New university alliance to boost graduate numbers, save money

If the University Innovation Alliance achieves its goals, high quality degrees will become more accessible for all students, particularly first-generation and low-income students. Thousands more will graduate each year, and additionally they could shave time off their studies, taxpayers could save US$100 million in educational costs, and over the next five years another 850,000 students could graduate from America’s colleges.

Lofty ideals, but entirely do-able, if all goes according to plan.

The University Innovation Alliance or UIA, a cluster of 11 large research universities across the United States that will collaborate to get more low-income students into higher education, was launched last Tuesday.

The universities are Arizona State, Ohio State, Georgia State, California at Riverside, Iowa State, Purdue, Central Florida, Michigan State, Kansas, Oregon State and Texas at Austin.

With a total student count of about half a million, all also serve large numbers of first generation low-income students, which is the group lagging furthest behind in gaining degrees. Their graduation rates range from 51% to 82%.

Proven methods

Working as an innovation body, the Alliance plans to create a series of proven methods to help the graduation of students from all backgrounds.

For universities, this means spending less time on unproven strategies, and for students it means institutions will work even harder for their success and to lower the costs of degrees.

In its prospectus, the Alliance says that despite the clear value and worth of college education, for the first time the United States is losing its lead in producing graduates, causing some anxiety about the nation’s future prosperity and the economic mobility of millions of Americans.

Estimates are that by 2018, 63% of all US jobs will require post-secondary education – 22 million more college-educated workers than the country currently boasts. America is on track to produce only 19 million of them.

The Alliance believes that while many higher education institutions have developed and piloted creative solutions, interventions that until now have been expensive and essentially are duplicates of each other in some form, universities have not shared the important lessons they have learned.

A completely new approach will be taken by the UIA. By testing solutions together and sharing results, the universities will be able to share what works and what doesn’t.

With the backing of six major funders, including the Ford Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and more than US$5.7 million in funding going towards salaries and data analysis, institutions within the Alliance will learn from each other and develop a national ‘playbook’ of what works.

Projected outcomes are optimistic and include the expectation that the numbers of baccalaureate degree awards would increase by nearly 5% within 10 years – a total gain of more than 3,300 degrees annually – particularly those to low-income students.

If the example of the Alliance leads to similar gains across the rest of post-secondary education, there would be more than 40,000 additional degrees per year.

Transfer retention and progress rates are also expected to improve – the former by about 1.8%, and 2.4% for low-income transfers in 10 years.

First collaborative initiative

The Alliance’s first collaborative scale initiative involves predictive analytics, Georgia State University’s mentorship example being one.

Through this, Georgia State has been able to increase its semester-to-semester retention rates by 5%, and reduce time-to-degree for graduating students by almost half a semester.

This means 1,200 more students are staying in school every year and that the university’s Class of 2014 saved a whopping US$10 million in tuition and fees compared with the previous year’s graduates. What’s more, Georgia taxpayers were saved about US$5 million in support costs for public education.

“If these same innovations were scaled across the 11 institutions of the University Innovation Alliance with comparable gains, this would translate into 19,000 more students staying enrolled and graduates of the UIA saving almost US$200 million in tuition-and-fee costs every year. Taxpayers would save US$100 million in educational costs,” says the UIA in a predictive analysis.

“Over the next five years, these innovations would produce more than 61,000 additional graduates from UIA institutions and save almost US$1.5 billion in educational costs to students and taxpayers.

“If the innovations were scaled across all public universities nationally, they have the potential to help 335,000 additional students stay in college every year. They would result in
US$2.2 billion in saved tuition and fees annually for students with an additional US$1.4 billion in cost savings to taxpayers,” the analysis continues.

“Over the next five years, this single scaled project could produce more than 850,000 additional college graduates from America’s public universities and save US$18 billion in total educational costs.”

The UIA has no obvious or intentional plans to swell its membership numbers. “As we move forward, other higher education leaders and institutions may be interested in this work and desire to learn from our progress,” it said.

“Though the Alliance will remain a group no larger than its current membership for the time being, a highly selective group of talented emerging presidents, chancellors and subject-specific higher education leaders might be invited to participate in an affiliate or observational capacity.”