Innovation In Education

Since then, we’ve interviewed those leading the First in the World initiatives at each of the twenty-four institutions to learn how they’ve begun putting these new funds to use and to find out what other institutions can learn about the initiatives.

Though the First in the World programs cover a lot of territory—from a game-based approach to moving students through the admissions process to a living-learning community designed to study the issue of first-generation student success on its own campus—we have been excited to see several common threads through most of these efforts.

These emerging trends may be among the first signs of a sea-change in higher-ed leadership, as change agents at colleges and universities recognize that to address the complex problems of today and the future, colleges are going to need to take a different approach than in the past. Questions of access and completion for first-generation or academically under-prepared students can’t be addressed by a single department operating within its own silo on campus. These issues require the marshaling of ideas and resources from across campus—and even, in many cases, the sharing of both costs and benefits across multiple institutions.

Also, as student demographics continue to shift away from a majority of traditional high school graduates with a family legacy of college attainment, college and university leaders are going to need to test and assess new ways of working, and more rapidly identify what is actually contributing most to access, student success, and completion. In the past decade, most institutions have taken a scattershot approach to student success, adding an array of programs, offices, and initiatives in the hope that some will pay off. Yet, without a clear sense of which efforts are making a difference, it is difficult to know what to scale up and what to scale back.

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