Welcoming New Members to the UIA

Dear Friend,

This month I am thrilled to share some important news about the work of the UIA campuses, and our exciting next steps!

While sharing about the work of the UIA over the past eight years, the question I heard most frequently was "when are you going to admit more campuses?" To be honest, my answer was never that great. I would explain that we thought it would be strange to add new members while we were only midway through working on a large collective goal (as unusual as opening up an experiment and changing the participants in the middle). I would then share about all the public diffusion work we have done over the years to make our learning transparent and available to everyone in higher education (videos, podcasts, events, blogs, playbooks, op-eds, etc.), but this always felt like an unsatisfactory answer. While I did not have news to share yet, we had been thinking long and hard about what we would do when the time arrived, and most importantly how we would identify prospective partners and what kind of process would support onboarding a new campus as an equal partner.

This is why we are so thrilled to share the news of our expansion, perfectly timed to occur right when we surpassed our 2025 goals President Obama announced at the 2014 White House College Opportunity Summit. Now that we have achieved our first big public goals, and most importantly we've learned enough in the process that we know how to move even more rapidly, more ambitiously, and to bring others along. Getting to this point was hard-fought! When it comes to adding new partners, we have been trying to find the right moment and then make sure that we figure out the right partners.

With over 120 campuses having requested to join the UIA, we needed to differentiate "wanting to join" from "actual commitment to do the work." Developing a rigorous process was extremely important because the intimacy of the UIA is an essential element to our network impact, and we anticipate getting no larger than 20 institutions.

We began developing our evaluation and vetting process in early 2019, and we started with evaluating every R1 and R2 university in the country. We focused first on their data terms of demonstrated commitment to enroll and serve low-income, first-generation, and students of color at scale. We weren't looking for perfection, we were looking for genuine commitment, eager learners, engaged collaborators, people who didn't always need to be the ones sharing the ideas, and those who came with a spirit of "yes, and..." which aligns directly with our values.

Fun fact: one important objective of the show Weekly Wisdom was to help us vet and have conversations with prospective presidents, to make sure that our instincts were right, (without signaling that they were being considered for UIA membership). Over the past year, while we were creating content that was useful for the field and uplifting, we were also figuring out who were going to be our partners.

And so, after all this time we have identified a prospective list of 18 potential campuses, with two obvious standouts leading the group. There could be no more perfect partners to start our expansion than UMBC and North Carolina A&T. They have already demonstrated that they are world-class collaborators and partners, and we can't wait to show you the values of its leaders and their serious commitment to student success.