From Innovation to Impact: What We’re Building Next

For more than a decade, the UIA measured progress in degrees. 183,500 additional graduates beyond projected baselines. That number is really important, and more than anything it represents a group of institutions choosing to hold each other accountable to improve. I'm so proud that they continue to do that for each other's students.

But this year's annual report reflects something we've been feeling for a while now: completion opened the door. Mobility is what lies beyond it.

We're proud to share our 2025 Annual Report. Here are a few highlights.

DFW rates have been a challenge across all of higher education for a long time. And the pattern is always the same: a student gets a D, F, or withdraws from a gateway course, and our only response is hope.
We hope they retake it.
We hope they do better next time.
With the support of Ascendium and the DeLuca Foundation, 11 of our campuses implemented something better than hope.

They redesigned 18 gateway courses with supports like supplemental instruction and near-peer coaching for more than 1,400 students. The assumption was always that students fail because they lack academic preparation. The reality is they fail because of work schedules, family obligations, health crises, and life complexity. Nationally, students who retake a course pass at about a 53% clip. With the Academic Recovery approach, our students passed at 70 to 80%.

The data across all 11 campuses was compelling and externally evaluated. But the best stuff is yet to come. Don't worry, we will share it all. And it wouldn't be the UIA if we weren't building an awesome suite of tools and playbooks to help any campus apply this intervention.

We also went after a question that's been nagging us: why doesn't learning innovation scale as far or as fast as students need? Fifty-five faculty across 14 campuses redesigned 24 STEM foundational courses, reaching more than 7,200 students. The assumption was that faculty innovation happens through individual heroics. The reality is faculty innovate at scale when given structure, time, peer accountability, and shared tools.

There's so much more in the full report, including:

• Our Listening Lab, where 13 campuses listened to hundreds of students across 85 focus groups and trained 45 new moderators to facilitate conversations that lead to real institutional change
• The University Innovation Lab crossing 1,000 members across 30+ campuses, a 40% increase this year alone
• Our free Scaling Innovation Toolkit, a practical guide for embedding innovation into how institutions actually operate
• Our free AI Vendor Diagnostic, built to help leaders ask better questions when navigating high-stakes AI contract decisions

Looking ahead, we're launching a range of exciting initiatives to solve shared problems around college choice and decision-making, how we prepare graduates to be future ready, how we serve transfer students, and ways we use AI to improve the student experience. At the core of it, we will always care deeply about student success, but student success must translate into social and economic mobility.

I can't wait for this next chapter.

I hope this report gives you a sense of what we've learned over the past year.

In partnership, 
Bridget