How 11 universities are using their 'collective scale' to solve higher ed's problems

Higher education often gets criticized for its silos, both within institutions and among them. So when the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) launched five years ago, its bold ambition of getting universities to share ideas to help them improve college access was met with skepticism. "This has been a fairly intractable space where every institution is doing really interesting experiments, and everybody has a narrative," Bridget Burns, UIA's executive director, told attendees at the Educause conference in Chicago last month. "(But) the diffusion of innovation is glacial, and most people are not very aware of what's going on, and most people struggle with actually how to fix it." After all, what could one public research university — in its own world of state funding, geographic enrollment trends and institution-specific growth plans — do that another could effectively implement? A lot, it turns out. By examining and rethinking areas of the institution that could be improved with better data, more information-sharing and, in some cases, the help of technology, the UIA schools are on track to graduate an additional 94,000 students by 2025. That's ahead of their initial mark of 68,000 additional students.