Higher education has always been rich with innovation. And while these innovations are certainly worth sharing with other institutions, scaling them effectively can be challenging. Leaders and thinkers are often frustrated by the inability to translate their ideas for increased student success beyond the walls of their own universities. To address this, it’s critical to recognize that scaling is not merely replication – it’s a strategic, context-sensitive process, and any lasting impact depends on governance, policy alignment, and continuous learning. Copy-and-paste approaches rarely stick in higher ed because every campus context is different. Simply put, innovation doesn’t scale unless systems are designed to support it.
The University Innovation Alliance (UIA) is thrilled to introduce a scaling toolkit that integrates lessons from K-12 education, healthcare, and social innovation with our real-world experience scaling innovation across our 19 public research universities.
Failure to Scale
In working with many institutions over the years, we’ve noted a widespread foundational problem. There’s an institutional tendency to evolve away from the original mission of educating students toward a culture of siloed, self-sustaining departments and systems that benefit faculty and staff. Fragmentation creates difficulties in implementing institution-wide change, as misalignment between administrative policies and on-the-ground conditions is often too easy to occur.
Another problem we’ve seen is that change can’t happen effectively without the infrastructure to support it. Breaking down silos and course-correcting misaligned policies are great starting points. Still, these alone might not be enough for a successful institutional pivot if there aren’t already available resources or adequately trained staff to support the change. The unintended outcomes might slow innovation even further.
Scaling as a Systemic Process
The UIA has created an action-oriented toolkit of guidelines and resources to serve as a practical framework for scaling student success innovations in higher ed. We’ve integrated insights from K-12 education, healthcare, and our decade of experience addressing challenges around governance, institutional buy-in, and scalability to foster systemic change across public higher ed institutions. The toolkit’s intended audience is:
- Institutional leaders
- Governing boards
- System heads
- Funders
- Policymakers
- Innovators
- Implementers
As a starting point for individuals in these roles, and everyone else working to support scaling student success innovations, we acknowledge that scaling is not linear, nor is it just about growth. Scaling is about evolving practices, shifting norms, embedding these changes into policy, and building lasting infrastructure.
Innovation and scale happen in partnership with change management and dynamic interaction within and across three layers:
- Local: The unit, campus, or institutional team driving the innovation.
- Organizational: Governance structures, institutional networks, and funding mechanisms.
- Macro: Federal and state policy, institutional accreditation and compliance requirements, philanthropic influence, and external forces.
Innovations shape and are shaped by the contexts and systems around them.
How Completion Grants Illustrate 3 Types of Scale
Scaling typically falls into three major categories: scaling out (spreading with adaptation), scaling deep (shifting cultural norms), and scaling up (embedding within policy). The UIA and our collaborators have pursued all three in our quest to improve student success. The growing popularity of completion grants, a powerful tool for student success, can serve as an example of successful scaling within these three categories.
Scaling out: A completion grant is a small amount of financial aid for under-resourced students who are just a few credits away from completing their degree and need a little help to reach the finish line. This Alliance-wide initiative was inspired by Georgia State University’s Panther Retention Grant and University of Central Florida’s Knights Success Grant.
Scaling deep: Introducing completion grants at Iowa State University prompted stronger relationships within the campus community. ISU’s Office of Student Financial Aid strengthened its collaboration and communication with many departments to better support students experiencing financial difficulties. The Athletics Program alone donated $1 million to the initiative. The institution-wide adoption of a completion grants strategy created opportunities for cultural shifts and improved connections across campus.
Scaling up: Thanks in part to the success of Georgia State’s Panther Retention Grant and the tireless efforts of Dr. Tim Renick, among others, to share its impact, the state of Georgia adopted the Georgia College Completion Grant Program. Tens of thousands of students within the University System of Georgia (USG), Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG), and eligible private non-profit postsecondary institutions have benefited from this program.
We offer these examples to show that scaling takes infrastructure, time, intention, and energy. This is a clear demonstration of how those efforts can make a huge impact.
Conditions for Successful Scaling
Scaling is a complex, contextual, and ongoing process. Through interviews, literature review, and over a decade of practical experience, we identified nine key elements that create the conditions for successful scaling efforts. Some of the elements are likely to overlap, manifest differently, and shift in their emphasis. Taken together, they create the necessary conditions for successful scaling. These elements fall into three categories: foundation, implementation, and culture and relationships.
Foundation: All stakeholders should be on the same page about identifying and understanding the problem to be solved. They need to share an urgency to solve it and a willingness to adapt the systems they’re using in the interest of creating an environment that favors their agreed-upon solution.
Implementation: From the beginning, any successful innovation is built to last. This means all parties committing to the desired result, embracing the most practical means for getting there, and staying alert to local and global conditions affecting how innovation will evolve and how it can be sustained.
Culture and Relationships: All participants should trust and honor the team making the innovation happen, the allies supporting the effort, and the people most likely to benefit from the innovation. This broad community will be critical to the success of the current project – and foundational to the success of future innovations.
Are You Ready to Scale Innovation at Your School?
In our efforts to understand scaling and put forward a practical framework for higher education, we at the UIA have reaffirmed our belief in the central role of change management in any innovation or scaling process. We’ve also come to recognize that scaling is about adapting rather than merely copying a set of rules and circumstances. In the second part of this series, we’ll help leaders determine if they’re ready to scale innovation and how to pursue that initiative. You can also download the toolkit to learn more.
Resources
- The UIA’s Scaling Toolkit
- Scaling Student Success: Insights from Bridget Burns on Ed on the Edge - UIA
- Completion Grants: Innovative Financial Aid for Today's Students - UIA
- Scaling What Works in Higher Education: UIA Summit Keynote by Tim Renick, Executive Director, National Institute for Student Success - UIA