KU has joined a group of major universities from across the country in an effort to increase the number of low-income students who earn a college degree and reduce costs at the same time.

“We are trying to look at best practices for student success, and have multiple campuses try them out, so you can see if they work and that they work in different settings,” KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little said.

The 11 schools have formed the University Innovation Alliance, which will put together a national “playbook” aimed at helping low-income and first-generation college students.

The UIA said studies show that students from wealthy families are seven times more likely to attain a college degree than low-income students.

“This alliance will create a space where university leaders can come together and learn from one another, and all of us will benefit as we share, adapt and scale up ideas that have been proven to help students from all backgrounds,” Gray-Little said.

The group includes KU, Arizona State, Georgia State, Iowa State, Michigan State, Oregon State, Purdue, Ohio State, University of California-Riverside, Central Florida and University of Texas-Austin.

It has raised $5.7 million from major private funders, including the Ford Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Markle Foundation and USA Funds.

The UIA member universities will share practices that have yielded significant gains for low-income students, such as predictive analytics that help schools chart an individual’s path to graduation.

Georgia State successfully used predictive analytics and proactive advising interventions to increase its student retention rates by 5 percent and reduce the amount of time needed to graduate by almost half a semester, according to the university. If these same innovations were applied across the 11 UIA institutions over the next five years, it is estimated an additional 61,000 students would graduate and save almost $1.5 billion in educational costs to students and taxpayers.

“There is no question now that educational attainment is key to social mobility in an increasingly knowledge-based economy,” UIA member and Michigan State University president Lou Anna K. Simon said.