This episode of University Innovation Alliance’s Innovating Together Podcast originally aired on April 14, 2025, 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 video of the keynote. You can also access our summary, along with helpful links and audio from this episode.
Bridget Burns:
Welcome to the Innovating Together Podcast. I'm your host, Bridget Burns from the University Innovation Alliance, returning from a robust and exciting ASU+GSV Summit, which robbed me of my voice, so apologies for the hoarseness. Just like when I came back from the UIA National Summit and people kept reaching out, asking for the content because it was so rewarding and there was just so much robust content, they wanted to try and make sure they could go home and share those videos, share that insight with folks on their campus. At the ASU+GSV Summit, I certainly heard a lot of really incredible ideas that right now I'm trying to reflect on who do I need to share this with and how do I make sure that my organization, or which one of our campuses moves forward on a topic that I've come back inspired with.
So today is about that, about equipping you with the content supports, the inspiration and perspective that will help things move forward, and that is going to be a keynote that I've received no less than 12 requests for since the summit individually, people asking, "Please release this because it was so good, it was so tight, it was so focused, and it gave me exactly the case that needed to be made at my institution." And that is going to be from Tim Renick, the Executive Director of the National Institute for Student Success.
First, you need to know that the Innovating Together Podcast is actually sponsored by Mainstay, which is a platform that works closely with Georgia State and also the NISS, the National Institute for Student Success. Insights on student success backed by data has always been a key focus of our work. Mainstay, relatedly, their analytics have provided institutions with those kind of similar real-time insights into student engagement, enabling tailored strategies that help you intervene at the right moment to foster student success. So, if you want to find out more, you should definitely check out mainstay.com.
We also are grateful that Carnegie Corporation of New York, a long-time ally and supporter of the UIA, is a sponsor for this podcast.
Now, today, like I said, I'm really excited to unveil this. It's a powerful keynote from Dr. Timothy Renick from, formerly, just Georgia State in terms of – He is the one who was the driving force behind their revolution, not just transformation, their absolute revolution. They have revolutionized higher education in a very significant way by being Exhibit A, that the ideas that people think, "Oh gosh, it'd be really great if we could just figure out how to do this." They've actually done it. They've done it, and they've also given away the content. They've helped other institutions scale it.
And that's where the NISS comes into the picture, is that after helping enough institutions try and replicate the work of Georgia State, he finally formed an institute that is working with hundreds of institutions, has already seen improvement on the other campuses that he's working with that is in real time from their coaching and their capacity support. So, take a look at the NISS if you're interested. There's a long line of institutions who are interested in their support.
In this speech in particular, what Tim does is he challenges us to confront a really uncomfortable truth, and that is that we are not just failing students, we're actually complicit in stalling social mobility and undermining our democracy if we continue to operate the way we do. There is hope. He shares how data-driven, student-centered, effective implementation of strategies that he talks about are closing gaps and transforming outcomes across the country. His message is very clear. We don't need to search for more solutions. We already know it works. The question is, will we act?
This talk is going to inspire you to lead with urgency and put data to work for every student. My favorite quote that I heard from this speech was when he said that history will judge us, not for what we inherited, but for what we chose to do. So please join me in reflecting on where you can find some inspiration to drive change as a result of this talk from Dr. Timothy Renick. And the title of the speech is “Scaling What Works,” and he provides a data-driven blueprint for student success.
Dr. Timothy Renick:
So, I am honored to kick off day two. Day one was largely about the why. Why is this work important? Why do we need to do things in radically different ways? Raj Chetty so effectively pointed out how we have been deficient with regard to addressing issues of social mobility and justice across the U.S., and quite frankly, higher education is complicit in that problem. By the end of the day, yesterday afternoon, you got that point underlined by President Crowe. Mike came in, talked about not only are we undermining in higher education, social mobility, but we are a threat to the very foundation of democracy as we know it. So, heavy thoughts but well-articulated and convincing.
So, the question today is, okay, so what do we do about the fact that higher education has not performed the way we'd like and is not producing the outcomes our nation needs in order to be successful? I'm an optimist. I believe that we can achieve a significant change, but I'm going to start my comments this morning by underlining the point that we heard yesterday in a slightly different fashion. If you were to look at the headlines in most of the national publications, you would not only be confronted with articles about social mobility challenges and so forth, you would be given the impression that success rates across the U.S. are declining.
It took me all of about 45 seconds in a Google search to come up with the headlines that you see on this screen: “Progress on College Completion Rates Stalls,” “U.S. Degree Completion Slide Downwards,” “Shocking Statistics About Graduation Rates.” National publications making this point. So, I want to start this morning by level setting and explaining what is really happening at the national level. And here's one way of looking at it. These are IPEDS six-year graduation rates for every four-year public university across the United States and what has happened over the last, in this case, 15, 16 years.
And you can see that the graduation rates are not sliding downward, there's not shocking declines, and so forth. Even through the COVID pandemic, the numbers have continued to grow in a fairly steady fashion. So, just let's adjust our language and our talking points as far as that's concerned. But I want to say something more specific to the approach that the University Innovation Alliance has been promoting over its first ten years of existence by saying, "Okay, what happens if we take those same metrics, six-year IPEDS graduation rates for public four-year universities and look specifically at a subset?" This is a group I'm defining as the early data adopters. It's a group that includes several members of the University Innovation Alliance, several other institutions represented in this room that haven't been Alliance members. For instance, I saw UT San Antonio has a team here today. Great. Schools in Florida, not only just UCF, but FIU, Florida Atlantic.
These are schools that, over the last 15 years, as I've done travels and written grants and participated in collaboratives and so forth, it's clear to me that they were adopting at scale the data approach, the approach to saying that we can more holistically and proactively support our students if we use data in an intelligent fashion. And I'll tell you more about this approach as my comments advance this morning. But the headline here is that if you pull out from the overall landscape of four-year publics, specifically these institutions that have adopted this particular approach to student success, the results are even more impressive. I mean, an 18 percentage point increase. And what is striking about this chart as you look at it, it very much does coincide with when these data-based approaches began to take off.
So, you'll see the graduation rates were very level between 2006 and 2012, and then all of a sudden in 2012, there's this quite dramatic improvement which has continued again through the pandemic unabated. Well, what's happening around then, I'll say autobiographically from Georgia State's perspective, it was in 2011 that we launched our completion grant program. It was 2012 that we launched predictive analytics and began using proactive advising and so forth. So, this was the time period when these approaches were beginning to reach scale across a number of large public universities, and the results were dramatic.
Another major goal of the University Innovation Alliance is not only to improve these numbers, though, but also to address equity issues. And clearly Raj Chetty's comments yesterday underlined the importance of us doing a much better job in this room of lessening equity issues between different student populations. So, what you see over this time period here, I'm just juxtaposing the previous two charts, these early adopters of data, these institutions that have been scaling the UIA approach were actually underperforming compared to the national average – the other institutions, the four-year publics through much of the late 2000s and into the 2010s. But what you can see as the graduation rates improved at a more rapid rate among the data adopters, they are now performing at a higher level than the national average.
That might not seem shocking until you look at who these institutions are and what they represent. They're mostly very diverse public universities in large urban areas: Wayne State in Detroit, Georgia State in Atlanta, FIU in Miami, UT San Antonio, and so forth. What's happened to the equity issues? Well, this is the national picture. So, on the left, you're looking at the average graduation rate for students overall nationally with the gray dots, the blue dots are for Black students across all of the sector of four-year public institutions. And it's a very sobering picture, right? The gaps are gaping, and the other thing you can see is that the blue lines are not getting particularly closer to the gray line.
We haven't made a lot of progress in this regard. The gaps are smaller on the right side of the screen for Hispanic students, but still far too large, and again, the gaps are not closing quickly enough. So, what if we look at those same two data points for these institutions that have been the early adopters of the data approach? The news is not entirely positive, but it is much better. On the left you have Black students again, and you can see the gap is much smaller by ten full percentage points than for the sector overall. And what you can also see here, which you didn't see on the previous chart, is the gap is getting smaller.
Hispanic students’ news is even better. Gap has not only been much smaller throughout the time period, but it now has been reduced to just a fraction of a single percentage point. So, part of what I want to lead by telling you is there are things that work. We know of things that scale and are highly effective. We don't need to continue to say, "We don't know what we need to do in order to make a difference." Because there are a number of things that have been shown by these data sets, but also by a series of randomized control trials and longitudinal studies that they work and that they're highly effective.
Here's a list. It's a familiar list for those of you who were here yesterday, because these are in effect the UIA’s scale projects: using predictive analytics in order to understand better which students are at risk and what kind of supports they need; proactively structuring advising to not wait to students to come to you, but reach out to these students; using financial analytics to shape the wellness programs, financial aid, and financial wellness on your campuses; taking advantage of AI and using that to communicate in a much more responsive and coordinated fashion to students. And then taking what was long a voluntary process of students raising their hands and saying, "I'm going to go to career services," and embedding the kind of supports that students need in the very structure of their academic experiences.
These are the type of things that have changed the field of student success. The institute I currently direct, we've worked with over 100 universities over the last three years. Part of our process is to survey practitioners on each campus. We want to understand what they see as working and what's not working. We also interview hundreds of these individuals. In fact, over the last three years, we've surveyed more than 2,500 student success practitioners at universities across the U.S. And what I think is most striking about what we've heard and is testimony to the impact of the UIA is that there is almost no debate any longer about whether these things need to be done.
We go to campuses. I don't think, in talking to over 2,000 individuals, we've had a single individual who has told us, "I really don't think we need to be using data more systematically on our campus, and I don't think we need to be more proactive. I like the idea of waiting for the students to diagnose their own problems and come to us."
Now yeah, I'm glad it gets a couple snickers because it seems so out of sorts for what we have come to accept our role and need and job to be. But I can tell you, because I've been standing on stages like this for the last 15 years, that wasn't always the case. Fifteen years ago, this idea of using predictive analytics and data and tracking students and so forth was a foreign concept to most universities, and I think we should celebrate that, celebrate that at the tenth-year anniversary of the UIA, but celebrate that as progress we've made in the field.
We have changed the conversation in significant ways, and part of what this morning is set up to do is allow you to explore some of these particular topics. In fact, I chose the bullet points on the screen because after this session, there will be breakouts with experts from various UIA campuses talking about how their campus is implementing one or the other of these specific measures. In the time I have with you this morning, I want to highlight a few issues and talk a little bit about why I think these things are no longer debatable as far as their effectiveness and usefulness, not only in raising graduation rates, but in reducing equity gaps.
So I'm going to talk about three of the five that were on the previous page. The first one, proactive advising: We have known for decades at places like Georgia State, but the other institutions represented in this room, that there are students struggling on our campus. We've known that because our graduation rates are not what we need them to be. We've known that because students from underrepresented, low-income and first-gen backgrounds leave us at disproportionate rate. But think about it. For most of the 20th century and a good part of the current millennium, the idea of responding to this problem was to get messages out to students that the help was available if you want to avail yourself of it. "Come to see us, drop by, set up an appointment." And if the students didn't do so, the narrative was, "Well, it's on them. They chose not to access the sources. They're struggling, but they didn't come to get the help and the support they need."
We now know that there are so many steps that we can take to bring those students to us in a timely fashion. One thing that many of the data adopters are doing now, including Georgia State, is tracking the electronic footprint of students. These are logins to our LMS platform. It's impossible at Georgia State, at least not practical at Georgia State, to track attendance for 5,000 core sections every semester, and get that information to us in a timely fashion. But we do know there's a direct correlation that we see in the data between students who are involved in their classes attending and engaged, and those who actively perform at higher – Not logging onto the class and gaining access to electronic materials, we use that as a predictor of this student being at risk, and we charge our advisors with that information to reach out and help that student.
There are other simple data points that just about anybody in this room can begin using next week. We found that there's a strong correlation between the first grade a student gets in his or her major and their chances of graduating on time. So, a political science major, if you look at the center of the chart, who gets an A or B in their first political science course graduates on time at a 75% clip. A student in that same class who gets a C grade is graduating on time at a 25% clip. For generations, most of us in this room did nothing with that C student, right? We passed them along to upper-level coursework where whatever deficiency led to the C grade becomes exacerbated, and 75% of the students, according to this data set, would begin to struggle and then eventually drop out.
Nobody who we talk to, nobody I think in this room thinks that that's a good way of handling the circumstance. Now we're going to reach out to this student and try to offer help before they begin taking the upper-level coursework. There are finer points that may take a little longer for your campus to adopt, but they're equally intuitive in their value in helping students. So, as we've looked more and more closely at some of these data sets, we found there are things like toxic combinations of courses. If a student takes organic chemistry and calculus during the same semester, they may only have a 65% chance of passing both courses. If they take organic chemistry and calculus in successive semesters, they may have an 80% chance of passing both those classes. I'll say even the best of our academic advisors didn't necessarily know that data point when meeting with students until we began to use the predictive analytics in a more holistic and comprehensive fashion. And again, nobody would doubt if you have this information in your pocket, it isn't worth sharing with your student. You've just registered for these two courses together. You're allowed to take them together if you want, but did you know you might have a better chance of succeeding in both classes if you take them in successive semesters?
This whole discussion of using data in this way, a timely actionable use of data to help students, is something that is relatively new to the field, but something that really can't be debated at this point. Part of what we've done at the University of Innovation Alliance, we received one of the First in the World grants. We ran a six-year-long RCT to try to gauge the impact of this particular approach to advising, flipping from a passive model relying on students to diagnose their own problems, to a more active model where the students come to us because we're identifying the problems and proactively offering them support and help. Here are the results.
These are the results for Georgia State, but this was done by an independent evaluator, Ithaka S+R, over a six-year period. They found during the randomized control trial that this intervention alone, it improved graduation rates by 15 percentage points. The other thing we saw in the data is that it helped in ways that tied directly Raj Chetty's discussion yesterday. Remember, part of what he said is it's not just important if a student graduates and where they graduate from, but also what they graduate in.
When we first launched predictive analytics at Georgia State, there was some suspicion from faculty that if we advise students based on these predictive values, looking at what grades they were likely to get and so forth, that we would move all students to the easiest majors. They'd end up taking the easiest courses and pursuing the easiest majors at Georgia State. What we've found by this predictive analytics model is just the opposite. Because we're finding problems early on, we are able to help students succeed in some of the most difficult majors at rates that were far in excess of what we were able to do prior.
At Georgia State over the last decade, we've increased STEM majors by about 100%, but the biggest K gains have been for our Black students, Black male students, Latinx students, and so forth. Not because, for instance, we have more Black males declaring STEM majors, but because we're tracking students identifying problems early on and getting them help at the first sign of difficulty, we have fewer Black male STEM majors who are dropping out of the university or dropping out of the STEM field after a semester or two.
So, what can you do? What can you do as you go back to your campus over the next couple of weeks? If you haven't done so already, begin to coordinate your advising approach. Commit to a common advising platform. I can't tell you how many of the 100 schools we're working with are still in the position of saying, "We've got this tool available if the particular office wants to use it." But there's not anybody really monitoring that they do, and there's nobody insisting that they do. I'm not talking here about buying some expensive technology. If you have those resources, there may be reasons to do so. I'm talking about just having a system in place across your campus which allows other advisors to understand what students have been helped, what comments and notes have been taken down, and those records travel with the student as they advance through your institution. Establish an advising counsel that has some legislative ability.
So, what does it mean to have an advising appointment? What counts as an intervention? What should we be doing in very basic circumstances? For instance, if a student's withdrawing from a class, as an institution, do we have a policy about what we're going to do to intervene and try to help that student and so forth? Have some legislatively empowered group that gets to sit down and make some of those decisions instead of saying, "It's up to each different office, each different department to decide for themselves."
And then, once you've got some common structures, require that advisors go through common training. This is not a centralized model in any geographical sense. These advisors could still be housed in colleges and departments and so forth, but have them trained in FERPA, have them trained in crisis intervention, have them understand what is the appropriate way to use these platforms. And then – this is an iterative process – commit yourself every semester to being more proactive next semester than you were during the current semester.
We're constantly learning additional things that we need to be doing. When we launched our predictive analytics in Georgia State, we didn't have the ability to track LMS logons and look at attendance through that lens and so forth. We are constantly trying new ways to do so, but every campus could start really on Monday to begin looking at predictive analytics and advising. Start with something really simple, a student's withdrawing from a course, that's a sign of distress. If they're withdrawing from a course in the middle of the semester, they're either academically overwhelmed or facing financial or other challenges. Intervene at that point.
Second example: coordinating your communications. You heard a little bit about this story from Bridget yesterday. Let me sketch what happened at Georgia State. We were facing huge problems with summer melt about ten years ago. We had 19% of our confirmed incoming first-year class who never showed up to a single day of classes. So, we began to look at the data, and what we found is it wasn't that these students were changing their mind. They had gotten admitted to Georgia State. They had confirmed their intent to enroll. They, in many cases, came to orientation and signed up for classes. They just never showed up.
What we found linked these students together – who, by the way, were almost 80% underrepresented, minority, low-income, and first-gen students – what linked them together was the fact that they weren't navigating our bureaucratic processes. They weren't getting the FASFA in, they weren't turning in their transcripts, they didn't have immunization records. They didn't provide the sorts of things administratively that are required to get you ready for the first day of class. So, we engaged in a design thinking exercise, and it's one you could do next week. In fact, it's a perfect time of the academic year to do so. It was quite simple. What we asked is every office that was communicating with our first-year students – our so-called freshmen students during the previous cycle, so from basically May to the start of fall classes – to come to a meeting bringing one thing with them, which was, "Print out all the emails that you sent to the incoming first-year class during the cycle."
So, each office – and we're not just talking about financial aid and admissions and so forth. We got our rec center and the library and the athletics leadership and so forth to do that. And then when they came into the room, we had set it up with a whiteboard that had week by week through the cycle from May to the start of classes, different dates on it, and each team got a different color sticky note. And if they had sent an email that day, they were charged with putting the sticky note on the board so we could get a sense of what was going on. And as you heard from Bridget, and we saw from our friends at Michigan State, it was ugly. It was embarrassing. I mean, it was gallows humor, laughing going on in this room because we began to realize that there was no coordination whatsoever.
Nobody at Georgia State knew who was communicating with the students on any given day and what they were saying. And when we began to see what was being said, it was not at all what we would've prioritized. The particularly energetic graduate assistant in our rec center was sending daily notices to students about a canoe trip that you could engage in. Meanwhile, our financial aid office was trying to not bombard the students, so it was only sending one message a week. So, if you're a student, you must think going on the canoe trip is more important than completing your FAFSA. And we all know this is happening over and over again on our campuses to the point where it's not even as organized as our whiteboard. This is what the students are getting, is just this onslaught of emails and messages, and most of them are tuning us out.
So, we made the decision in 2016 to totally change the way we communicate with our incoming first year students. We were one of the first schools in the country to really scale the use of an AI coaching or chatbot platform. We're using Mainstay for this work. We built up a knowledge base of all the kind of questions that first year students ask about, housing and financial aid and transcripts and immunization and so forth. And we put these responses on a platform where the AI was used when a text question came in to identify the right response and deliver it to the students.
We thought that this would help, we hoped that this would help with some of the summer melt problems we were facing, but we weren't sure about it. The first four months we had the tool available, we had over 180,000 exchanges with students. Average response time when a student asked a question was six seconds. Use of the chatbot was heavier at 12:00 midnight than 9:00 in the morning. And that observation alone tells you something important. Anytime you have a service available to students, which is time limited, only available 10:00 to 4:00 on Tuesday, Thursdays, I can assure you that that resource will be used more forcefully by your most empowered students. And your students who are working jobs, your students who have child-rearing responsibilities, your students who have these complicated lives will be less able to access it.
So, all of a sudden, almost overnight, we began to get this help to all of our students 24/7. And what we really did, I think, at heart, is take what was an onslaught of messages from more than a dozen different offices and begin to stack them as far as levels of importance, begin to recognize how many an individual student was receiving, so that we began to look like we knew what we were doing for the first time. And the impact – and this is the result of a randomized control trial, the results are published out there – we've been able to reduce summer melt at Georgia State by 50%. It was 19% this past fall. It was 9% more than 50% drop.
And the RCT will show you that the biggest gains are for our most vulnerable students. So, the empowered, middle- and upper-income students, they were already making it through the administrative gauntlet. It's our first-gen, our minoritized low-income students that have benefited the most. And because it worked so well for our first-year students, we now have the tool available to all our continuing students. It continues to help them navigate the administrative hurdles at Georgia State. These are results of another randomized control trial. And they're striking. We're not seeing 5% improvement in outcomes. Students starting the semester with a balance down by almost 50%, students with account balance, who actually take a step to deal with it in financial aid up by a third and so forth.
And more recently, because this tool is now in the hands of all of our students 24/7 and thousands and thousands of students are using it every day, we've begun to integrate it into our highest DFW rate classes, the courses with the highest non-pass rates. And we've run other randomized control trials, and you're looking at the results here, that we've seen significant gains in having this tool available to nudge students to study before an assignment, or remember that a paper is coming up, or being there to answer some basic questions about the course when they're home doing homework, but the instructor is not immediately available.
And again, disproportionately strong gains for Pell students. In the breakout session we'll do about chatbots, I'll tell you more about a large Department of Ed grant that we have for the next four years where we'll be working not only at Georgia State, but with two of the campuses in the room today, with University of Central Florida and Morgan State University on implementing this AI-enhanced coaching platform in introductory math and English classes across those schools over the next four years.
So, what do you do with communications? What are the next steps? Well, go back to your campus if you haven't already and do this design exercise. It doesn't take a lot of pre-planning. And I think the advantage is not only do you get good data that you didn't have before about your communications, you get an audience of people across all those offices to realize why you need to do something significantly different than you are currently. Designate a university texting platform, come up with some policies that control the flow of texts so that texting doesn't become the same thing that email became, a free-for-all for everybody on campus. We actually have a chatbot team at Georgia State that vets every request for a text to go out to students and makes a judgment about what is the prioritization? We can't send any one student five texts a day. Each student's going to get two or three a week. What are we going to prioritize? Let's put that in the hands of a team that can make good, wise decisions.
The last example I'll share is how you can use data better with regard to financial aid and financial wellness. Here's some sobering data we just came up with about a year and a half ago. We looked at 75,000 bachelor students for an eight-year period from 2013 to 2021, asked a very simple question: What is the difference in ultimate graduation rates for students among those 75,000 bachelor students who were barred from enrollment for a single semester for financial reasons? So, they had a financial hold on their account, or they got dropped from their classes for non-payment, some financial issue that made them or caused them to stop or discontinue their enrollment for even a single semester.
And you're looking at the sobering data right here, that the bottom line is even if a student is stopping out for a single semester for financial reasons, their chances of graduating go down by 50 percentage points. Fifty percentage points. Most of these students think they're coming back. A lot of our protocols go on the assumption, "Oh, they're out now, but they're going to be coming back again." But the reality is most students don't. In fact, across that whole group of 75,000 students, only 24% of the students who stopped out for a single semester for financial reasons ever came back and completed their degree.
More encouragingly, a lot of these students are stopping out not for a lot of money. So, that gives us some opportunities to think about intervention. And then, maybe the most surprising thing we saw across these data sets is the students who were most likely to stop out for financial reasons were not the first-year students or the sophomores, they were the seniors. Because if you enroll low-income students, those seniors are the ones who are going to be running out of eligibility for their aid program. Even if they're making good academic progress, they may not have the aid to get them across the finish line.
So as many of you know, Georgia State became one of the first schools in the country to scale a completion grant program. This was in 2011, where we began not requiring the students to identify, not promoting themselves, but just began to identify via the data and provide students who are close to graduating and had run out of aid with these micro-grants averaging about $900. We've given over 22,000 of these grants out. What has happened is basically by giving the student $900 at the right moment and keeping them enrolled, instead of allowing them to stop out, we've overcome all the negative impacts of that stop-out rate. Their graduation rates go right back up to the level of other students. In fact, 85% of the senior recipients of these grants went on to graduate and they're graduating with far less debt.
What do you do in financial aid? Next steps, acknowledge on your campus that financial aid challenges are not a challenge exclusively for the financial aid office. These offices are overmatched and overwhelmed. It is a collective responsibility. Confront misunderstandings about FERPA. Probably half the campuses we work with at the NISS start with the assumption, "We can't share information about which students are at financial risk with our registrar's office or our academic advisors and so forth." That is not true. The Department of Education has embraced the Georgia State model of sharing these data. These are people who need to know the information to advise students properly and begin to identify and track early financial risk factors just as you're going to do or already doing in the academic space.
The good news is you can bring about transformation in a relatively short period of time. We're currently working, as I mentioned, with over 100 universities. We've only been in existence for a couple years. All of these hundred go through a six-month diagnostic. We look at both quantitative and qualitative data to try to understand what's working and what's not with their student success programs. We have a whole process of change where they then engage with NISS tools and resources, digital courses. In many cases, our coaches are meeting with them every other week to help them implement changes.
What's happened? The first cohort of schools we worked with was a group of seven institutions in Georgia. Across those seven institutions, over the first two years of this program, we've seen an average increase in retention rates of almost nine percentage points. Put that in perspective. What's happened nationally over that same time period? The improvement in retention rates over that same time period is 1.5. This need not take years, right? There are systematic changes that can begin making significant differences for your students almost immediately.
And we've seen the same thing across these NISS partner campuses with regard to equity gaps that all the students are doing better, each racial and ethnic group. For instance, the white students' retention rates across those schools up by almost five points, well above the national average. But what you can see is these interventions disproportionately benefit minoritized students, students from underserved backgrounds, Black, Hispanic students up by 11 and 13 points. And across all of our partner campuses now, a much broader group over the last year, we've continued to see that same rate of improvement in retention rates at about four percentage points a year.
So, the last thing I'm going to say in my closing couple minutes here is just to underline why this work is so important. Not just this work generally, but specifically the idea of offering systematic supports for all of your students. Not targeted supports for one group that one group receives and others don't, but systematic changes for the whole student body.
One event that was very memorable for us over the last five or so years was we had a visit from Bill Gates. He was speaking in downtown Atlanta, and actually his people contacted us, and they said, "Would you mind if he comes by for a couple hours?" And we said we would allow it just this one time, "But don't let it become a habit." And he came. He spent two-plus hours learning about our programs. He was on our predictive analytics platform and chatbot and doing all those things. That was really great and affirming that maybe we're doing something that is working. But clearly the highlight of the visit was he asked to meet with some of our first-gen students. So, we picked up a group of students for him to meet with, and it was really very affirming for them. They've all gone on to continue to talk about this day that they got to meet Bill Gates.
But what I want to observe here is if you're looking at this picture, you might not immediately assume which student in the room was the least likely to be there. It was almost surely Austin. Austin came from a very low-income family in a rural section of North Georgia. His father was career military. When his father left the military, he ran a fruit and vegetable stand. So already by Georgia standards, the likelihood that somebody with that economic profile would get a bachelor's degree was under 10%. But the odds became even less likely as his academic work unfolded during middle school because his father was diagnosed with ALS. And it began a four-year period where Austin had to come home immediately after school because his mother was working a night retail job. She would care for the husband during the day, and then Austin would come home from school, no extracurriculars, just directly after school, and help care for the dad and his siblings when he got home as the oldest son.
And sadly, I'll say this, that one of the saddest stories that Austin tells is he, to this day, will tell you he's one of the most careful drivers he knows, because one of his dad's last wishes was to teach Austin how to drive. And his father was in a lot of pain at the time, and so Austin learned to brake really carefully and slowly and so forth and not have impact. Sadly, his father did pass away while Austin was in high school. So, you can imagine how many kids are going to recover from that and go on under these circumstances and be successful in college. But Austin applied to Georgia State. He not only got in, he got a major state scholarship and was excited and thrilled about that opportunity. But several months before the start of fall classes, he got his first bill, and it was much higher than he thought it would be, thousands of dollars more than he thought it would be. And like a lot of first-generation students, he immediately blamed himself. "Oh, I obviously didn't calculate this well." In fact, he says he was even embarrassed to tell his mother about this big shortfall because he knew on her retail job and the finances of the family, she couldn't possibly fill this multi-thousand-dollar gap.
But the good thing about this story, bleak though it is in some ways, is that Austin struggled with this issue in the summer of 2016. We had just launched the chatbot. And while Austin was embarrassed to admit that he had not calculated things well, he was not too embarrassed to go on the chatbot and figure out what went wrong. And he went into the systems and asked a lot of questions and found out that he really did deserve the scholarship that he'd earned, but it wasn't being applied to his current bill because there had been some transcription of some Social Security number somewhere in the system. He says he was so happy to learn the news and tell his mother that yes, he is going to be able to go to college, that even though 99% of our students pay their bills online, he insisted, the mom insisted on physically coming down to campus, standing in line at the bursar's office, and he says his mother had tears down to her face while they were paying the bill that she was so happy and relieved for Austin.
And what I want to close by just pointing out to you is the importance and the weight of what we do on a day-to-day basis. If we hadn't committed to using data and committed to making some systematic changes and so forth, that picture, that selfie that the students took right before Bill Gates left, it would've been a very different picture. And I think while we live in very divisive times, we would all agree that the world's a much poorer place if that selfie was taken and Austin was not there to stand for it. So, we talk about the thousands of students, the hundreds of thousands of students that we've helped at the University Innovation Alliance at a number of our member campuses, but each one of those students has a story like Austin. And what you're doing is more important than you can ever imagine.
If there's one message that comes from the first two years of the UIA, and a message that comes from the work of Georgia State, is you have more power than you give yourself credit for, that you have the power to overcome some of those inequities that Raj Chetty was talking about that predate when the students arrive on our campuses. You have the power to significantly improve graduation rates. You have the power to significantly reduce and even eliminate equity gaps. And I'm so proud of the fact that you're here today to learn more about how to do so. So, thank you for your attention, and thank you for all you do on behalf of our students.
Bios of Guest and Co-Host
Dr. Tim Renick, who has led Georgia State University’s student success efforts since 2008, is the founding executive director of Georgia State’s National Institute for Student Success, and Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State. Previously, he served as Georgia State's Senior Vice President for Student Success, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and Director of the Honors Program. Between 2008 and 2020, he directed the university's student success efforts, overseeing one of America's fastest improving graduation rates and the elimination of all equity gaps based on students' race, ethnicity or income level. Dr. Renick has testified before the U.S. Senate on strategies for helping low-income university students succeed and has twice been invited to speak at the White House. His work has been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, and CNN and cited by former President Barack Obama. He was named one the 16 Most Innovative People in Higher Education by Washington Monthly, and received the Award for National Leadership in Student Success and the McGraw Prize in Higher Education. He has served as principal investigator for more than $30 million in federal and private research grants in student success. A summa cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College, Dr. Renick holds his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University.
Co-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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