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 it sure seems like a lot of repeated experiments and tinkering in silos. And so this group decided to band together to see if we could move faster and that going it alone was a waste of time, energy and money. And so this is the culmination of all of my prior background into one experience.
And I have the privilege of helping the most innovative universities hold themselves accountable by working together and driving rapid innovation, prototyping, scaling to try and solve student problems. And we've been able to, over the course of 10 years, we've been able to produce over 150,000 more graduates than we were
on track to at even stretch capacity when we formed and uh 89 more graduates of color 41 more low-income graduates so it's been wildly successful um because of i think the willingness to hold the tension between competition collaboration innovation and how you get universities
to really be serious about the painful process of change and the painful process of redesigning what they do around the students they need to serve.
It originally wasn't my idea. It was Michael Crow's. And he had already found the 11 total. So it was him and 10 other presidents. But I will say there was a baseline commitment to a willingness to figure that out together. And I think at the time, these presidents, they were willing to see. And they signed up for the chance to figure out how they would do this together. And I think that...
They had a shared interest in addressing the scale question, and ultimately they realized that they were all wrestling with the same challenge of needing to improve outcomes for populations that we've historically failed. But when I got involved, it was not moving as quickly as it should, and it was because these people had not really spent time building relationships together.
And I was willing to actually fly to each of their campuses and spend time. If there's anything distinctive about me, it's that I'm an incredibly curious person. I find people fascinating. And just from a human interest perspective, but also I find just all of this work is just endlessly interesting to me.
And I find watching leaders figure out like how they lead, how they drive teams, how they advance, how they... These jobs are just so fascinating and difficult. And so... Each of them was like its own case study that I could observe. And what my job was at the time was to get this moving. And the way I did it, though, was because through my
like deep curiosity about them, I could see that they had the same problems and they didn't know it. And there was no way they were going to come to that conclusion because of the architecture of the sector. Higher education is highly competitive. It is hierarchical. We are all a bunch of people who are trying to prove ourselves to each other with our pedigree and our publishing and our rankings.
And it's just very much set up that the rewards and trappings pit you against others. And as a result, there's very little, space to share about shared problems and to really understand that maybe it's not you that's the problem. Maybe it's actually that these systems are problematic in their design. They were not designed around students.
It turns out leading a complex bureaucracy with a multi-billion dollar footprint is like really complicated and hard. And that it's also hard to be a human doing that. These people are humans, right? And so I had to do a lot of the weaving of the relationship because they don't have time to get to know each other.
They would come to a meeting every three months and they were interested, but I don't think that they would have kept going had I not been able to weave together. a sense of perspective between them and for them to know that, hey, Michael Crow struggles with that thing, too. Or President Chancellor Wilcox, they're having that same issue at UC Riverside.
And in fact, here is a here's some anecdotes from that experience that makes them realize that maybe there's other value in working together beyond just teaming up to see if this works. It's actually, wow, it would be nice to have some allies, some buddies. And that was a really big part, I think, that I played.
And then also forming the prospectus, which was basically the strategy and what we were going to do. And getting 11 college presidents and chancellors in 11 states, running institutions over 25,000 students.
to sign off on a document that was so significant, including a data sharing agreement and agreeing to match all the money that is raised was really, it required a lot of trust building because there's no way that any one person can read every single line. But for me, I had to, and I had to come up with this consensus-based document and how this organization was going to operate.
And when I first got to, you talked about like the kind of entrepreneurial aspect of it. When I first got to ASU and met Michael Crowe, He told me I was a bureaucrat and that I was going to need to become an entrepreneur if I was going to do this. And we were going to have to break out that bureaucrat. And boy, did we.
I don't think I... I wasn't already... I had some entrepreneurial tendencies prior to this. But it just required a willingness to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and figure it out and ask for a lot of help and advice from people. But just sitting with the stories that I had to surface of the campuses and the weaving between of what they had in common.
And then also what the sector really needed to see from that. leaders that would be fundamentally different than everything they'd seen before. Because at the time, higher ed was obsessed with college access, which is just get more people in. That was the strategy.
And the other theme was under-matching from President Obama, which was basically that low-income kids could get into better schools, but they just don't know it. And both of those things are right and fine for that time.
But they are missing the biggest problem, which is that there are literally millions of students who are never going to go to college if the higher ed doesn't change how well it does, how well we serve those students.
Showing 201–220 of 389 · page 11 of 20
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