, we’re talking real change here—no politics is needed, just good old-fashioned teamwork that is centered on humanity. Episode Breakdown: 00:35—Introduction: Rundown of today's episode 03:20—Overcoming Adversity: Bridget's Journey from Isolation to Empowerment “I grew up in a cul de sac of racism, homophobia, misogyny—very rural America—and getting out was super important.” 06:33—Problem in Universities: Unveiling the Diffusion of Innovation Problem “We don’t know if what we’re doing is any good, or how to scale it.” 10:59—Higher Ed Hunger Games: Tackling the Cutthroat Competition "Higher education is highly competitive, hierarchical, set up to pit you against others, which leaves very little space to share about shared problems." 16:03—Real Change or Just for Show? Scouting for True Innovators in Academia "We need to figure out who else is a worker bee, who's interested in doing the really hard stuff and not just drawn to the image." 18:48—Who Actually Likes Change? Spoiler: No One “Everyone who says they like change is a liar. You only like change that is your idea and that you actively participate in creating.” 30:07—Mending Hearts in the Office: When Leaders Turn into Heartbreakers "There are a lot of people walking around with broken hearts because they’ve had a leader who’s betrayed them." 33:39—The AI Rat Race: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? "This natural tendency to compete with each other. There’s like an arms race and that’s what’s happening with AI.” 38:41—From Cap and Gown to Capable and Grown: Reinventing the Grad-to-Gig Highway "There should be coaches for faculty to embed career readiness into every single classroom, starting from the first class a student takes." Connect with Us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Bridget Burns Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. A Modernist Community for Growth Progressives World's Number One Career Podcast Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI Top 10: GB, FR, SE, DE, TR, IT, ES Top 10: IN, JP, SG, AU  1.3 Million+ Streams 50+ Countries

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. We are a modernist community for honest humility for progressive minds around the world. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. 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 is 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.

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 of 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 fell 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 higher ed. 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. At the time, I was in the state of Oregon, which is where I live now. But here are the 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 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 base fellowship, the idea of the University Innovation Alliance was Michael Crow's.

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 it 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 we have 4,000 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 Crow's, and he had already found the 11 total. So 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, I think 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 have shared 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 pit 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 multbillion 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 going to 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 at 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 undermatching 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'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 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're going 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 and 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, and then we also, what I find is because that's a regular experience is it's often like physical moving

offices is like the most, like the worst case. Every leader will tell you that 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 going to have a different boss, that what I'm responsible for completely is changing, the students I serve are changing. You're not going to 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 going to 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 like I came into my office today and you had moved my furniture in my office around, listen, it might be a better flow 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 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, 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, we 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 were 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 going to 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, which is 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 going to 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 you 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 percent. 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. And most universities have no idea that they do that.

And most of them are sending more than 450. And 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 like, ah, you know how it is. You unsubscribe from emails like bros. 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 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 like 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 is about contributing to the evolution of the change 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. Yeah, it's invite your people to know, 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. Listen, I know that you can have employees that you're like, ah, they're just not going to want it. All I'm saying is that the resistance is justified. And if you are so out of touch with your people that you can't understand that, then you've been at it too long. And you need to give yourself a micro dose of a empathy sprint to go out and remember why you started doing this work. Remember why you cared about the people.

Remember why you chose to be a leader. Because I get dismissing people and because you because I feel like people who work in any industry, my observation is there's a lot of people walking around. They're walking around with broken hearts because they've had a leader who's betrayed them. They've had a thing that they worked on for 10 years that got shelved at the last minute. And they remember that they showed up, that they missed dinner with their kids to build that thing. And you're just going to turn it off. You're just getting rid of it. There's all these people who are carrying around

these stories of bad experiences from change. And then there are leaders who are carrying around this mythology about people being lazy or people not wanting to do stuff. And I just, it doesn't serve us. And it is not, it's not reality. And we are not our best selves. All we're doing is living out a story

we're telling ourselves about other people. And so you just got to you got to tap in. Curiosity is going to be your best friend. And if you don't if you don't have it right now, you've got to give yourself you got to pull back out of the work and get back to caring about people and remembering they all have a reason to feel the way they do. Honestly, if I had an office and someone came in and said, hey, we are going to implement this change. And because of that, I'm going to move from my corner office to a shared desk in a large area. I wouldn't be happy either. I can totally resonate with that scenario. Speaking of humanity, there's one growing area we are all watching closely.

AI. AI is here to stay and will impact all areas of our lives, including education. There's a lot, a lot of hope for its potential in education. So for a change leader like you, the question isn't just about integrating AI into higher education, but how to make the best use of it. Based on your experience working with these leaders and institutions, what could be the hurdles or challenges for the institutions in embracing and integrating AI into teaching, learning, and administration? How can they create a collective, intelligent scenario

that many people are looking forward to? So I think the thing that is going to get in the way are things that are very human. The first thing I'm observing is that we have this natural tendency to compete with each other. There's like an arms race usually when something's new and that's what's happening with AI. So what you have is thousands of people across higher ed, different institutions who are all trying to figure something out simultaneously. And what a waste that we are not finding a way to work together, that we are not teaming up on the shared objective that you just put forward. Because this is a space that's hyper-competitive, and we will batten the hatches and not share with anything with anyone, and students will be worse for it.

Because you need the people who are in the classroom and people who are outside the classroom finding ways to collaborate with peers, not just at their institution, but do it in a way that advances the entire agenda forward for everyone, which is we have big questions around learning that we need to address. We need to figure out how to make it so that any person can learn. We need to figure out how to make it more sustainable for every person to have access to personalized learning at scale. We need to figure out the efficacy and the safety issues that are definitely going to happen and are popping up already. And instead, what you're having is a bunch of people who are working individually with their head down, separated,

all figuring out what problem they want, how they want to use AI or whether they don't. And then there's a large swath of higher ed that is more risk averse. And so they may or may not be using it at all. And so you're going to see a new version of the haves and the have-nots. And for me, what I just always, I'm predisposed to notice the big picture and to be a systems thinker on this. And so I just, I see really big sector problems

that affect community colleges, every type of institute, every type of university. And it's really about the students. It's about how we can weaponize this for good. How do we make it so that the people who work in a university who are, you know, front office that are being overwhelmed by repetitive questions or repetitive issues, how do they use AI

so they can actually not have to do that and instead can provide more hands-on support for students? Now we're seeing that with chatbots as such. And how do administrators be more effective and efficient so that they can actually get through their days and be able to produce more things to be able to accelerate speed? Because that's a real challenge for us. And for faculty, just like it's learning, it's, you know, how do you use this ethically when you're trying to, one of the biggest impediments for your time is grading.

How do you use it from a like pedagogical perspective to make it so that what you're doing is better? These are big questions that are not particularly unique. These are, I've given you what, that's like three problems. Those are sector problems. And so it's just sad when we only focus on my institution wants to be first. So University of Michigan, go get them, or Arizona States, they're definitely out front on AI. But I just think that there are very clearly like same problems, like same team. And we have to find a way that we are going to collaborate in an effort to make our use of AI safe, effective,

efficient, and trustworthy and going to be able to, again, I think at the end of the day, it's about personalized learning at scale. And also make sure that what we're teaching today is not out of date because the future of work and how AI is disrupting the workforce and going to disrupt the workforce, that means that the things we're teaching now in certain classrooms today is no longer relevant. And there is, I have little confidence that individual disciplines are going to be in real time keeping up with that. And if they are, it's one dean or it's one chair or faculty member. It's not the whole discipline working together to figure out, okay, so I can see that the role of pure legal

is going to be changing rapidly right now because of ChatGVT. Fundamentally, you can conduct a lit review with a well-trained model super effectively. And what does that mean for how we can, I just think there's a lot that's happening so fast. So then if you're training people in the legal profession or anything related right now, you should have a part of your curriculum about AI. You should be thinking about how the role of paralegal is changing rapidly now because of that. And so therefore, it's like we've always had a problem with our connection with workforce. And now it's like it's on steroids and steroids are AI.

And so, again, every one of these is a sector-wide problem. And I just say that my problem is the architecture of this entire sector would make it so that we would hunker down and work alone independently and wait until we feel like we have a peer-reviewed article to publish before others find out what we've been doing and students cannot afford to waste that time. Your response is totally relevant, not just about AI, but in other matter, I want to get your take on before we conclude this interview, which is the student outcome. You've helped a lot of students. According to your website, over 68,000 from low-income backgrounds are expected to graduate by 2025. That's a significant achievement

and an important KPI. Now, given our discussion about AI, technology, and the job market, it's clear that the type and nature of jobs are changing rapidly. Ultimately, we go to college school isn't just about graduation. It's about helping students achieve better life outcomes through education. From graduation to employment, this transition from learning to earning is crucial. In terms of UIA, what have you done to help students move from education to employment? Perhaps, is there something currently in place or part of your future vision? Can you share with us what's happening at this stage?

Yeah, in 2017, we partnered with Strata Education Network to, as a next, we do a big change initiative. So like predictive analytics, chatbots, proactivizing, our whole thing is scale. So we take a model from one place and scale it on other campuses and we learn a method for scale. Like how do you need to adapt that idea so that it survives and thrives in a different ecosystem? And then we create playbooks for the rest of the sector to learn from us. So that's been our model, scale. But we ran into this issue in 2017 of this issue of college to career, there's nothing to scale. There are lots of little tiny things out there, but we recognize that the entire, we've come at this work thinking with the baseline belief that higher education was never designed around students.

And that's the problem. And it was especially not designed around the students that we need to serve. Low income, first gen students of color. So then we get to college career and it's, oh my gosh, if we thought we had bad design once, watch out. Because when you look at career services and just that model and that approach, it became very clear that was a manifestation of what we're talking about. And we agree with you about the students measure their success by it's much more nuanced and complex, but they want a job, of course. So we did a multi-year initiative to actually come up with, instead of the scale, it was about innovation, which was how should this be if we were to design it based around the needs of students and specifically use design thinking.

If you could reimagine that whole college to career handoff around the needs of students, where you could actually make up for privilege. Meaning if you looked at the data that a student from a low-income background would have the same kind of results or outcomes as a high income student who comes in with a deep social network, etc. And so we got seven universities together to first we started with process mapping, as always, to understand just how bad is this? Because the system seemed really dysfunctional for students. You have a office in some basement somewhere with like a tiny budget that nobody wants to go to other than to get their resume looked at. And so we first started with this false assumption. We quickly checked, which was,

let's see all the things that career services is responsible for. And then let's like map those things and let's look at their KPIs. And then we would be able to benchmark against those and try and improve those. That's what we thought. It turns out step one is we didn't have any KPIs because nobody was actually tracking any data. We had no idea that if you wanted to measure the number of students who go into career services from certain backgrounds, they don't have that data. They don't even know how many people come in. Depending on who you're talking to, like they just they're overwhelmed.

One of my institutions had 70,000 students and they had two people in the office of career services. And so that was a bust. And we also mapped all of the things that campuses did around career services. And we found out the vast majority had no relationship with career services. Oh man, so if we were trying to fix career services, we were in trouble because it turns out

most of these things report to the deans or they're over here in this other office. And it's no surprise, there's nobody at the end of the day who's responsible for career services or career outcomes for students. It's just very distributed. And that's a formula for chaos. So that gives us, so already we're wrong in our design, but we've learned a ton. We also then get all the career services folks together and we engage in a series of empathy sprints where we interview hundreds of students across all these campuses about what success in college would look like, what kinds of experiences have been most valuable to that end, what they've been struggling

with, all that kind of stuff, and use those empathy insights to then generate, create design charrettes and design thinking sprints where we actually came up with prototypes of what would it look like if we actually designed this part of the higher ed system around the needs of students and came up with seven different prototype models that are then our next step was you could not implement your own idea. And so Ohio State had to implement another campus's idea. Riverside, University of. And so Ohio State had to implement another campus's idea. Riverside, University of Central Florida, they all had to implement someone else's idea. And that was a way for us to not fall in love with our own idea.

And then COVID happened. Despite that, much of that kind of calibrated it down a bit. But despite that, we did end up developing a robust playbook and a clearer picture of how you should design that whole space. And the spoiler is there are several of the models that actually still live today. In fact, University of Central Florida just announced a $10 million gift to match their initiative that came from that project. Now, it's several years later later and they're just continuing to expand it. The outcomes have been improved, but again, it was hard for us because we didn't,

we couldn't baseline because it turns out nobody captured that data. It wasn't as scientific as we expected it to be, but what we figured out is the only place that all students go is the classroom. And so instead of an office shoved in a basement, the answer is that career services people, professionals, they should be reimagined as instructional designers, and they should be coaches for faculty to embed career readiness into every single classroom, starting from the first class a student takes. They should have a career readiness experience, activity, or exercise. They should engage and learn from alumni who are working in the field. They should have a career readiness experience, activity or exercise. They should engage and learn from alumni who are working in the field. They should be doing team based learning.

They should be doing work where we actually use what is called NACE competency language, which is like language that you could use in a job interview to describe what you did in a class. And so it's things like that. It was also paid virtual and in-person internships, micro-internships. We implemented those. It was a variety of other suite of solutions. You can download the playbook on our website.

So that's what we've done thus far. I would say COVID was a disruptor for us in a significant way because building change management was really hard during that time. But now I will round the bases that it's been 10 years, that 68,000 data point you mentioned, we're now at 150,000 on that goal. That was the goal that President Obama announced of ours that was by 2025 and we've already hit 150. And not by adding new campuses, this is just the original 11. But we are now about to launch our new goals. And I will say that it's a preview, but mobility is a big part of our plan, our focus going forward. And I will say that my campuses are not just interested in getting credit for measuring it because the field is nascent on this issue. There's a lot of language

and people talking about social mobility. It turns out that at most campuses are at most measuring it. No one is trying to improve it. And what happens is campuses find out they're good at social mobility because they wind up in a ranking. And that is sad. That is not where this field needs to be. We need to work together on this. So what my campuses are willing to do, and I'm just, my job is to raise the money, is we will aggressively consume all of the existing measures, implement them. But so we're going to measure post-college outcomes. There's a couple different options you can choose right now, and we're going to do a hybrid of that, whether it's income two

years post-graduation, whether it's that you are employed within two years of college in a job that requires a bachelor's degree. There's another early measure that is basically found this from Strata Education Network that the second that you are no longer eligible for social services is the moment that higher ed was worth it for you. It'll be some hybrid of those things, right? Or there's a value commission from the Gates Foundation. So we're going to do the measure, but what we're going to do is set the baseline at where we are, and we want to set targets to improve. And then we are going to work together as a group to figure out what are the specific interventions and supports that dramatically improve upward mobility for students across all backgrounds. And now we

represent over 570,000 students, a significant number of those, almost 200,000 are low-income students. The data will be valuable for the field. So that's where we're going to go forward. I would just say that from my perspective, what's needed is we need a strategy as a country, a smart strategy that's about talent and opportunity in the future of work as a country, and we also need each state needs their own strategy for talent and opportunity in the future of work. And by that, people are born all over in all kinds of backgrounds.

And the job of higher education is to take someone, no matter where they are born, what family they grew up in, to activate their talent so that they can contribute all of their potential, all of their skill, all of their talent to build a compelling future for all of us, right? And each state should actually think about their demographics, the people who are born there, no matter their natural resources, their industries, and they actually need to have a plan, like as if an adult was in charge. And that's the part that I'm working on right now is I think that what would it look like for universities to operate truly as the

talent activator that they are? They would partner more closely with workforce. They would collaborate aggressively. They would do a much better job on the front end, making it easier for students to make smart and intuitive decisions about the kinds of careers that would be a good fit for them and make it easier for them to make smart and intuitive decisions about what degrees to pursue or not pursue and what majors. I just think there's a lot to be fixed in this particular space and we will be ready to announce our new goals and I look forward to working on this

because it's a super interesting, meaty problem that I just think the only real threat for me is if we go it alone. If you have universities working on this issue alone, because I agree with you that this is the reason people come to college. And I think all students deserve us to figure this out. Yes, I can't wait for you to announce the new goals because I can see this as a global issue for higher education institutions. Just a quick story to share with you. When you talk about career centers, I totally agree. Like a business, your clients are the students. But if the shop is set up in the basement, the customers won't go there. Why not go to your customer directly, meaning the States, I attended Yale School of Management as an international MBA student.

In the U.S., especially for brand-name MBA programs, they're all well-funded, have a lot of resources. From day one, they started talking about careers, preparing us for interviews and summer internships right from the start. That was just in August and September. And they were already talking about getting our resumes polished and reaching out to potential employers and alumni for informational interview. At first, I found it very stressful. But it was crucial training. They immersed us in the mindset and skill set needed. So by the time we graduated, we were better prepared.

I graduated right after 9-1-1, which wasn't an encouraging job market. But I acquired essential career skills during those two years, even before LinkedIn and other technologies were in place. I think this kind of preparation is vital for undergraduates, regardless of whether they are at a state, university, an Ivy League school, or anywhere else. At the end of the day, we study something we are interested in, and we want to use that knowledge to make money, support ourselves, and help others. We want to feel fulfilled. Education is a crucial means for us to achieve our goal and contribute to the society.

If there are hurdles that hinder the process, it affects the mobility and progress of society, leading to social and economic problems. Bridget, I really appreciate your time. I know we overran, but I didn't want to cut you off because you have so much valuable insights to share. I've learned a lot from you today. This has been a privilege for me and it's a great conversation. Feel free to cut out anything. I did go along because you ask great questions and it's nice great conversation. Feel free to cut out anything. I did go along because you ask great questions and it's always, it's nice to zoom back out and look at the work from a different altitude

than I always do. And yeah, thank you so much. Just so you know, I haven't cut anything out in the editing process. This is the unfiltered version of our interview together. I hope you all enjoy 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 follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.