Change is hard, especially for an enterprise as given to tradition as higher education. But shifting the conversation about higher education in a changing world – and then taking action – is critical to our efforts to help more students get to and through college.

Our prevailing model of higher education in this country – one that prizes exclusion over inclusion, that tolerates innovation rather than embracing it, that can be actively disdainful of measures of institutional effectiveness and efficiency – is not sustainable. US higher education as an industry needs to fundamentally change.

We are excited to announce the Frontier Set, a select group of colleges and universities, state systems, and supporting organizations committed to significantly increasing student access and success and eliminating racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in college attainment.

By Dan Greenstein Last month’s elections here in the U.S. represent a significant shift in both leadership and policy direction. As a historian, I’m always interested in understanding the how and the why of such consequential events. In my role as head of the Gates Foundation’s postsecondary program, I’m also interested in what they mean […]

So we have reached a time for choosing. We will either innovate and make the hard choices needed to make affordable, high quality education after high school a reality for more Americans, or we will choose the path of least resistance, one that will widen the opportunity gap and leave us both less competitive and more divided than ever.

I am really glad to be with all of you, especially since you made it easy for me to come to you! I want for this to be a lively discussion, rather than me just talking at you, so I’m going to be posing questions to you at points that I would like for us to engage together. Think of it as crowdsourcing hard questions and good ideas.

A majority of today’s students are older and nearly 30 percent are parents. Forty-two percent of today’s students come from communities of color; women make up more than half the total student population; and 40 percent of students attend part-time. Moreover, 61 percent now rely on Pell Grants to access a higher education, meaning they come from low- and moderate-income families.

The University Innovation Alliance (UIA) brings together 11 large public research universities with a common vision: to raise college success rates, particularly for low-income, first-generation and underrepresented students.

This post was guest authored by Danie Korac, student at Western Governors University and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation employee. I am not your typical student. I am first generation born in the United States, the first in my family to go to college, and a woman.

We need more students than ever to make it into and through college to fuel our economy and maintain social mobility. What are some of the most common misconceptions about today’s college students? Here are just a few: