Chief Change Officer
#359 Bridget Burns: Breaking the Higher Ed Hunger Games—Part One
Sat, 10 May 2025
If higher education feels like the Hunger Games, Dr. Bridget Burns is building the resistance.In Part One, Bridget shares her journey from growing up in rural Montana to becoming CEO of the University Innovation Alliance—a national coalition of public research universities working together (yes, together) to improve outcomes for low-income and first-generation students.She pulls back the curtain on the real problem in academia: a culture of competition, hierarchy, and duplicated failure masked as innovation. Instead, she offers a new model: universities learning from each other, mapping broken processes, and holding themselves accountable to real results. This episode is for anyone tired of hearing that higher ed can’t change—and ready to hear from someone who’s actually changing it.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Out of the Cul-De-Sac: Bridget’s Escape from Rural Isolation“I grew up surrounded by racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Getting out was everything.”From Student Leader to System Architect“At 22, I went from student government to hiring university presidents. That’s when I saw how broken the system really was.”The Problem Isn’t Resistance to Change—It’s Bad Design“No one resists change when it’s their idea. We resist top-down mandates that ignore lived experience.”Why Higher Ed Feels Like a Zero-Sum Game“Presidents are rewarded for beating each other in rankings, not for helping more students graduate.”Building the University Innovation Alliance“I wasn’t trying to form a club. I wanted to create a working lab for collaborative problem-solving.”The Trust-Building Work No One Sees“I flew to 11 campuses, built real relationships, and got them to sign off on data sharing and joint accountability.”How Process Mapping Saved 450 Emails and 50 Student Holds“Michigan State found it was overwhelming new students with hundreds of emails and dozens of unknown account blocks—just by putting everyone in the same room.”From Bureaucrat to Entrepreneur“Michael Crow told me I’d need to break out of my bureaucratic mindset. He was right. I had to become a builder.”Innovation Isn’t Flashy—It’s Often Inconvenient“We glamorize innovation, but it’s messy. Slower. More painful. That’s why it needs to be built around people, not power.”______________________Connect with Us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Bridget Burns --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Bridget Burns and what is her background?
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.
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.
Chapter 2: What inspired Bridget Burns to focus on higher education innovation?
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 transition from student leader to higher ed system architect?
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.
Chapter 4: What challenges exist due to competition in higher education?
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.
And so all of those things combined really lead to where I am now, which is by the conclusion of my ACE fellowship, the idea of the University Innovation Alliance was Michael Crow's. And I happened to show up with a unique skill set of telling presidents what to do and organizing them and supporting them. because I was the former chief of staff for the university system.
And so building the University Innovation Alliance was the ultimate kind of, it was like the ascension for me. It was merging this focus on user-centered design and thinking about the perspective of students and why the student experience is not what it needs to be. The complexity of overseeing institutions, especially in a climate that's rapidly changing,
rapid innovation and figuring out how to get universities to work together and try and accelerate innovation by collaboration. So the University Innovation Alliance is what I launched by the end of my ACE fellowship. And I've been for 10 years now at the UIA. I'm the CEO. And to describe what we do is...
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Chapter 5: What is the University Innovation Alliance and how was it formed?
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 6: How did Bridget convince 11 universities to collaborate despite competition?
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.
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. 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
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Chapter 7: What role does trust-building play in university collaboration?
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.
is that you just told me that i'm gonna 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. They don't even get a chance to consider it because all they do is hear, I'm going to change your life. I'm going to change your daily experience. And I respect you so little. I haven't even given you a chance to be part of the process or to offer input.
And then we also, what I find is, because that's a regular experience, it's often like physical moving offices is like the most, like the worst case, every leader will tell you that's the worst. But I could talk to you about consolidating data or getting, switching advising from being decentralized to centralized.
Now you're telling me that I'm gonna have a different boss, that what I'm responsible for completely is changing, the students I serve are changing. You're not going to even ask me for input or like I get no buy-in on this process. I get no even, I don't even get a chance to touch it. And my daily experience every day from nine to five or whatever is going to change.
And you're surprised that I am disappointed or that I might be a little bit grumpy. We just never consider the possibility that people do not, anyone who says they like change is a liar. You only like the change that was your idea and that you actually agree with. And that is usually a change that's your idea, right?
But if you told me, if like I came into my office today and you had moved my furniture in my office around, listen, it might be a better blow and layout. But the fact that change happened, that I wasn't like, you didn't give me a second to turn the water temperature up slowly so that I could acclimate to it or that I couldn't offer input.
We just jump over these very basic things and that change is discomfort. It is shifting things around and We glamorize innovation as though it's literally lasers and rainbows. And the truth is innovation is messy. I've never seen an example where innovation, we're starting something new. that you don't, the time, it doesn't take longer. It's more difficult. You run into unexpected hurdles.
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Chapter 8: How did Bridget shift her mindset from bureaucrat to entrepreneur?
We didn't invent it, but how the Alliance works is I bring campuses together and we do the professional development and build them as a network and a community. So they trust each other and talk about the things that are getting in the way. And then they help each other out by here's something that worked for me. Here's something you can do.
In one of those experiences early on, Georgia State University shared about process mapping, which is one of the things they do before they do any new system. Because you have to understand the system that you're bringing a new idea into so that you don't just bring a new idea into a toxic system.
And two people who were at that event are a professor and a person who's been working at the university for, I don't know, a couple of months, early stage, early career person. And they got stuck in the airport and they decided that the idea of process mapping was pretty profound and they were going to figure out how to take it back home to Michigan State. That's where they worked.
So they went back. They first they got the person who we call a UIA fellow, which is an early career professional. They got her training process mapping. It's like a weekend experience. You go away. And they decided to invite everyone at the university who works on student success into the same room for the first time, which has never happened at the university.
And they were going to just target one period of time. They were going to map out the day the student gets admitted to the day they show up on campus. And they invited everyone who works together. And so the process mapping is basically you put a post-it note on the wall for every step in a process, right? You want to actually see the system for how it is instead of our fantasy of it.
Anyway, so all these people are in this room. These people who work very individually, they all feel like they have a different lane. They interact with students not very often, but they all work. They care about students. And this is the first time they've ever been invited to come together to see their work connected to each other.
And the way the day goes is people start putting post-it notes up for these are when we send emails to students. This is when we ask them to do this or that. And throughout the day, there's things where people are like, hey, we should stop doing this system right here. This seems like way too much or redundant or an overlap.
And because the people are in the room who oversee that system, they say that reports to me. Yeah, 100 percent. We should stop doing that. And I'm going to make that happen. Another example is someone in the room says, hey, I need this. Clearly, I need access to this data. I don't have access to this. The person who someone else in the room raises their hand and says, what's your email?
I have access to that data. I'm going to send it to you now. And so what's happening is this magical thing where people are experiencing real collaboration and a sense of community. They're feeling like they're on the same team. They're actually being reminded of the purpose that they work for students. They care about students. It's activating. It's very exciting.
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