Eleven public research universities around the country that enroll some of the most economically and racially diverse student bodies in the nation have formed a collaboration aimed at increasing the numbers of low-income students who start and graduate from college.
The institutions in the new University Innovation Alliance, to be formally announced on Tuesday at an event here, say that they have all committed to work together to test promising approaches, to document what works and what doesn’t, and then to develop techniques to spread the ideas at a big-enough scale to make a difference.
College leaders go to all kinds of meetings and hear about all kinds of good ideas, but “then you look at the national data and nothing’s changed,” said Mark P. Becker, president of Georgia State University and vice chairman of the alliance. This alliance, he said, would work to improve retention rates and graduation rates “not by tens, twenties, or thirties, but by thousands.”
Higher education certainly does not want for consortia, alliances, collaborations, or associations, and each of the 11 institutions already pays dues to many of them. But Mr. Becker said the alliance intends to be different. Designed so that some members will serve as mentors to others on particular projects, the collaboration also calls for sharing data based on student demographics, to make the comparisons more meaningful, and the use of third-party experts to help evaluate the results.
“It’s going to be more intensive than what you get from your associations,” said Mr. Becker.
As a group, the alliance’s members enroll 20 percent of all students attending large research universities and are experienced in putting large-scale projects into practice. They also enroll a higher proportion of financially needy students than do their peers: 33 percent of alliance students receive Pell Grants, compared with 25 percent among other universities in their Carnegie classification. Their graduation rates range from 51 percent to 82 percent.
“The overarching goal is to produce more graduates,” said Mr. Becker. “The only way to do that is to broaden who participates.”
Learning What Works
Georgia State, he noted, had already taken steps in that direction, At that institution, low-income students graduate at the same rate as the overall enrollment. And at a time when race and ethnicity are still too often tied to lower incomes and poorer academic preparation, another alliance member, the University of California at Riverside, has achieved similar parity across racial and demographic groups.
Some of the first projects will focus on the use of predictive analytics of the sort that Georgia State has used to improve its semester-to-semester retention rates by 5 percent, resulting in 1,200 more students’ staying in school each year.
It’s that use of such tools at Georgia State and two other alliance members, Arizona State University and the University of Texas at Austin, that helped attract $3-million in backing for the alliance from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Kresge and Lumina Foundations have each pledged $1-million. A total of $750,000 more will come from the Ford and Markle Foundations and USA Funds, a nonprofit organization that also offers loan-default services to students and colleges. The alliance members have pledged to match that $5.7-million with cash and in-kind contributions.
The alliance’s other members are Iowa State, Michigan State, Ohio State, Oregon State, and Purdue Universities, and the Universities of Central Florida and of Kansas. The California State University system, whose chancellor led UC-Riverside during the alliance’s formation, is an “observer” member. Arizona State’s president, Michael M. Crow, who has championed the formation of this kind of alliance for several years, is its chairman.
Kim A. Wilcox, the current chancellor of UC-Riverside, said the group’s value would come not only from what it does right but also from its failures. “No one ever talks about what didn’t work,” he said, and “no one else can learn from that.” But in the context of the alliance, the institutions will have a portfolio of successes and failures that will allow the 11 presidents and chancellors “to talk about it in quite a different way.”
Still, he noted, successes at one institution won’t necessarily translate easily to others. UC-Riverside has been able to preserve its diversity thanks to some very intentional policies, he said. But he also credited the rich demographic mix of the California population, state lawmakers’ decision to continue financing need-based student aid—even during the financial crisis—and a University of California policy that ensures that one-third of tuition revenue gets reallocated for student aid.
Still, if institutions elsewhere don’t have those policies, they may end up with different results no matter how intentional their efforts.
