Fresh From The UIA

Great news: we just kicked off our annual round of national recruiting for UIA fellows. The UIA Fellowship is a full-time, paid 12-24 month leadership development program that places top-tier early career professionals with institutions across our eleven member alliance. This year, we're recruiting for UIA fellows at Arizona State University, Ohio State University, University of California Riverside, and University of Central Florida. Get all the details here and spread the word! Note: we're currently recruiting for project fellows as well.

Earlier this year, several students at University of California, Riverside (UCR) found themselves stuck in a difficult situation. They had failed to register for a full-time course load, so they hadn't received their financial aid, but a hold on their accounts prevented them from enrolling in a full-time course load. It was what you might call “a financial aid loop”.

While just a few semesters ago, these students would have likely fallen through the cracks, UCR now tracks students proactively through a project called Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS).

Our advisors had a problem. They had millions of data points—grades, test scores, and more—at their fingertips but no time to figure out how to use them to help their students. Applied at just the right time, this data could be used to proactively reach out to students to avoid common issues and resolve minor mixups before they became major barriers. However, advisors were too busy addressing current problems to try to prevent new ones. It was a messy, complex situation but one particularly suited to process mapping.

Portland, Ore. – The University Innovation Alliance (UIA) today released the formal agenda for its first ever National Summit for Student Success Innovation and Campus Transformation, which will take place April 3 through April 5, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia. The Summit builds on the Alliance’s commitment to identifying, scaling, and sharing innovations that improve college graduation rates for first-generation college students and those from low-income backgrounds.

The UIA has always been deeply committed to the role of public universities as engines of social mobility, so we were proud last year when UIA institutions did exceptionally well in an important 2017 ranking by the Brookings Institution of which public universitites contribute most to social mobility.

We're delighted to announce that the University Innovation Alliance's first ever National Summit for Student Success Innovation and Campus Transformation will be taking place April 3 through April 5, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Portland, Ore. – September 25, 2017 – College completion data released today by the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) shows that the number of low-income graduates has increased by 24.7 percent among participating universities over the past three years, marking significant progress toward the Alliance’s goal of graduating an additional 68,000 undergraduates by 2025.

PORTLAND, Ore. – August 16, 2017 – The University Innovation Alliance (UIA) today announced a new scale initiative designed to ensure that students who face financial challenges at the end of their studies aren’t prevented from graduating. The new initiative will provide students at its 11 partner universities with completion grants to alleviate financial pressure in their last semesters.

When it comes to the classroom, we don’t want just one winner, which is why in the past we've used the Final Four as an analogy for the kind of thinking higher education should avoid.

We argued that while rounds of elimination may be exciting when it comes to sports, it’s misplaced in higher education where an unrealistic “beat the odds” mentality has traditionally held too much sway and is particularly out of place with respect to low income and first generation students.