Bridget Burns
speaker
389 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Bridget Burns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
and make it easier for them to make smart and intuitive decisions about what degrees to pursue or not pursue and what majors. I just think there's a lot to be fixed in this particular space, and we will be ready to announce our new goals. And I look forward to working on this because it's a super interesting, meaty problem that I just think the only real threat for me is if we go it alone.
If you have universities working on this issue alone, because I agree with you that this is the reason people come to college. And I think all students deserve us to figure this out.
This has been a privilege for me and it's a great conversation. Feel free to cut out anything. I did go along because you ask great questions and it's always, it's nice to zoom back out and look at the work from a different altitude than I always do. And yeah, thank you so much.
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. And it's been a wild ride since then, South by Southwest EDU and now across the world.
My journey has been one where I started with humble beginnings in rural Montana. And higher education really was transformative for me. I grew up in a very low-income family. in an environment that felt like a cul-de-sac of racism, homophobia, misogyny, all that stuff, right? Very rural America. And getting out was super important. Getting to college, just making it there was a huge priority.
And then college itself, higher education was just fundamentally life altering. It created incredible opportunities for me and changed my perspective of myself and the world around me. And so that's where it really begins is I got hooked on higher ed because it was so important in shifting my own opportunities and my experience. And so that's where I fall in love with higher education.
When I was a student still at Oregon State University, I was a year and a half after arriving there, I was elected student body president. And a year and a half after that, I was appointed to the State Board of Higher Education in Oregon, which is a really rapid transition for a 22-year-old. And so I was involved in the hiring and firing of my first college president at that age.
And that was when I started, I learned, I went from being a user of higher education to being aware of the complexity and challenges around governing and leading and seeing universities as organizations, as in some cases, a business and that My complaints as a user were not because somebody had planned those problems on purpose. It was actually organizational dysfunction.
It was funding challenges. It was all these other things. First, I'm hooked on higher ed. Then I go from being a user to understanding how to oversee an institution. I end up being on the board for, I think, seven institutions at the time. And later I started working at the university system and became the chief of staff.
And that really turned me on to the problem of competition in higher ed and universities not working together, not collaborating. And I just was really frustrated with that. This I just could see that they all should be on the same page, that we're all working in the same direction. We need to work together for the at the time I was in the state of Oregon, which is where I live now.
But but here are the seven institutions, limited resources, potentially millions of students, millions of people to be served. And I just kept seeing elbows thrown and I kept seeing unnecessary. It was just really difficult to get universities to be on the same page. So this is when I really fall in love with the just the tension between competition and collaboration in higher ed.
And then I go through a transition where I had heard all of these things about innovation. I'd been I was ready to transition. And I just wanted to know if innovation and higher ed was real or if it was fake and marketing and PR. And in the state that I live and the institutions I've been working with for the past prior decade, I didn't see real innovation.
I thought that all this messaging I saw out there, you know, I was just curious about it. And so I left and I was able to be an American Council on Education fellow, which is like baby president school. And you shadow a university president for a year.
And I happened to get the chance to shadow Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State, which is a very transformative experience because he's the most innovative leader in higher education. And to have this background of understanding the difference between the student perspective and how to run these institutions, I've really seen this tension around collaboration and competition.
And now I see this other dimension, which is why are some institutions able to drive change and why are some not? And is it like, why do I go to institutions and I went to more than 50? And I would ask the senior leaders about what they were doing that was interesting and innovative, but I would also ask what an institution near them was doing.
And I noticed that nobody had an answer to that second question. And so it, for me, unveiled that there was a real diffusion of innovation problem. Like, we don't know what other people are doing. We don't know if what we're doing is any good. We don't know how to copy what other people are doing. We don't know how to scale it. There's not a method for scale, like all of that.
And so all of those things combined really lead to where I am now, which is by the conclusion of my ACE fellowship, the idea of the University Innovation Alliance was Michael Crow's. And I happened to show up with a unique skill set of telling presidents what to do and organizing them and supporting them. because I was the former chief of staff for the university system.
And so building the University Innovation Alliance was the ultimate kind of, it was like the ascension for me. It was merging this focus on user-centered design and thinking about the perspective of students and why the student experience is not what it needs to be. The complexity of overseeing institutions, especially in a climate that's rapidly changing,
rapid innovation and figuring out how to get universities to work together and try and accelerate innovation by collaboration. So the University Innovation Alliance is what I launched by the end of my ACE fellowship. And I've been for 10 years now at the UIA. I'm the CEO. And to describe what we do is...
It was founded by a group of university presidents who decided to unite around a shared sense of urgency that we were doing a terrible job as a country when it comes to graduating students, especially from low-income, first-generation, and student of color backgrounds. And we have 4,000 to 7,000 universities, depending on what you measure.
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