This interview originally aired on May 19, 2025 as part of the University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast, appearing live on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The transcript of this podcast episode is intended to serve as a guide to the entire conversation, and we encourage you to watch the video of the presentation. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to another episode of the Innovating Together Podcast. I'm your host, Bridget Burns, with the University Innovation Alliance. I'm super excited to share with you about today's episode. First, I want to let you know that the Innovating Together Podcast is sponsored by Mainstay, which is a student engagement and retention platform that has been a partner that has made a huge difference on many of our campuses, and we are grateful for their support. But also, we are supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who is a unique partner that really believes in listening to the field to be able to identify the solutions that are needed rather than imposing them from the outside, and we've loved being a partner of theirs. So, thanks to them, we get to have this opportunity.
Today, I get to talk to you about my favorite thing. My favorite of all time is the Fellows Program. And specifically, you're going to get a chance to today hear from one of our superstar fellows, who wasn't just a star when they were in the Fellows Program, their very first cohort, but they also went on to make a significant change and move up throughout the UIA, and have gone on to become actually one of our lead liaisons and are playing a really significant leadership role at the University of Central Florida. And that is Dr. Ryan Goodwin.
Now, he's going to share his career path as a postgraduate. He was a post-grad at Michigan State when we first met him. He came to UIA in our very first year. He was so valuable to our work, to building it out when we were just – it was me by myself, and liaisons giving their time when they could, but we needed actual help on the ground, and so the fellows were vital for that. But then, he went on to become a liaison, to actually become one of our project leads on a variety of topics. He's played just such an important role shepherding work at UCF, University of Central Florida, for the past decade, and we are so proud of the work he's done, and he gets to share some of that.
But I want to offer that, broadly, what the UIA does is, more than anything, we notice things, we notice shared problems. And when I first started working on all of this, what I noticed is that if you wanted to work in higher education and you cared about students and you wanted to make a change, that you could walk in a couple of doors, you could go into it advising, fundraising, faculty. There were just very few doors if you were early in your career. And then, if you saw a lot of challenges and you wanted to be a part of change, you were going to have to wait about 20 years before you could actually effect that change, because you have to work your way up to build the political capital, you have to get to the position that you could actually be able to do something. That's a broad generalization, but that was how it felt.
And then, I saw an example at Arizona State, called the University Initiatives Fellows Program, and that program would take early career professionals. And Michael Crow has a bajillion, to be very technical, a bajillion ideas at any moment in time. He's an idea factory. And big ideas are one thing, but if you don't have the structure and the design to support your ideas being implemented, you are going to be in trouble. So, what he has done – and his team, that was led by Jim O'Brien and Jacqueline Smith, the University Initiatives Division – they built a fellowship that has really made such a difference in who ASU is now. It was essentially like a stable of early-career professionals, who whatever ideas he had, they would prototype them, they would build them, they would pressure test them, and then send them out into the institution. And this was a recruiting path platform for ASU for a long time, and a lot of their senior leaders now came up through this program, and it's phenomenal, and I hope they reintroduce it.
So, that's what I saw, and we riffed on it, just like we always riff on most things. And so, we said, “Great.” Early- to mid-career, a professional that will focus exclusively on working on implementing the change initiatives of the Alliance, they will work to support a cross-functional team, liaisons, and the president. They'll get a chance to see and learn the whole institution, but they're going to actually project manage a lot of this work. And it's murky, but we'll network them together, develop them, coach them, but we believe that they could be future college presidents. That was the radical idea, is we think we can actually build a pipeline of talent that is early career and is positioned to focus on change and innovation, the two things that higher ed really needs to move on.
And so, that's where the Fellows Program comes from, and that is where Dr. Ryan Goodwin, who's one of our first fellows, comes from. He's just a phenomenal talent. We're so grateful to have him. He's been able to lead such important and significant change at the University of Central Florida, and can speak to that in his speech that he gave at the UIA National Summit. And so, I am just really thrilled to introduce Dr. Ryan.
Ryan Goodwin:
As a tremendous introvert, I can't tell you how excited I am to be speaking to you this morning. In 2015, my life changed forever when I joined UCF as the University Innovation Alliance Fellow in the first cohort. I was lucky. UCF saw the potential in the role and gave me the opportunity to work in the president's office at one of the nation's largest universities. It was my first job post grad school, and I had no idea how transformative the journey would be. I also had no idea how much UCF would transform in the coming years. I also had no idea what I was doing at all.
Over the next nine and a half years, I've had the privilege to witness and contribute to monumental shifts in how we support our students at UCF. Personally, I started as a fellow, as I said, and had an office in a closet. I was then named founding director of the Center for Higher Education Innovation. It was another bet the university was making on me. The center didn't have many resources to work with, but I had the resource most important to me: confidence in me and my future from UCF leadership and from Bridget and the UIA. From my closet office, I was given the chance to start something special, and I was granted one great gift by UCF and the UIA: the ability to hire our second UIA fellow. If that first decision was a test, I aced it. Dr. Anna Drake Warshaw was my first hire, who you just heard from, who's now president. Anna was a lifesaver. She's excellent at everything I'm terrible at, and she's excellent at everything I'm good at, too.
I've held a number of positions along the way, as assistant vice president, assistant dean, and as just of a few weeks ago, senior assistant vice president for strategic initiatives and chief of staff in our Division of Student Success and Wellbeing, our largest division, by the way. I'm honored to lead a team of about 200, including all of UCF's academic success coaches, who most of you would call advisors, our training and development team, academic advocates, communications and marketing, and our Center for Higher Education and Innovation. Our work impacts all 60,000-plus UCF undergrads.
But none of this would've been possible without the UIA. None of this would've been possible without UCF's consistent confidence in me, gift of freedom to take risks and prioritization of student success. The UIA has been a consistent partner, pushing us to prioritize student success, innovate fearlessly, and collaborate boldly. This isn't just a partnership on paper; it's a driving force that has reshaped UCF's strategy, culture, and results. I'm very proud to say that student success and wellbeing is the number one priority of the UCF strategic plan.
The UIA partnership has helped spur critical partnerships beyond the UIA, including our very impactful partnership with the National Institute for Student Success. With the UIA and NISS, together, we've scaled a student success chatbot used by over 250,000 unique users, re-imagined advising analytics, implemented and scaled completion grants, innovated the college to career experience, and launched one of the largest advising reforms in the nation, shifting from a decentralized model to a fully centralized model with centralized reporting and accountability. For the first time, as of last week, UCF students have an assigned academic success coach that walks with them throughout their UCF journey, empowers them to thrive, and helps them transform their aspirations into achievements. In the process, we've cut our student-to-advisor ratio in half.
Here's the thing about transformation. Well, let me back up. The results speak for themselves, as you can see here. We're proud of our nearly 93% retention rate. We're proud that while our four-year graduation rate was 40% ten years ago, now it's 58.7%. That's nearly a 70% increase in the last decade, and we're not done yet. We have our sights set on providing the experience and supports needed to help our students achieve a 65% four-year graduation rate by 2027. Here's the thing about transformation. It's not one big moment. It's the cumulative impact of small daily actions. It's the leaders who care deeply and invest in people on the ground. I've seen this firsthand, from our provost, president, and many other UCF leaders who are willing to champion collaboration and innovation.
UCF's success is not because they invested in my success, it's because they saw someone passionate about student success and invested in them, and then they did that 100 times over with other folks who are passionate about student success, and they did that 100 times over with their consistent commitment to the UIA and to collaborative innovation. The work that truly transforms careers and institutions is led by people who are willing to take bold risks, invest in collaboration, and drive incremental yet powerful change. So, if you leave here today with one message, let it be this: Transformation isn't a single stroke of genius. It's the daily intentional efforts to drive forward, to innovate and to uplift those around you. Believe in those around you, and work with them to solve problems. And when we do that together, we not only change institutions, we change lives. Thank you.
Bios of Guests and Host
Dr. Ryan Goodwin is the assistant vice president for Strategic Initiatives. He serves as a member of the executive team for UCF’s Division of Student Success and Well-Being. He also oversees the Center for Higher Education Innovation and the Office of Data and Strategic Projects and supports divisional efforts to create an ecosystem in which all students thrive. Dr. Goodwin’s research and practice focus on higher education innovations that improve access, success, and completion for all. A native Hoosier, Dr. Goodwin earned a B.S. in Elementary Education from Indiana University Bloomington and continued his education at the University of South Carolina, where he earned a Master’s in Higher Education and Student Affairs with a concentration in Higher Education Administration. Later, he was awarded the Erickson Research Fellowship to attend Michigan State University where he completed a dual Ph.D. in Educational Policy and Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education. After leaving MSU, Dr. Goodwin served as UCF’s inaugural University Innovation Alliance Fellow and as the founding director of the Center for Higher Education Innovation.
Host: Bridget Burns, Executive Director, University Innovation Alliance
As a trusted advisor to university presidents and policymakers, Dr. Bridget Burns is on a mission to transform the way institutions think about and act on behalf of low-income, first-generation, and students of color. She is the founding CEO of the University Innovation Alliance, a multi-campus laboratory for student success innovation that helps university leaders dramatically accelerate the implementation of scalable solutions to increase the number of college graduates.
About Innovating Together
Innovating Together is an event series that happens live on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It also becomes a podcast episode. Every week, we join forces with Inside Higher Ed and talk with a higher education luminary about student success innovations or a sitting college president or chancellor about how they're specifically navigating the challenges of leadership. We hope these episodes will leave you with a sense of optimism and a bit of inspiration.
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