Chief Change Officer
#218 Dr. Bridget Burns: Changing Higher Ed from Turf Wars to Teamwork — Part Two
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: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.”30:07—Mending Hearts in the Office: When Leaders Turn into Heartbreakers"There are a lot of people walking around with broken hearts because they’ve had a leader who’s betrayed them."33:39—The AI Rat Race: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?"This natural tendency to compete with each other. There’s like an arms race and that’s what’s happening with AI.”38:41—From Cap and Gown to Capable and Grown: Reinventing the Grad-to-Gig Highway"There should be coaches for faculty to embed career readiness into every single classroom, starting from the first class a student takes."______________________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: What is the focus of Dr. Bridget Burns' mission?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community 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.
Chapter 2: How does empathy play a role in organizational change?
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. Yeah, empathy, curiosity, and ownership are crucial for change. Like you said, no one really likes change unless it benefits them in some way.
It also needs to generate collective benefits. People often ask, why does change? How can we make things better? Why does my contribution matter in this case or that case? How can I help? Maybe I can help more than you expected. Ownership isn't just about being informed or notified. It's about contributing to the evolution of the change and being responsible for the outcome.
If the outcome isn't as good as expected, how can we work together to make it better? This sense of ownership, this power of ownership is so impactful.
Yeah, invite your people into the problem that you need to solve. People love to solve problems. People love to be helpful. But what they don't want to be is a cog in a wheel told to do X or Y. And they also literally work in that area. They might have some ideas. Listen, I know that you can have employees that you're like, they're just not going to want it.
All I'm saying is that the resistance is justified. And if you are so out of touch with your people that you can't understand that, then you've been at it too long. And you need to give yourself a micro dose of a empathy sprint to go out and remember why you started doing this work. Remember why you cared about the people. Remember why you chose to be a leader. Because...
I get dismissing people because I feel like people who work in any industry, my observation is there's a lot of people walking around with broken hearts because they've had a leader who's betrayed them. They've had a thing that they worked on for 10 years that got shelved at the last minute. And they remember that they showed up, that they missed dinner with their kids to build that thing.
And you're just going to turn it off. You're just getting rid of it. There's all these people who are carrying around these stories of bad experiences from change. And then there are leaders who are carrying around this mythology about people being lazy or people not wanting to do stuff. And I just, it doesn't serve us. And it is not, it's not reality.
And we are not our best selves when all we're doing is living out a story we're telling ourselves about change. Other people. And so you just got to you got to tap in. Curiosity is going to be your best friend.
And if you don't if you don't have it right now, you've got to give yourself you got to pull back out of the work and get back to caring about people and remembering they all have a reason to feel the way they do.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does AI present in higher education?
Honestly, if I had an office and someone came in and said, hey, we are going to implement this change. And because of that, I'm going to move from my corner office to a shared desk in a large area. I wouldn't be happy either. I can totally resonate with that scenario. Speaking of humanity, there's one growing area we are all watching closely.
AI is here to stay and will impact all areas of our lives, including education. There's a lot, a lot of hope for its potential in education. So for a change leader like you, the question isn't just about integrating AI into higher education, but how to make the best use of it.
Based on your experience working with these leaders and institutions, what could be the hurdles or challenges for the institutions in embracing and integrating AI into teaching, learning, and administration? How can they create a collective intelligence scenario that many people are looking forward to?
So I think the thing that is going to get in the way are things that are very human. The first thing I'm observing is that we have this natural tendency to compete with each other. There's like an arms race usually when something's new, and that's what's happening with AI.
So what you have is thousands of people across higher ed, different institutions, who are all trying to figure something out simultaneously. And what a waste that we are not finding a way to work together, that we are not teaming up on the shared objective that you just put forward.
Because this is a space that's hyper-competitive and we will batten the hatches and not share anything with anyone and students will be worse for it. Because you need the people who are in the classroom and people who are outside the classroom finding ways to collaborate with peers, not just at their institution, but do it in a way that...
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Chapter 4: How can universities collaborate effectively on AI integration?
advances the entire agenda forward for everyone, which is we have big questions around learning that we need to address. We need to figure out how to make it so that any person can learn. We need to figure out how to make it more sustainable for every person to have access to personalized learning at scale.
We need to figure out the efficacy and the safety issues that are definitely going to happen and are popping up already. And instead, what you're having is A bunch of people who are working individually with their head down, separated, all figuring out what problem they want, how they want to use AI or whether they don't. And then there's a large swath of higher ed that is more risk averse.
And so they may or may not be using it at all. And so you're going to see a new like version of the haves and have nots. And for me, what I just always I'm predisposed to notice the big picture and to be a systems thinker on this. And so I just I see really big sector problems that affect community colleges, every type of institute, every type of university. And it's really about the students.
It's about how we can weaponize this for good. How do we make it so that. The people who work at a university who are, you know, front office that are being overwhelmed by repetitive questions or repetitive issues, how do they use AI so they can actually not have to do that and instead can provide more hands-on support for students? Now, we're seeing that with chatbots as such.
And how do administrators be more effective and efficient so that they can actually get through their days and be able to produce more things, to be able to accelerate speed? Because that's a real challenge for us. And for faculty, just like it's learning, it's, you know, how do you use this ethically when you're trying to one of the biggest impediments for your time is grading?
How do you use it from a, like, pedagogical perspective to make it so that what you're doing is better? These are big questions that are not particularly unique. These are, I've given you what, it's like three problems. Those are sector problems. And so... It's just sad when we only focus on my institution wants to be first. So University of Michigan, go get them or Arizona State.
They're definitely out front on AI. But I just think that there are very clearly like same problems, like same team. And we have to find a way that we are going to collaborate together. in an effort to make our use of AI safe, effective, efficient, and trustworthy, and going to be able to, again, I think at the end of the day, it's about personalized learning at scale.
And also make sure that what we're teaching today is not out of date because the future of work and how AI is disrupting the workforce and going to disrupt the workforce, that means that the things we're teaching now in certain classrooms today is no longer relevant. And there is I have little confidence that individual disciplines are going to be in real time keeping up with that.
And if they are, it's one dean or it's one chair or faculty member. It's not the whole discipline working together to figure out, OK, so I can see that the role of paralegal is going to be changing rapidly right now because of chat GBT. fundamentally, you can conduct a lit review with a well-trained model super effectively.
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Chapter 5: How is the University Innovation Alliance improving student outcomes?
And I just say that my problem is the architecture of this entire sector would make it so that we would hunker down and work alone independently and wait until we feel like we have a peer reviewed article to publish before others find out what we've been doing. And students cannot afford to waste that time.
Your response is totally relevant, not just about AI. But in other matter, I want to get your take on before we conclude this interview, which is the student outcome. Youth help a lot of students. According to your website, over 68,000 from low-income backgrounds are expected to graduate by 2025. That's a significant achievement and an important KPI.
Now, given our discussion about AI, technology, and the job market, it's clear that the type and nature of jobs are changing rapidly. Ultimately, we go to college to get a job upon graduation. So, outcome for UIA or any school isn't just about graduation. It's about helping students achieve better life outcomes through education.
From graduation to employment, this transition from learning to earning is crucial. In terms of UIA, what have you done to help students move from education to employment? Perhaps is there something currently in place or part of your future vision? Can you share with us what's happening at this stage?
Yeah. In 2017, we partnered with Strata Education Network to, as a next, we do a big change initiative. So like predictive analytics, chatbots, proactivizing, our whole thing is scale. So we take a model from one place and scale it on other campuses and we learn a method for scale. Like how do you need to adapt that idea so that it survives and thrives in a different ecosystem?
And then we create playbooks for the rest of the sector to learn from us. So That's been our model, scale. But we ran into this issue in 2017 of this issue of college to career. There's nothing to scale.
There are lots of little tiny things out there, but we recognize that the entire... We've come at this work thinking with the baseline belief that higher education was never designed around students. And that's the problem. And it was especially not designed around the students that we need to serve. Low-income, first-gen students of color. So...
Then we get to college career and it's, oh, my gosh, if we thought if we thought we had bad design once, watch out, because when you look at career services and just that model and that approach, it became very clear that was a manifestation of what we're talking about.
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Chapter 6: What initiatives help students transition from college to career?
And we agree with you about the the students measure their success by it's much more nuanced and complex, but they want a job, of course. So we did a multi-year initiative to actually come up with, instead of the scale, it was about innovation, which was how should this be if we were to design it based around the needs of students and specifically use design thinking.
If you could reimagine that whole college to career handoff around the needs of students where you could actually make up for privilege. Meaning if you looked at the data that a student from a low income background would have the same kind of results or outcomes as a high income student who comes in with a deep social network, etc.
And so we got seven universities together to first we started with process mapping, as always, to understand just how bad is this?
because the system seemed really dysfunctional for students you have a office in some basement somewhere with like a tiny budget um that nobody wants to go to other than to get their resume looked at and so we first started with this false assumption we quickly checked which was let's see all the things that career services is responsible for and then let's like map those things and let's look at their kpis and then we would be able to benchmark against those and try and improve those that's what we thought it turns out
step one is we didn't have any kpis because nobody was actually tracking any data we had no idea that if you wanted to measure the number of students who go into career services from certain backgrounds they don't have that data they don't even know how many people come in depending on who you're talking to like they just they're overwhelmed the i one of my institutions had 70 000 students and they had two people in the office of career services
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.
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