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
I will round the bases that it's been 10 years, that 68,000 data point you mentioned, we're now at 150,000 on that goal. That was the goal that President Obama announced of ours that was by 2025, and we've already hit 150. And not by adding new campuses. This is just the original 11. But we are now about to launch our new goals.
And I will say that it's a preview, but mobility is a big part of our plan, our focus going forward. And I will say that my campuses are not just interested in getting credit for measuring it because the field is nascent on this issue. There's a lot of language and people talking about social mobility. Great. It turns out that at most, campuses are at most measuring it.
No one is trying to improve it. And what happens is campuses find out they're good at social mobility because they wind up in a ranking. And that is sad. That is not where this field needs to be. We need to work together on this. So what my campuses are willing to do, and my job is to raise the money, is we will...
aggressively consume all of the existing measures implement them but so we're going to measure post-college outcomes there's a couple different options you can choose right now and we're going to do a hybrid of that whether it's income two years post-graduation whether it's that you are employed within two years of college in a job that requires a bachelor's degree there's another early measure that is basically found this from strata education network that the second that you are no longer eligible for social services is the moment that higher ed was worth it for you
It'll be some hybrid of those things, right? Or there's a value commission from the Gates Foundation. So we're going to do the measure, but what we're going to do is set the baseline at where we are and we want to set targets to improve.
And then we are going to work together as a group to figure out what are the specific interventions and supports that dramatically improve upward mobility for students across all backgrounds. And now we represent over 570,000 students, a significant number of those, almost 200,000 are low-income students. The data will be valuable for the field. So that's where we're going to go forward.
I would just say that from my perspective, what's needed is we need a strategy as a country, a smart strategy that's about talent and opportunity in the future of work. as a country, and we also need each state needs their own strategy for talent and opportunity in the future of work. And by that people are born all over. in all kinds of backgrounds.
And the job of higher education is to take someone, no matter where they are born, what family they grew up in, to activate their talent so that they can contribute all of their potential, all of their skill, all of their talent to build a compelling future for all of us, right?
And each state should actually think about their demographics, the people who are born there, no matter their natural resources, their industries, and they actually need to have a plan.
like as if an adult was in charge and that's the part that i'm working on right now is i think that what would it look like for universities to operate truly as the talent activator that they are they would partner more closely with workforce they would collaborate aggressively they would do a much better job on the front end making it easier for students to make smart and intuitive decisions about the kinds of careers that would be a good fit for them
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.
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