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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And that was a bust. And we also mapped all of the things that campuses did around career services. And we found out the vast majority had no relationship with career services. Oh, man. So if we were trying to fix career services, we were in trouble because it turns out most of these things report to the deans or they're over here in this other office.
And no surprise, there's nobody at the end of the day who's responsible for career services or career outcomes for students. It's just very distributed. And that's a formula for chaos. So that gives us... So already we're wrong in our design, but we've learned a ton.
We also then get all the career services folks together and we engage in a series of empathy sprints where we interview hundreds of students across all these campuses about what success in college would look like, what kinds of experiences have been most valuable to that end, what they've been struggling with, all that kind of stuff. And use those empathy insights to then generate...
create design charrettes and design thinking sprints where we actually came up with prototypes of what would it look like if we actually designed this part of the higher ed system around the needs of students and came up with seven different prototype models that are then our next step was you could not implement your own idea. And so Ohio State had to implement another campus's idea.
Riverside, University of Central Florida, they all had to implement someone else's idea. And that was a way for us to not fall in love with our own idea. And then COVID happened. Despite that, much of that kind of calibrated it down a bit. But despite that, we did end up developing a robust playbook and a clear picture of how you should design that whole space.
And the spoiler is there are several of the models that actually still live today. In fact, University of Central Florida just announced a $10 million gift to match COVID. their initiative that came from that project. Now it's several years later, and they're just continuing to expand it. The outcomes have been improved.
But again, it was hard for us because we couldn't baseline because it turns out nobody captured that data. It wasn't as scientific as we expected it to be, but... What we figured out is the only place that all students go is the classroom.
And so instead of an office shoved in a basement, the answer is that career services people, professionals, they should be reimagined as instructional designers. And they should be coaches for faculty to embed career readiness into every single classroom, starting from the first class a student takes. They should have a career readiness experience, activity or exercise.
They should engage and learn from alumni who are working in the field. They should be doing team-based learning. They should be doing work where we actually use what is called NACE competency language, which is like language that you could use in a job interview to describe what you did in a class. And so it's things like that. It was also paid virtual and in-person internships, micro internships.
We implemented those. It was a variety of other suite of solutions. You can download the playbook on our website. So that's what we've done thus far. I would say COVID was a disruptor for us in a significant way because building change management was really hard during that time. But now
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
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