The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is endearing because it is not enduring. Rather than have the foundation last in perpetuity, Bill and Melinda Gates made a deliberate, wise decision to give it a limited life that required all projects to be completed and the endowment spent within 50 years of their deaths. It set a refreshing example for American philanthropy.
This legacy, quite apart from the specifics of the Gates foundations initiatives, has potential for great impact on higher education in the United States. It leads by example to provide college presidents and development officers a compelling precedent to use in persuading prospective donors that major gifts may not be effective if one presumes that they must be—or ought to be—established to last forever.
An additional sign of the foundation’s wise stewardship of wealth is its clear focus on selected, significant topics—global health, global development, and, in the United States, school-college relations. The net result is that the foundation tends to avoid thoughtless sprawl that can fritter away even a large endowment.
In the area of American education, the Gates foundation has helped shift attention from the 3 R’s to the 3 I’s—initiatives, image, and influence. And these have been the catalyst for a fourth new “I"—intrigue. Recent articles have raised questions and eyebrows about whether the foundation has ventured into political advocacy for education reform.
I cannot speak to those allegations because I follow this drama of philanthropy and politics from the bleachers, far from the stage and the cast involved in legislation. Besides, I seem to be one of the few individuals in higher education who has neither sought nor received money from the Gates foundation.
From this vantage, then, I can say that I find the foundation’s commitments significant and inspiring. Their sound bites on NPR invoke goals of health and opportunity for all, noting that “every life has equal value.” These remind me of the corporate benevolence on display in General Electric’s advertisements from the 1950s that told the American public, “Progress is our most important product.” In its College-Ready Education and Postsecondary Success programs, the foundation takes on problems that individual schools, colleges, and universities are unlikely to tackle on their own. One contribution of the foundation to education is that its numerous grants have provided encouragement and seed money to many innovative education organizations, along with grants to familiar, established agencies and associations.
The foundation’s Web site is also impressive, with its forthright note to grant applicants and recipients that all projects are subject to rigorous evaluation and metrics. But this internal scrutiny of components apparently does not extend to an assessment of the overall effectiveness of the Gates foundation itself on College-Ready, which “aims to ensure that all students graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college,” according to the Web site.
Solving big problems often has been cast in metaphors of war—the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on crime. So, if the College-Ready program is cast as a war on college attrition, it brings to mind World War I: long, dreary episodes involving high-powered technology and a lot of investment and effort, much of it hard fought back and forth over the same terrain with little net gain. So one question that persists for me is: For all these initiatives and subsequent deliberations and jockeying, how and how much have the traditional advantages of family and wealth changed in the sweepstakes of attending and graduating from college?
When educational innovations overlap with legislation, my analogy of World War I is especially apt. For example, in early June The New York Times reported that Rep. John Kline, Republican of Minnesota, had introduced legislation, the third education bill introduced that week, to reduce “the federal footprint” in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools. One is left to ask, How—if at all—does this mesh with the Gates foundation’s general goals and specific grants? Does it reinforce the foundation’s initiatives? What involvement did Gates have in these bills? It’s hard to say. Whereas the Battle of the Argonne Forest in 1918 was dense with smoke from artillery and mustard gas, the forces behind today’s education campaigns are obfuscated by the smoke and mirrors of proclamations and public relations among a complex cast of allies and adversaries in Washington.
We do know, though, that on balance the Gates foundation is a leader in the amount of fresh money—and fresh ideas—devoted to education reform, which is no small accomplishment. It is fostering collaboration for some nationwide reforms among school systems and higher education. However, such educational and organizational changes are expensive and difficult, both to achieve and to measure. Even though the foundation’s commitments represent a high point in private philanthropy, its resources and efforts may not be sufficient to fulfill its aim to substantially increase educational opportunities and achievement. How unfortunate it will be if its efforts turn out to be too little, too late.
John Thelin is a professor of educational-policy studies at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of A History of American Higher Education (2011) and The Rising Costs of Higher Education (2013).
