UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA

In 2008, a report from The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education described cost, quality and access as forming an unbreakable “iron triangle” of interlocking constraints on colleges and universities: any effort to expand access will degrade quality and/or raise costs; any effort to improve quality will limit access and/or raise costs – and so on.

With more than 68,570 undergraduate, graduate and medical students, the University of Central Florida near Orlando (UCF), is the largest public university in the United States. But it’s not size that makes the university proud; it’s a 20-year initiative that flatly disproves the notion that universities must play a zero-sum game.

The school’s latest enrollment statistics speak for themselves: in 2018, the average SAT score of the entering freshman class at UCF was 1328, with an average high school GPA of 4.12. More than 47% of students are minorities; 26 percent are Hispanic. Fully 72% of undergraduate students received financial aid, 50% of first-time-in-college students at UCG graduate with zero educational debt – and UCF's six-year graduation rate is 72.6 percent.

When the opportunity came for UCF to apply for a $100 million-dollar grant via the MacArthur Foundation’s “100 & Change” competition, UCF knew that breaking through the clutter would be a tough challenge. There were more than 2,000 applicants – and each application was limited to seven pages of specific answers to tough questions. 

Set of 1 worked with the university’s development leadership team to distill a meta-story that could guide not only the application language, but overall university communications and messaging.  We also crafted the final language used in the application and provided a visual concept and script for a required video to highlight their idea.

While UCF ultimately did not win the MacArthur grant, the story developed by Set of 1 provided messaging guidance to drive myriad development efforts with other funding sources that bore substantial fruit - as well as communications in support of the university’s ongoing vision for change in higher education.