But this might be the year that more colleges answer the endowment question differently, especially in the wake of the Ford Foundation’s announcement that it will borrow $1 billion to increase its payouts. The big kids in higher ed could follow the lead of Ford and a few other foundations and borrow, too. Princeton ($500 million), Stanford ($750 million), and Yale ($1.5 billion) already are.
Even more of them could pursue an idea proposed by Buck Goldstein at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: that colleges begin to systematically ask their donors to “opt in to a program where all constraints on endowment and contributions would be suspended during the pandemic.”
A campaign to “unrestrict the money”? The pros seem greater than the cons. For one, it’s a simple way to give college leaders the thing they need most: resources to maintain flexibility. Goldstein, an entrepreneur in residence and a professor of the practice in Chapel Hill’s School of Education, calls that “the biggest gift” anyone could give right now.
What’s more, as he sees it, temporarily lifting a gift restriction is a way that living donors or their heirs could help ensure that, once this crisis passes, “the institution will be around and strong enough to continue the work of why they gave.” Colleges just need to ask, he says. He thinks a lot of people would say yes.
He might be right. But the idea is also based on the premise that donors trust college leaders. I’m not saying they shouldn’t or don’t. But restricted giving in higher ed didn’t develop in a vacuum. Even the uncertainty of a pandemic might not be enough to sway some donors. Another con: Gift stewardship is an important concept to uphold, says Susan Johnston, president and chief executive of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. I take the point. Still, some adjustments might make sense, especially in cases where gifts are designated for things like convocations that won’t be happening anytime soon.
When, not just whether, to tap these funds is another important strategic question. “The risk of spending ‘unrestricted’ is that it’s gone,” says Tim Yates, president and chief executive of Commonfund Asset Management, which advises colleges on their investments. And yet the crisis isn’t over. If colleges have to make another big pivot, or even more-radical moves, will they have access to the money they need? “As dire as it may seem in June,” he says, this may be a more protracted crisis than some see it as right now.
At this point, the “unrestrict” movement has already gone further than colleges’ asking their living donors and heirs, officials at Moody’s Investors Service told me this week. Institutions in California and Massachusetts have sought dispensations from their state attorneys general to lift restrictions on gifts whose original donors or descendants are deceased. Mostly, says Susan Fitzgerald, of Moody’s, those actions are coming from colleges “facing more fundamental financial stress with thin liquidity.”
More changes on the scene.
Change is afoot for several of the companies, organizations, and people I’ve covered before in this newsletter and elsewhere in The Chronicle. Let’s keep up:
Lumen Learning just acquired the assets of Faculty Guild, a company that provided peer-based training in teaching for professors at about 40 institutions. Lumen, which is known primarily for its work in open educational resources (OER), is now streamlining those offerings — and cutting their price by about half — to focus on three themes: online teaching; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and teaching with OER. It’s given the program a new name, too: Lumen Circles. The acquisition was in the works before the pandemic. But as Lumen’s founder and chief executive, Kim Thanos, told me this week, the pivot to online learning accelerated the deal, as leaders of both companies saw a growing need for faculty training.
Braven, a nonprofit focused on helping low-income students succeed in the job market, is now offering career advising to thousands of students who were not already in one of its more robust semester-long campus programs. Beyond the recession, “distancing for this group of students is really unfortunate,” says Aimée Eubanks Davis, Braven’s founder, because they’re already at a disadvantage when it comes to networking and other elements of social capital.
Braven has raised about $800,000 of the $1 million it needs to offer its two-week Career Booster online program to as many as 20,000 students from now to November. Davis hopes that colleges will kick in “the price of a latte” per student to help cover the costs for their graduates. As with the campus-based program, students will be paired with working professionals to critique their résumés, LinkedIn profiles, etc. (Many of the mentors are typical in-person volunteers who now have time on their hands.) And there’s an addition: an emphasis on contingency planning. In these times, Davis says, students need “four to five plans.”
Guild Education has acquired the Entangled Group. Guild is the company that helps big employers (including Walmart) promote postsecondary education among their employees through arrangements with partner colleges. Entangled owns the consultancy whose “turnaround” advising at Fort Lewis College I am following. That means Guild has now gobbled up one of its early investors. Even before the pandemic, both corporate ventures were focused on creating businesses to help employers offer education-based “outskilling” to laid-off or furloughed employees. With the acquisition, I expect to see even greater attention to Guild’s product Next Chapter.
And some moves for individuals: Hadass Sheffer, founding president of The Graduate! Network, which helps adults return to college, is stepping down after 16 years with the organization. A lot of the reporting I’ve done in the past three years on adult students, which the network calls “comebackers,” has been informed by Sheffer’s work. Michelle R. Weise, chief innovation officer and senior vice president of work-force strategies at Strada Education Network, will become entrepreneur-in-residence and senior adviser at Imaginable Futures, a venture of the Omidyar Group. There, she says, she’ll be “working through the deep structural changes and restorative education and work-force solutions we need to support specifically for our Black and brown communities.”
I missed saying it last week, but hope you’re all still staying safe, sane, and humane. And, remember, there is no “second wave” yet, because the first wave still hasn’t passed. So if you can’t #StayAtHome, please wear your mask.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, or sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.
