02
March
2018
|
09:33 AM
America/New_York

​Ohio State leadership to attend summit on student success and campus transformation

The Ohio State University leadership will be joined by leaders in higher education from across the country at a summit designed to improve education excellence.

Ohio State is a part of the University Innovation Alliance and will be one of the member universities attending the first national summit for Student Success Innovation and Campus Transformation in April.

The national summit is designed to share innovations in higher education and motivate institutional leaders to take action by implementing these ideas. Ohio State is a founding member of the UIA.

"This inaugural UIA summit will gather more than 350 professionals to share how approaches to enhance student success can be replicated to scale and continue the upward trend increasing the percentage of earned degrees for students across all socioeconomic groups," said Executive Vice President and Provost Bruce A. McPheron.

Ohio State will be joined by Purdue University, University of Kansas and dozens of other universities. University leadership will collaborate on innovative ideas to improve student success and discuss how to build a community to support the best practices of those ideas.

The goals of the summit align with Ohio State’s new strategic plan. The plan emphasizes five key areas including Teaching and Learning; and Access, Affordability and Excellence.

The strategic plan calls on Ohio State to lead the way in best practices in teaching and learning to improve student outcomes. Ohio State aspires to be a leading public university offering an excellent, affordable education and promoting economic diversity.

Those objectives speak to the idea behind the summit. Bridget Burns, Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance, explained in a video promoting the summit the need to close the achievement gap.

“We believe that it is absolutely essential that we all work together to try and close the achievement gap. Because right now the zip code you grew up in and how much money your parents made is determining the limits of your potential,” Burns said.

Since its launch in 2014, the UIA has transformed a theoretical concept for collaboration into a nationally recognized community of practice that is driving both institutional transformation and improved student outcomes.

Member institutions are on track to graduate an additional 100,000 students over the next decade, and UIA universities have raised graduation rates for students from low-income backgrounds by nearly 25 percent.