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Rooted in Place: Institutions Redefining Their Role in the Community
Higher education’s promise has always been largely about the relationship between a campus and the community that surrounds it. For three of the 2026 Top Colleges for Innovation Award winners, that relationship is central not just to their values but to their most innovative programs. Northern Illinois University (NIU), Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), and the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB) have each found distinctive ways to extend their campuses outward, serving not just traditional students but lifelong learners, workforce seekers, and community members who may never formally enroll.
NIU in DeKalb, Illinois has framed workforce development and community engagement as inseparable from its academic mission. Newton—the Northern Energy Workforce + Technology Network—brings industry partners in as investors in research and workforce development initiatives focused on energy and climate. Faculty and students design research projects and training programs around challenges that industry identifies, creating a shared stake in outcomes that goes well beyond the typical transactional relationship between universities and employers.
NIU’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) serves as an internal engine for curricular innovation, offering workshops, grants, toolkits, and professional learning communities to faculty.
The university’s initiative focused on Student Success in Gateway Courses used course-level data disaggregated by student demographics to implement targeted instructional innovations in high-enrollment foundational courses, with a specific focus on persistence and equity for underrepresented students.
NIU’s Innovation Fund provides strategic funding for emerging ideas that advance student success, research, and community impact—enabling faculty, staff, and university partners to pilot high-impact initiatives and scale promising solutions.
A standout community-facing effort is the Safe Selling Initiative, a program designed to equip local small business owners and entrepreneurs with skills for safer, more effective sales practices, extending the university’s expertise directly into regional economic development.
The Candidate Concierge program, meanwhile, demonstrates NIU’s sophisticated understanding of what it takes to attract talented faculty and staff: personalized community introductions, housing assistance, and family integration support signal that NIU invests in the whole person it is recruiting, not just their professional credentials.
Community engagement as deep and sustained as NIU’s is one hallmark of innovative institutions, and Tri-C in Cleveland, Ohio has made it the cornerstone of its identity. Under President Michael A. Baston, JD, EdD, a nationally recognized voice in community college reform, Tri-C has positioned itself as a civic and economic institution as much as an educational one.
Their partnership in the MidTown Collaboration Center (MCC), a 95,000-square-foot innovation hub in Cleveland’s MidTown neighborhood, places the college alongside Case Western Reserve University, University Hospitals, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and major economic development organizations, embedding the college within the region’s broader innovation infrastructure.
Tri-C’s Workforce Innovation division works directly with area employers to upskill and reskill workers across information technology, health care, advanced manufacturing, construction, transportation, and public safety sectors, keeping Northeast Ohio’s workforce competitive.
As a founding member of the League for Innovation in the Community College, an international nonprofit dedicated to transforming the community college experience, Tri-C’s leadership role in shaping the field nationally is as significant as its local impact. The college’s 85% graduate retention rate within the region underscores just how deeply it is woven into the economic fabric of greater Cleveland.
Regional context shapes innovation in different ways for different institutions. The University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB) sits in the Lowcountry, a region shaped by its unique cultural heritage, stunning natural environment, and rapidly changing economic landscape, including the arrival of major international employers like Hyundai’s Metaplant, located just 37 miles from campus.
USCB has responded to these shifts with a curriculum and community engagement strategy that honors both the distinctiveness of the region and the demands of the global economy. Among USCB’s most distinctive innovations is its Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), which provides lifelong learning opportunities to Lowcountry residents, primarily retirees who have settled in the area seeking intellectual engagement and community connection.
OLLI courses are taught by volunteer instructors, which means that membership fees are reinvested directly into the program and the university. Beyond its educational value, OLLI serves as a community bridge: the satisfaction of OLLI members translates into goodwill toward the institution among families of prospective students, strengthening USCB’s ties across generations.
The OLLI Makerspace, open to students, faculty, staff, and OLLI members alike, provides shared access to VR technology and fabrication tools that bring different campus communities together around creative and technical exploration.
USCB has also developed an Asian studies initiative that reflects its attention to regional economic transformation. As Korean and Japanese businesses have established significant presences in the Lowcountry, the university has developed programming, including a partnership with EWHA Language Center and the Japan Foundation, to equip both campus and community members with the cultural and language context needed to thrive in this evolving environment.
A major classroom redesign initiative is transforming eight instructional spaces into flexible, collaborative environments designed around active learning, and the university’s strategic goal of ensuring every student has at least one experiential learning opportunity before graduation, currently at 70% and growing, reflects the same commitment to practical, engaged education that animates USCB’s broader community mission.
For USCB, NIU, and Tri-C, the most meaningful innovations are the ones that extend the campus beyond their own walls, recognize learning, economic vitality, and community well-being as inseparable goals, and that position the institution not as a destination but as an active participant in enhancing the life of the places it calls home.
