A Quiet Revolution in College Access: UIA Leader Wins Prestigious Clark Kerr Award

Recognition for steady, practical change

Bridget Burns, the long-time leader of the University Innovation Alliance, was named this year’s recipient of the Clark Kerr Award, a major honor in higher education. The prize recognizes work that changed how colleges help students finish degrees. For more than a decade, Burns pushed a simple idea into practice: universities can learn from each other and scale what works to help more students graduate, especially those who are the first in their family to go to college or who come from low-income backgrounds. The award is less about one person’s fame and more about a steady push to change everyday policies — advising, course design and student supports on campuses across the country.

Why the prize matters to colleges

The Clark Kerr Award is known in higher education as recognition for leadership that moves colleges and the public good forward. It has a reputation for honoring people or teams who produce ideas that get put into practice, not just lofty speeches. Winning the award signals peer recognition: scholars, administrators and public officials see the work as influential and practical. For a coalition like the University Innovation Alliance, the prize highlights a shift in how universities measure success — focusing on whether students complete useful credentials, rather than just enrollments or prestige.

From conversation to collective action: Burns and the UIA

Bridget Burns built her career by feeding practical ideas into big systems. She helped shape the University Innovation Alliance as a loose but steady partnership among public research universities that signed on to compare results, share data, and copy programs that worked. The idea was straightforward: instead of each campus re-inventing the same fixes, they would test approaches together and move the successful ones into day-to-day operations.

Under Burns’s leadership, the UIA focused on concrete barriers students face: confusing course paths, weak advising, and financial strains that make staying in school hard. The group pushed for changes that sound ordinary — clearer degree maps, simpler transfer rules, new advising models — but that add up when many campuses do them at once. Burns also made the UIA unusually data-driven. The coalition created common measures so members could see what worked and what didn’t, and then used money and partnerships to scale the winners. That mix of patience and practical pressure has become her trademark.

Small changes that add up

The work Burns led is not dramatic in a single headline sense. Its effects show up in steady improvements: more students stay enrolled from year to year, degree paths become clearer, and gaps between richer and poorer students narrow. Those are the kinds of gains that change lives — more first-generation students finishing majors, more nurses and teachers entering communities that need them.

The UIA’s strategy was to measure outcomes the same way across campuses so leaders could spot patterns. When a change produced steady gains at several places, others copied it. That approach lowered the risk of chasing fads and made it easier to spend limited funds on proven steps.

Voices from campuses and peers

Leaders at UIA member schools described the award as recognition of long-term work rather than a sudden breakthrough. Campus presidents said the prize validates experimenting with small fixes and then scaling them. Faculty and student advocates welcomed the attention to completion and equity: many pointed out that the grant money and national recognition can help sustain programs beyond short-term grants. Award organizers praised Burns’s ability to combine policy smarts with practical steps that improve everyday student experiences.

What comes next for UIA and campuses

The Clark Kerr Award gives the UIA a louder voice with state leaders and funders. More universities are likely to adopt the alliance’s playbook — clearer degree plans, coordinated advising and shared data — because the prize marks those steps as proven. For Burns and the UIA, the task now is widening adoption: help more campuses fit proven fixes to local needs and keep pushing steady, ordinary changes that raise graduation rates over time for students and their communities nationwide.

Sources

• prnewswire.com