Learning from what works... and what doesn't

Dear Friend,

The resilience of our students, faculty, staff, and administrators was on full display over the past year, making graduation season more emotional (with gratitude and admiration) than ever before. The pandemic revealed so much about our students and our institutions. We were reminded of our students vulnerability to sudden financial difficulty and trauma, yet we also saw how nimble our campuses were capable of being when our students needed help.

At the UIA, thinking about graduation always brings us back to completion grants, an intervention first developed at Georgia State University and later scaled to every UIA institution (with the support of Ascendium Education and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Last month we shared our playbook and the lessons we learned— both positive and negative— about adopting and adapting strategic financial interventions. We're grateful for the impact these grants have had on the lives of our students, and we hope this playbook helps you support your students.

When the UIA first launched in 2014, one of the core commitments in our work was to cultivate and amplify a different kind of conversation in our sector: one that talks about failure, shares learning from things that don't go as planned, and one that creates social safety to help higher education innovate more rapidly. We were tired of perfectly curated stories bragging about success rather than sharing learning, and we suspected a more candid and honest dialogue might help our sector evolve and improve more rapidly to serve the needs of the students we care about.

UCR Chancellor Kim Wilcox was quoted in Goldie Blumenstyk's 2014 Chronicle article when we launched "UIA's value would come not only from what it does right but also from its failures. "No one ever talks about what didn't work," and "no one else can learn from that."

He was right! Over the past seven years, we have shared countless examples of things that didn't go as planned, and in every circumstance, we are better for it. The completion grants playbook would not be as effective if we were polishing things up and hiding the ball. Instead, we learned and shared the most valuable lessons as a result of our commitment to talking about and learning from failure. For example, we found that we could use completion grants to get a student to graduation, but we had no idea that there could still be an extra fee preventing a graduate from accessing their transcripts— which could make their degree far less usable. Rather than patting ourselves on the back for implementing a completion grant perfectly as planned, going through this process helped us identify an entirely different problem we weren't aware of and explore solutions.

What is something you learned only because of things not going as planned? I would love to hear about it.