Universities operate in environments where competition is a defining feature.
Institutions are in constant competition. They compete over students, grants, and top-tier faculty to elevate their institution. Yet even amid this competition for limited resources, significant opportunities exist to collaborate around shared challenges.
This is a driving factor behind the University Innovation Alliance. Established in 2014 by 11 university presidents, UIA was established to dramatically redefine student success in American higher education. To date, the original UIA member institutions have graduated an additional 164,000 above their original baseline – more than doubling their initial goal – and have expanded the alliance to include an additional eight institutions.
Bridget Burns, CEO of UIA, doesn’t pretend that competition doesn’t exist between her members. Instead, she focuses them on what they can achieve together through shared purpose and deep trust. She hopes that not only can her member institutions make significant improvements to student success within the communities they serve, but that it can also transform higher education across the United States.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Co-Lab: For those who don't know what the University Innovation Alliance is, how would you describe it, and what its purpose is in the world?
Bridget Burns: Higher education is defined by competition, and we built something intentionally different. The UIA serves as a national laboratory for student success innovation. We bring large public research universities together to solve shared problems, test evidence-based solutions, and scale what works. The Alliance was founded in 2014 by presidents and chancellors who were themselves former low income, first generation, and students of color. They shared a clear sense of urgency that the country was not producing enough graduates to meet our economic needs, and that institutions were doing a poor job supporting low-income students. They also understood that trying to solve these challenges alone was a waste of time, energy, and money. They believed that working together could achieve far more than any single campus acting alone, and that bet has paid off.
In the past twelve years, UIA institutions have produced 183,000 additional graduates above baseline, including more than 100 percent more graduates of color and 50 percent more low-income graduates. Our purpose is to prove that public research universities can be both big and good, and that collaboration is the most powerful strategy to strengthen student success and national economic competitiveness. We also do this work publicly because we want to galvanize broader sector change. Everything we learn, we share freely, so that institutions we will never meet can benefit and their students can access the most effective practices.
The Co-Lab: How does UIA drive this collaboration among these institutions, who are naturally competitive sometimes against one another? What are the principles of collaboration that have shaped your design and evolution?
Bridget Burns: Our principles start from a simple idea. Even though every university has its own personality and politics, the structure of American higher education is remarkably similar. That means we face many of the same problems, which creates real opportunities to work differently. Our approach is to unite around shared challenges, innovate together, and scale the ideas that actually work from campus to campus. When we started, our hope was to create and share a method for scale that higher education could use, because unlike other sectors with tools like Six Sigma or Lean, our field had nothing comparable.
The principles that guide our work are radical transparency, shared credit, and collective accountability for student outcomes. We believe the best learning comes from being honest about failure, and that only happens in an environment of trust. So, we have built a high trust network where leaders can speak candidly about what is not working, learn from each other, and move faster because of it. We spend most of our time focused on the real challenges campuses are facing, because that is where the most valuable collaboration happens.
The Co-Lab How do you drive the institutional leaders or their teams to open up or to have trust in these institutions that, on a day-to-day basis, they're competing with?
Bridget Burns: It takes real intentionality in how we convene, and that has to be the North Star. People love conferences and gatherings, and they often think they can sprinkle in a little trust building on the side. It does not work. If trust is not the core purpose, you make compromises about who you invite, how you frame the experience, and how honestly people can show up. For us, nothing is more important than creating the conditions for honest, candid problem solving.
We start with Chatham House Rules and a “yes, and” mindset in everything we do. And the truth is, it does not take a lot of convincing from me because this was their president or chancellors’ idea. Our board is made up entirely of presidents and chancellors, and they created the Alliance. My job is to support their goals. When a president prioritizes improving outcomes for low-income students and chooses to join a network like this, it creates a different permission structure for their campus teams.
Not every institution has that. Many campuses feel they cannot admit they have problems. They polish everything and pretend the challenges do not exist. But if you cannot acknowledge your DFW (D, F or Withdraw) rates, or the students you are losing, or the practices that are not working, you will end up going it alone. Collaboration requires honesty. Institutions that cannot be honest cannot participate at this level.
The Co-Lab: What hasn't worked, and what lessons did you learn from these issues?
Bridget Burns: Presidential turnover is the Achilles heel of the sector. It is the one moment when a campus can go from fully engaged to completely disengaged, and if the new leader does not prioritize student success, it is very hard for their institution to participate at the level our model requires. We learned quickly that uneven participation cannot be ignored. You have to confront it directly because it threatens the integrity of the collaborative.
Another early lesson was the absolute need for campus capacity. Many collective efforts rely on consultants or convenings, but if no one on a campus wakes up each day responsible for the work, nothing moves between meetings. You end up managing stagnation instead of driving change. That is why we scaled ASU’s “UI Fellows” program, and launched our own “UIA Fellows program, which became a talent recruitment strategy, which now has generated more than 55 alumni Fellows across the country. UIA Fellows form a network within our network and serve as innovation capacity, facilitators, project managers and we see this as a professional development pipeline for future presidents. More importantly, they are the people who get up every day thinking about collaborative student success work on their campus. Without that capacity, progress does not happen.
We also learned that our early idea of mentor and mentee institutions was unrealistic. Everyone believes they are the mentor, and very few want to admit they are the mentee. In reality, every institution is both. The work is less about assigning roles and more about matchmaking. A lot of what we do is quiet shuttle diplomacy, connecting campuses with the right peers based on the challenge they are trying to solve. That matchmaking has become one of the most valuable services we provide.
The Co-Lab: What other outcomes have occurred that have kind of been realized through this collaborative model beyond just that top number of additional graduates for these 19 institutions?
Bridget Burns: Our original goal, announced at the White House Opportunity Summit in 2014, was to produce 68,000 additional graduates by 2025 across the 11 founding institutions. At the time, we had to prove that level of improvement was even possible. Those same 11 institutions went on to produce 164,000 additional graduates in that window, including 43 percent more low-income graduates and 100 percent more graduates of color. That is clear evidence the student success work has delivered meaningful impact.
We have raised more than 45 million dollars in philanthropic support for campuses, and those institutions have contributed 26 million dollars in matching funds. Those investments matter. They have generated more than 5 billion dollars in lifetime earnings for 8,000 additional low-income graduates.
Our impact is also visible in the large-scale implementation projects we took on together. In our first year, we chose to scale an idea that was still unfamiliar to most campuses at the time: predictive analytics. Eleven universities implemented it publicly and simultaneously, and today it is common across the sector. That pattern continued with proactive advising, completion grants, chatbots, and other innovations that were once new and are now standard practice. I am proud of the difference this has made for students and for the institutions working to support them.
There have been all kinds of innovations that have taken off through this work, and what I appreciate most is how much of it we have been able to share freely. The materials we create in the University Innovation Lab, along with our summit content and online courses, are open to any campus. Institutions have used these resources to make real improvements without spending a dollar. That matters because their students deserve access to the most effective practices, regardless of institutional resources.
But the broader effect may be even more important. When we started, student success was not a widely used term. We did not invent it, but we helped it take hold across the sector. The shift was away from focusing only on access and graduation numbers and toward building the conditions that help students thrive. It is not about giving us credit. It is about proving that going it alone is wasteful and slow. Institutions can achieve far more when they work together around shared challenges. We have seen this through the rise of collaboratives around the world, from Australia to South Africa, informed by what we have learned. Competition will always exist, but the idea that it produces the best outcomes is simply not true. Collaboration, done intentionally and with the right partners, produces better results for students and for institutions.
The Co-Lab: How does a model like UIA, be applied in other areas of higher education beyond just student success? What advice would you give to institutional leaders looking to collaborate, but don't know where to start?
Bridget Burns: There are really only two good reasons to collaborate. The first is a shared problem that no single institution can solve on its own. The second is a big goal that can only be reached by working together. Without one of those conditions, it becomes too difficult in a landscape where institutions are constantly measured against each other.
People often talk about collaboration as if it is simple, but in practice it can feel like body doubling unless there is a clear, shared purpose. That purpose has to be strong enough to override the daily reality of competition. I do not convene campuses around areas where they compete. That is not productive, and it does not build trust. What works is bringing institutions together around challenges they all face, like online student success. When the focus is on a shared problem or a shared goal, leaders can stop worrying about comparison and start engaging honestly with each other.
At the end of the day, institutions have far more in common than they realize. Collaboration becomes possible when leaders focus on those shared challenges rather than the competitive pressures that dominate their day-to-day work.