Two of the biggest education-oriented philanthropies, the Lumina Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are each sharpening the focus of their work.
As a result, expect to see even more Lumina money flowing over the next four years toward projects that help adults with little or no college experience to earn some form of postsecondary educational credentials, efforts to expand the use of competency-based education at colleges, and new ideas to create a better system of quality assurance for all sorts of educational offerings.
The priorities, three of several that Lumina outlined on Monday in its latest strategic plan, are aimed at achieving its longstanding “big goal” of increasing the number of Americans who hold high-quality postsecondary credentials by 2025.
The foundation’s goal is to have some 40 million people holding a degree, a certificate, or some other worthwhile post-high-school credential. That would be 16 million more than would be expected based on current trends. In the shorter term, its goal is to see 5.9 million more people than otherwise projected to hold such credentials by 2020, especially adults who currently have no recognized postsecondary credential.
Lumina’s focus on credentials, not just college degrees, isn’t new. But the particular emphasis on adults who haven’t attained any postsecondary credential is, said Jamie P. Merisotis, Lumina’s president, in an interview on Friday.
Some research has raised questions about the benefits of such credentials, suggesting that in some cases they aren’t steppingstones to better careers or further education. Mr. Merisotis acknowledged that concern — credentials “cannot be dead ends,” he said. But he countered that efforts like the Lumina-backed “Credential Engine” could eventually provide more clarity about which credentials are worthwhile.
He said he was also optimistic that more adults and others would be able to attain a higher education through competency-based programs, now that the approach is “starting to achieve some mainstream acceptance.”
Meanwhile, the Gates foundation’s Postsecondary Success program recently outlined its own set of advocacy priorities for the year. Those objectives will translate into increased financial support for organizations that are helping to simplify the federal student-aid system, those working to ease some of the barriers to student progress such as poorly designed remedial courses and faulty credit-transfer systems, and groups creating ways to provide data to policy makers and others to track how students progress during and after college.
Even though Congress has outlawed the creation of a federal “unit-record system,” said the foundation’s spokesman, Travis Reindl, its education team sees value in “a national approach that covers every student and every institution.”
Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.
