The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to spend several hundred million dollars over the next five years to double the number of low-income young people who complete a college degree or certificate program by age 26. Foundation officials described the ambitious plan to an exclusive group of education leaders who gathered here last week to offer comments on it.
The foundation hopes to hit its goal by 2025. If successful, the new postsecondary program would help an additional 250,000 people per year earn some type of higher-education credential. The program broadens the foundation’s already-generous spending on education, which had focused on secondary schools and college scholarships.
Over all, the foundation plans to spend $3-billion on education during the next five years.
Gates officials announced their new campaign at a conference attended by about 100 people, including current and former governors, prominent business executives and school superintendents, and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.
At first, the new program will focus on community colleges because of their relatively low tuitions and open admissions policies.
Foundation officials said they would consider ways to expand innovative approaches to improve college-completion rates, such as using technology to allow a student to move quickly through remedial work, and forgiving a portion of debt each year for students who stay in college and are making progress toward a degree.
In a speech at the conference, Melinda Gates, a co-chair of the foundation, pointed to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics that show that more than half of all new jobs in the United States will require more than a high-school diploma. Only about 20 percent of low-income black and Hispanic students earn any sort of degree or certificate after high school.
“Completing high school ready for college is a key transition point in the path out of poverty,” Ms. Gates said. “A second transition is earning a postsecondary credential with value in the workplace. If young people fail to make the first transition, it’s unlikely they will make the second. If they fail to make the second, it’s likely they will be poor.”
Hilary Pennington, the Gates official who is leading the program, said the foundation would announce a small initial round of grants next month. Within a year, the organization would select eight to 10 states in which to focus its work for the next three to five years. Grants would probably go to networks of institutions and organizations, rather than to individual colleges, she said.
George R. Boggs, president and chief executive of the American Association of Community Colleges, said that community colleges had learned how to improve success rates for at-risk students through Achieving the Dream, a project financed primarily by the Lumina Foundation for Education that involves community colleges.
“It’s an ambitious goal,” Mr. Boggs said of the Gates Foundation’s plan. “But I think it’s achievable.”
Who Is Left Out?
The list of attendees at last week’s gathering revealed the foundation’s reach. Its guests included Sanford I. Weill, former head of Citigroup and current chairman of the National Academy Foundation, which helps prepare high-school students for professional careers, and Craig R. Barrett, chairman of the board of the Intel Corporation.
The foundation took a risk by presenting its general ideas to a high-profile audience. Ms. Gates asked for “candid feedback” during sessions moderated by the journalist Juan Williams, and the foundation received plenty.
Some conference attendees wondered why the foundation — which has, by its own admission, achieved mixed results in its eight years of trying to improve high-school education — was not spending more on elementary and middle-school education, rather than college completion.
“We made a choice,” said Bill Gates, a co-chair of the foundation and a co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation. He said the foundation was motivated in part by new approaches that are helping students make it through certificate programs and community colleges.
University officials who attended, including Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the California State University system, urged the foundation to broaden its initial focus to include four-year institutions. And representatives of for-profit institutions grumbled that the foundation’s age cutoff — 26 — would exclude the many proprietary institutions that serve adult learners.
But Mr. Boggs, of the community-college association, said the foundation’s focus on getting more students through community college would ultimately help four-year institutions, too.
“Universities will benefit if we become more successful in preparing students to transfer to universities,” he said. “It’s good for all of higher education.”
The foundation has hired Thomas J. Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard University, to oversee an initial research effort. Vicki L. Phillips, the foundation’s director of education, said it would spend $500-million over the next five years on research related to college preparation and completion.
Ms. Phillips said the foundation had recently given a grant to the National Student Clearinghouse, an organization that has enrollment records for 90 percent of college students, so that the group could provide their information to high schools and school districts. That information will allow schools to track which of their graduates are attending college and whether they are completing degrees.
The Gates foundation, which gives away $3.5-billion a year, far more than any other American foundation, is already a force in education. It has spent $4-billion over the past seven years on efforts to improve high schools and on scholarships for low-income minority students.
‘Big and Bold’ Endeavor
Foundation officials tout their latest program as the modern equivalent of the GI Bill, which helped millions of returning soldiers attend college.
“We must be as big and bold as we were at the end of World War II,” Ms. Pennington said. “And we must do everything we can to make certain that postsecondary education is not just about access but success.”
Gates officials said that they would work in partnership with other foundations, especially the Lumina Foundation, and that they wanted to expand existing programs with records of success.
Ms. Pennington cited a program started by ArcelorMittal, a steel company, in which students alternate between on-the-job training and community-college course work. After three years, students earn an associate degree and a shot at a full-time steelworker’s job.
“We want to support the development of many more models like this in jobs that promise good futures and help grow our economy,” Ms. Pennington said.
The foundation will also support programs that emphasize more-effective uses of technology. Ms. Pennington mentioned Rio Salado College, in Arizona, which has a rich online course catalog and online tutoring and support services. The college’s graduation rate — 60 percent — is double the national average for community colleges.
At last week’s conference, attendees spent much time discussing how to improve high schools so that students could succeed in college. Participants included Joel I. Klein and Michelle Rhee, the school chancellors in New York and Washington, D.C., respectively, and politicians who have worked to improve education, including James B. Hunt Jr., the former governor of North Carolina. Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania participated by teleconference.
Although the foundation’s first efforts in education focused on creating smaller high schools, Mr. Gates said the foundation would now emphasize improving teaching through new standards, curricula, and instructional tools.
For example, the foundation will give $7-million to the Educational Testing Service, the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan for a study that seeks to develop more-precise measures of teacher effectiveness.
“It’s clear that you can’t dramatically increase college readiness by changing only the size and structure of a school,” Mr. Gates said. “The schools that made dramatic gains in achievement did the changes in design and also emphasized changes inside the classroom.”
A Credential Crisis
Through the postsecondary effort, the foundation is devoting its resources to a problem that states and colleges have been grappling with for more than a decade, with little to show for it. Twenty years ago, the United States ranked first in the world in the percentage of adults between the ages of 25 and 34 who held a postsecondary credential. It has now fallen to 10th place, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The country’s financial crisis may help the Gates foundation as it tries to persuade states, school districts, and colleges to embrace structural changes and experimental approaches. The federal government and many states will not have the money to lead a reform effort, according to Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University.
“That means the Gates foundation could become the most powerful force in American education in the years to come,” he said.
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 55, Issue 13, Page A1
