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
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.
The prospectus, which was the 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 Crow, 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 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 to get more people in. That was the strategy.
And the other theme was undermatching 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, and that there are millions of people walking around who went to college and the only credential they have is a student loan because they failed out, because the institution was never designed for them to be successful.
And just like the scale of that and the threat that creates for the future economic competitiveness of this country. And it's just it was like it's a big problem, but nobody sits with it. It's no one's responsibility to fix that. We all need it to be solved.
But when you have college presidents who are hired to run just one institution and their board holds them accountable to move up and down in the rankings against each other, imagine what that does. It doesn't make them want to work on the same team and fight for a bigger cause than themselves. It makes them want to play defense and hunker down and focus only on their institutions.
It was a huge challenge to build that. And then also I needed to raise all the money for it to work. exist. And thankfully, the idea was right. The people were right. And they were responsive and excited. And honestly, it's only the momentum has just accelerated from then. Now we have 17 institutions. And I say that, but I stopped counting
the number of institutions who were asking to join the alliance at 120. And I stopped counting within six months of announcing the alliance. So it's not a question of we could be massive and have all kinds of institutions, but it was about figuring out who first we needed to actually do the thing to actually accomplish our goals.
of figuring out how to innovate together and scale up what works, hold each other accountable, and produce dramatically more graduates, especially from low-income backgrounds. But the big challenge I ran into after that was, how do you figure out who to let in when you've already built something that's successful?
Because then you run into the problem of people want to be a part of something that's successful. They like the image of it, perhaps. They like the PR and the marketing, and it looks really great. But we needed to figure out who else out there is a worker bee.
Who else is interested in doing like the really hard stuff and not just drawn to the fact that we will have been very effective at telling our story and amplifying the importance of this work. So that's to this day still one of the biggest problems I face is that vetting issue of who else to let in because this could continue to grow.
But we have to actually deliver on the outcomes while we're doing it.
So I think that a lot of the time we just have no intentional strategy about change. We expect change to happen. And then we don't think about the very human experience of, okay, I come into my office every day. I've worked an entire career with the hopes of being able to see a window. I've worked in a cubicle most of my life.
It's a huge deal to finally have an office that I, maybe I don't have a corner office. Maybe I just have a window I can see. And now you got to come in here and you're telling me that we're going to be moving our department because we need to do a better job.
We need to combine departments because of a need to do data sharing and also to make sure that we're aligning our systems and process with this other department. What I know. is that you just told me that I'm going to have to give up this office that I've worked for. You're completely ignoring the things that matter to me, the experiences that have been valuable to me.
You haven't, for a second, given me an opportunity to even offer ideas based on the, let's say, 20-year career I have. Let's say I have some expertise to contribute. Instead, you just come in with this pipe dream of an idea. You know what the solution is, and you give people no opportunity to to add to it, to make it feel like it's an idea that they could be excited about.
Showing 341–360 of 389 · page 18 of 20
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