Higher education is going through a series of seismic shifts—including significant demographic changes, growing public concern about cost and completion rates, and unmet demands for preparedness in certain employment fields, according to Steven Mintz, Executive Director of the University of Texas’ Institute for Transformational Learning (ITL).
“To meet these challenges, every institution needs to focus on the three Ss—they need to be strategic, success-oriented, and sustainable,” said Mintz. “For Texas and this country to be vibrant, we must dramatically increase graduation rates among traditionally underserved groups,” such as racial minorities and low-income populations.
At the UT system’s 14 institutions (8 undergraduate), almost half of its students are African American and Latino and almost half are Pell Grant recipients. Created to meet the needs of these students, the ITL has a mandate as bold as its name: To make a UT-quality education more accessible and affordable and to improve student learning outcomes and dramatically increase the number of Texans with a college degree and other advanced educational credentials. The UT regents invested 50 million dollars in the ITL to develop transformational curricula, pedagogy, support structures, and delivery modes that will increase access, affordability and student success.
The ITL is using multipronged, innovative strategies to accomplish its mission, and Mintz is excited to share one of those projects during his plenary presentation at AACRAO’s 2015 Technology and Transfer Conference.
“We’ve adopted a multi-institutional strategy to move the needle of success for every group of students higher education hasn’t effectively served in the past—non-traditional students, underrepresented groups, low-income students, students who have to juggle work and family along with studies,” Mintz said. “The goal is to increase the funnel of qualified science and technology students into professions such as health care, engineering, and computer science.”
The first leg in this project, “Middle School to Medical School,” begins this August, and it’s designed as a competency-based initiative to help students even pre-college prepare for careers in health care. Subsequent initiatives will target competency in engineering and computer science tracks.
“We know the levers that can drive student success—especially for non-traditional students—include a degree with clear value proposition, a streamlined pathway to completion, personalized support, technologies that can diagnose and remediate weaknesses , and a monitoring system that can alert faculty when students are confused, off track or disengaged,” Mintz said. “We’ve developed a multipronged solution that we think can make a big difference in these areas, especially if it can be done in a cost efficient way.”
“I’m eager to talk about this because it’s part of the future of public higher education,” Mintz said. “It represents in some ways a radical departure from business as usual.”
Join colleagues to learn more about the ITL and other innovative, transformational approaches to education at this year’s AACRAO Tech and Transfer Conference in Austin, Texas, July 12-14, 2015.