Overview

The Lab worked with Lumina Foundation and HCM Strategies to create innovation tools and design capacity for large public universities that hope to better serve students of color and high need. Despite increasing financial and political pressure to improve or develop new operating models, little direction exists about how to undertake large-scale change. Increased focus on the need for change has not yet produced enough actionable guidance on how public institutions can make major adjustments to their academic models. Our teams together partnered to create design and prototyping processes to support this question: How can growth-oriented public universities develop operating models that capitalize on advances in teaching and learning to expand capacity to serve and graduate more students of color and high need students?

This effort is grounded in the belief that by focusing on the how — guiding universities through a process of designing, prototyping, and networking with peer universities — while trusting universities to determine the what — adaptive operating models that meet their students’ needs — we can increase the likelihood that universities are positioned for a changing landscape in ways that lead to a better-educated society, serving all demographic groups equally well.