Chief Change Officer
#217 Dr. Bridget Burns: Changing Higher Ed from Turf Wars to Teamwork — Part One
Thu, 6 Mar 2025
Higher education often feels like a reality TV show—full of rivalries, dramatic eliminations, and schools fighting for the top spot. But what if universities actually worked together?Enter Dr. Bridget Burns, CEO of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) and host of The Innovating Together Podcast. From her small-town roots to becoming a driving force in educational reform, Bridget is on a mission to replace academic competition with collaboration. She’s tackling the “Higher Ed Hunger Games” head-on, working to boost graduation rates and open doors for low-income students—no cutthroat eliminations required.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Overcoming Adversity: Bridget's Journey from Isolation to Empowerment“I grew up in a cul de sac of racism, homophobia, misogyny—very rural America—and getting out was super important.”Problem in Universities: Unveiling the Diffusion of Innovation Problem“We don’t know if what we’re doing is any good, or how to scale it.”Higher Ed Hunger Games: Tackling the Cutthroat Competition"Higher education is highly competitive, hierarchical, set up to pit you against others, which leaves very little space to share about shared problems."Real Change or Just for Show? Scouting for True Innovators in Academia"We need to figure out who else is a worker bee, who's interested in doing the really hard stuff and not just drawn to the image."Who Actually Likes Change? Spoiler: No One“Everyone who says they like change is a liar. You only like change that is your idea and that you actively participate in creating.”______________________Connect with Us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Bridget Burns______________________--**Chief Change Officer**--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Deep Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives, Visionary Underdogs,Transformation Gurus & Bold Hearts.6 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.100,000+ subscribers are outgrowing. Act Today. --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Bridget Burns and what is her mission in higher education?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today, I welcome Dr. Bridget Burns from the University Innovation Alliance.
Bridget and I met at South by Southwest when we were on the same judging panel for startups in education technology. That was a time before COVID. Many changes have occurred ever since. Bridget has navigated these changes firsthand in higher education.
She's now leading a university innovation alliance focused on improving graduation outcomes for students from low-income families, a mission tied closely to her own background. In this episode, we'll explore how she convinced 11 schools to work together shifting the paradigm from competition to collaboration.
We'll discuss the resistance to change because of poorly designed processes and how improving these processes led to much greater acceptance. We'll talk about the importance of empathy, curiosity, and ownership in driving change. We'll also cover how AI is reshaping education and the challenges institutions face in integrating this technology.
Lastly, we'll explore the crucial transition from education to employment and how her organization is helping students achieve better life outcomes. Sit back and enjoy this unfiltered conversation packed with insights and practical advice. Bridget, welcome. It's been a long time since South by Southwest.
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.
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Chapter 2: What personal experiences shaped Bridget Burns' view on higher education?
Yes, the world has changed so much and so quickly in the past couple of years. We'll deep dive into many of those changes in your space, higher education. But first, I always start with the guest. The focus is on your change journey over time. So let's begin with that.
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.
Chapter 3: How did Bridget Burns transition from student leader to education reformer?
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.
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Chapter 4: What challenges exist in fostering collaboration among universities?
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.
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.
So you're now leading a university innovation alliance focused on improving graduation outcomes for students from low-income families. This mission ties back to your own background. You've worked within the system for a long time. You've seen the problems, experienced the frustrations, and reached a point where you decided this is it. You shifted the perspective from competition to collaboration.
How did you go about convincing these 11 schools, their presidents and administrations to work together? How did the lobbying process unfold? It must have been like an entrepreneur pitching for investment. How did you make it happen?
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.
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Chapter 5: How was the University Innovation Alliance formed?
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.
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 a big problem, but nobody sits with it.
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Chapter 6: What strategies did Bridget Burns use to unite university leaders?
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. 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 back. 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 need to figure out who else out there is a worker bee? Who else is interested in doing the really hard stuff and not just drawn to the fact that we have been very effective at telling our story and amplifying the importance of this work?
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.
Speaking of delivering outcome, I recall from one of your recent speeches that you mentioned people are not actually resistant to change. They resist poorly designed processes. Do you have any specific examples where resistance was due to a poorly designed process? And then once the process was improved, you started seeing more and more acceptance?
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're going 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.
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