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:

My eldest is headed to college in the fall and the whole admissions process has ironically brought many of the issues I deal with from my foundation perch to my dining room table. During this process, I’ve been struck by how much our expectations of higher education have changed in a generation.

My eldest is headed to college in the fall and the whole admissions process has ironically brought many of the issues I deal with from my foundation perch to my dining room table. During this process, I’ve been struck by how much our expectations of higher education have changed in a generation.

My eldest is headed to college in the fall and the whole admissions process has ironically brought many of the issues I deal with from my foundation perch to my dining room table. During this process, I’ve been struck by how much our expectations of higher education have changed in a generation.

With the potential to combine courseware, iPASS and GPS, and to leverage data in ways that can improve student outcomes, OpenSUNY can enable campuses not only to catch up with front runners in the race to transform higher education into an engine of economic development and social mobility, but eventually to surpass and to lead them.

If higher education is to be the bridge to opportunity, it will take a movement to widen and strengthen that bridge, to make it more accessible and more navigable, to collaborate in evaluating and disseminating promising innovations.