In the last year, advocacy groups have churned out reports on how all kinds of students—those who work, are minorities, attend less-selective colleges, or come from low-income families—struggle in higher education. They have talked about the needs of the modern work force, and how the United States is falling behind.
All together, the groups’ findings have been picked up by USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and so on.
The drumbeat of reports came from eight different groups, written by a few dozen different people. But all coalesced around the same point: Not enough students are graduating from college. Another thing the studies had in common: All were paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The reports are part of an aggressive push by the foundation to convince the public that the United States has a college-dropout problem.
“People don’t really understand that we have a problem with completion,” says Hilary Pennington, director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives in the foundation’s United States program. “We’ve been so focused on access, and had this mentality of students’ right to fail, that there’s little understanding of how much churn hurts our institutions and the students they’re trying to serve.”
Changing that is one part of the three-pronged strategy that has emerged since the foundation officially entered the postsecondary sphere, in late 2008. It’s a tack that casts the organization as both vocal critic and white knight. And not all those in higher education are sure they want the Gates foundation’s particular brand of rescue.
Few people openly criticize the foundation, but privately some worry that its approach to postsecondary reform is too top-down and too systematic. The most outspoken critics of the foundation’s education work, however, have faulted its market-based approach to elementary and secondary schools.
Diane Ravitch, in a chapter of her recent book, Death and Life of the Great American School System, takes aim at Gates and other business tycoons’ foundations. “Education,” she writes, “is too important to relinquish to the vagaries of the market and the good intentions of amateurs.”
Others, of course, welcome the help. Many college leaders say the foundation is bringing much-needed attention to a neglected sector of higher education. The Gates foundation aims to double the proportion of low-income Americans who earn a postsecondary credential by age 26. To get there, the philanthropy is focusing its grants on community colleges, where more than half of students come from families earning less than $40,000 a year.
In addition to its policy and publicity work, the foundation is supporting efforts to increase low-income students’ access to financial aid and to good information about attending college. And it is financing work to identify and test practices that improve students’ outcomes, particularly in remedial math. Throughout, the philanthropy is exploring how technology could enhance quality and reduce costs.
While gathering evidence of good practices is a piece of its work, Ms. Pennington says, the foundation is not pushing for a uniform system. Much of its money is going to expand programs started on campuses themselves. “We feel like it’s very, very important,” Ms. Pennington says, “to support capacity and conversation within the sector.”
It’s easy to see the group’s move into higher education as a natural extension of its work in high schools. There, the foundation has focused on improving teaching but also on increasing options for families. Higher education in the United States, however, is already a market, and its primary federal support looks a lot like vouchers.
But the foundation has concluded that the market isn’t working. Why? Because students don’t have enough information—and because many lack real choice. “It is a diverse market, but it’s not highly functioning,” says Ms. Pennington. “With the population we’re focused on, they go locally.”
Colleges, she says, must change. To help them do that, the organization has awarded more than $178-million in higher-education grants since 2008 and paid out almost $97-million. In the scope of the Gates foundation—it paid out about $3-billion in 2009—that makes higher-education a growing but still small part of its portfolio.
But its higher-education grants of more than $72-million in 2009 still made it a huge player in that sector. The Lumina Foundation for Education, by comparison, committed just over $58-million that year. And the two foundations have joined each other in many of their efforts, giving them nothing short of a ton of influence. Both have set out to dramatically increase the number of college graduates by 2025, goals that are mirrored in the Obama administration’s own 2020 goal.
Throughout the Gates foundation’s work is a focus on data and structural change—both of which have implications for higher education more broadly. “We need,” says a strategy memorandum, “to ‘re-engineer’ the delivery model for postsecondary education.”
And the foundation has identified states as key partners. It’s a policy approach that, depending on where you sit, allows for regional diversity or looks a lot like No Child Left Behind.
Either way, the foundation’s influence—and the impact of its work—has just begun to be felt. “They are more powerful than people think” says Fred Galloway, an associate professor at the University of San Diego, who has done higher-education research for the federal government and foundations.
“I’m pleased as punch” he says, but “some people might not think that’s great.”
‘Mammoth’ Influence
Mixed feelings about philanthropists and their causes is nothing new. When Andrew Carnegie began building his libraries, more than a century ago, a debate raged between librarians and philanthropists over the proper design of the structures. But never before has a foundation had such wealth as Gates’s.
“They will have mammoth public-policy influence, especially with the federal government pushing the same direction,” says Richard L. Alfred, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Michigan and founding director of the Consortium for Community College Development.
President Obama announced in early 2009 that he wanted the United States to have the highest proportion of adults with college degrees by 2020. It’s a goal roundly supported, but there are questions about the details. Gates will very likely play a role in shaping those, but higher-education leaders say it’s hard to know just how.
“What we can say is that this is a brave new world,” says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “I think that Gates and a couple foundations, primarily Lumina, are pioneering a new approach that wouldn’t have been used in the past. Let’s call it ‘advocacy philanthropy.’”
The Obama administration has made clear that it plans to help states collect better data on individual students’ progress, a position supported by many Gates grantees.
That interest harks back to earlier efforts, under the Bush administration to create a “unit record” system. The debate over that pitted some college associations, which were concerned about student privacy, against researchers and advocates who argued such data were necessary to adequately diagnose the state of higher education. Congress ultimately banned a national tracking system, but some higher-education leaders were left feeling they had been painted as against student success.
The Gates foundation was not involved in those debates, but they are a backdrop for its support of more data, accountability—and, hopefully, better student outcomes. Grantees, like the Data Quality Campaign, are leading that push.
And Gates is supporting other loud megaphones trained on Washington: the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, Demos, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
“They’re a big player, and there’s a double-edged sword,” says Derek V. Price, a higher-education consultant who has done work for the Gates foundation and was a director at the Lumina foundation. “They can move policy, but they could drown out ideas. That’s an unknown.”
Many higher-education associations themselves, including the American Association of Community Colleges, have received Gates grants.
Of course, taking a grant doesn’t mean a think tank suddenly has to support everything a foundation is promoting—just as giving a grant isn’t a blanket endorsement. “I don’t think there’s a cause and effect,” says Mark David Milliron, Gates’s deputy director of postsecondary improvement in the United States. “It really does seem to be a coming together of people around a clearly critical issue.”
Building Connections
But it does mean a lot of money flowing to people with similar ideas. Take three of the foundation’s largest grant recipients: Achieving the Dream, the Gateway to College Network, and MDRC, a New York-based research-and-policy organization. All are focusing, to varying degrees, on learning communities as a way to improve remedial education. The idea is that the linked courses create peer-support networks, build greater cohesion in the curriculum, and enable students to earn some college credits along with precollege work.
Gateway to College is rolling out one such program, Project DEgree (for “developmental education”), this fall at a handful of community colleges. In addition to employing learning communities, colleges in the project must create a resource-specialist position to help students with study skills and professors with new teaching techniques.
Laurel Dukehart, president of Gateway, says the group got the idea after seeing the early successes of its model to help high-school dropouts re-enter school and do college work. It turned to the Gates foundation, which had supported much of the group’s earlier work.
“We came up with a three-year project that was more than Gates wanted to fund alone,” says Ms. Dukehart. “They were instrumental in putting us in touch with other foundations.”
Ultimately, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Foundation to Promote Open Society, and the Kresge Foundation joined in.
The Gates foundation as a connector is a theme that runs throughout conversations with its grantees—whether it’s connecting foundations to one another or creating a time and place for researchers to bounce ideas around. “The opportunity to learn from each other and talk about our work is really key,” says Catherine M. Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
In one case, the Gates foundation saw a lack of collaboration across states and helped start a new group altogether, Complete College America. Twenty-three states have signed on so far, pledging to set goals for completion, establish uniform measures, and monitor colleges’ progress.
A potential problem, however, is the people and ideas left out of those conversations. “The tendency to minimize risk by going with well-known institutions and researchers,” says Mr. Alfred, of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, “has a tendency to exclude a lot of very important work.”
The Gates foundation has tried to work around that by turning to existing networks of colleges. One such project, Achieving the Dream, has grown over the past six years into a force in the community-college field. “If you didn’t have that network of colleges, you’d want to create it,” says Ms. Pennington.
Achieving the Dream is built on the idea of creating a “culture of evidence” to raise the performance of community-college students, and it has received the largest Gates grant in the postsecondary program to date. The foundation liked that the group’s work was data-driven, Ms. Pennington says, but felt it was still too diffuse.
So Gates awarded MDC, a North Carolina-based nonprofit that manages the Achieving the Dream project, $16.5-million to scale up promising efforts to improve remedial education. And, in 2009, the groups announced the 15 community colleges selected. A good number, like Valencia, in Orlando, Fla., and El Paso, in Texas, are perennials on the national scene. But several, including Danville and Patrick Henry Community Colleges, in Virginia, are less well-known. In addition to creating learning communities, the colleges want to better align precollege and college-level work, and to speed up remedial math.
Another Gates grantee, Highline Community College, in Washington, created different tracks for students planning to major in math-heavy fields and for all the others.
Highline is one of 29 colleges in Washington that got Gates money as part of a $5.3-million grant given to the Washington State Board for Technical and Community Colleges. Highline has been awarded $165,000 total to revamp math, work on an open-courseware project, and expand a successful adult-basic-education program for students in remedial reading.
“Low-skill adults in the work force now outnumber new high-school graduates by 10 times, and there are all these people out there that can’t get good jobs,” says Alice Madsen, dean of instruction for professional technical education at Highline. “You can keep doing the same widget factory, or you can realize change is needed.”
With math, Highline started by revamping its prealgebra class to emphasize important concepts rather than textbook chapters set by an outside company. Faculty members created a custom textbook that not only allows them to teach differently, but also saves students money. The new course, which made its debut this past spring, weaves information on study skills and how to evaluate test results throughout.
Aaron Warnock, an instructor and math-faculty coordinator, says that his students responded well. They had a clearer understanding of what they needed to learn and how to improve, he says. On the first try, 19 of his 33 students scored at least 80 percent, which was required to pass the course, on their final mastery test.
Under the new system, students are required to take only two more math classes after prealgebra. The capstone course for most students focuses on statistics and applied math concepts, while math and science majors continue down the path to calculus. Students were thrilled, Mr. Warnock says, to learn it would now take them only a year to get from prealgebra to being finished with math. It used to take a year and a half.
The Carnegie foundation, Gates, and three other foundations recently put up $14-million to do similar work on a broader scale. Over two years, Carnegie will help 19 colleges create two new remedial-math pathways. One will take students through college-level statistics in one year, and the other will prepare students for college-level math in one semester.
“They’re looking for big game-changers,” says Ms. Casserly. “And this could be one.”
Early Returns
The big question, of course, is will it work?
“The last two years have been very affirming of our strategy,” Ms. Pennington says. Still, the foundation remains in the R&D phase with its higher-education program. And, according to a recent status report, it anticipates that “not every grant or strategy will prove effective.”
The early results on learning communities, for example, are mixed. MDRC, in a randomized study at Hillsborough Community College, recently found that learning communities had no measurable effect on students’ overall academic outcomes. However, the results varied by cohort, and the last group of students to participate did see improvement. The researchers hypothesized that the project became more effective as it matured.
An earlier study by MDRC found that students in learning communities took and passed more courses, but that they weren’t necessarily more likely to stay enrolled.
The Gates foundation is “taking a risk on trying unproven approaches,” says Thomas Brock, director of policy for young adults and postsecondary education at MDRC. At the same time, he says, it is “supporting research projects that are really grounded in work colleges are trying to do on the ground level.”
That, Ms. Pennington says, is the foundation’s niche. She and her colleagues can take chances that government can’t. But even with all the foundation’s billions, government will eventually have to take over. And colleges worry, with state budgets in a sorry condition, that they may end up with all stick and no carrot.
Their fears came true in Washington State last year. The state began developing an outcomes-based formula in 2006, and three years later the Gates foundation provided money to help increase its reach and study its impact. The money was supposed to be additive, says Jan Yoshiwara, the state community-college board’s deputy executive director for education services. But with the shortfall in the state, she says, the new money in 2009-10 ended up essentially coming from the colleges’ base budgets.
“Some colleges don’t think the measures are fair,” says Ms. Yoshiwara. “Others worry that the reward money will continue to come out of their base.”
The Gates and the Ford foundations stepped in to provide an additional $1.6-million over two years for the achievement pool. But that isn’t permanent.
“It’s an uphill battle, and we feel sober about how much of a push it will be,” says Ms. Pennington. “Not only what does it take to increase completion, but what does it cost?” And, after the Gates foundation, who will pay?
