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From: Goldie Blumenstyk
Subject: The Edge: How Does MacKenzie Scott Pick Which Colleges Get Donations?
I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
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I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
Community colleges and community-college watchers took notice over the past year as one of the richest women in the world began showering hundreds of millions of dollars in donations on dozens of two-year institutions. For folks at the Aspen Institute, the list of MacKenzie Scott’s grantees was especially familiar: Twenty-four of the 30 public two-year colleges receiving donations had also won or been finalists for Aspen’s Community College Excellence Prize at least once in its 10-year history.
Based on what I’ve heard from Aspen, that’s probably almost certainly not a coincidence. And while I’ve previously reported on how ambitious education prizes can fizzle out if they lack the right design or follow-through, I’ve admired the Aspen prize for the rigor of its evaluation and its staying power. Now Scott’s own selection process may be another reason to take the contest seriously.
Her first gifts to colleges became public in December 2020. In that first round, nine of 11 two-year colleges receiving grants had either won or been a finalist for Aspen’s every-other-year prize. Several of them weren’t well known nationally. If that made the Aspen folks wonder if Scott was using the prize as a screening tool, those suspicions most likely intensified in February, when the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting organization that has been helping the billionaire choose her recipients, contacted them. Bridgespan officials spoke with Aspen’s Linda Perlstein, a director of its College Excellence program, and Josh Wyner, the program’s founder and executive director, about the criteria for choosing prize winners. In Scott’s most recent round of gifts, announced last month, Aspen Prize winners and finalists (again, some not nationally known) were also heavily represented.
The Bridgespan officials had told the Aspen folks they were representing a philanthropist looking to make investments in higher education (they didn’t mention her name, even though by that point the organization’s ties to Scott were already public). So Perlstein and Wyner can’t say they know for sure that their selection process is influencing Scott’s giving. But even so, they’re heartened by the overlap. “It means these investments are going to colleges that we know are using it well,” Perlstein told me. And the gifts amplify one purpose of the prize, she noted: to “elevate colleges” that deserve it.
Aspen has taken the prize seriously from the beginning. The evaluation process takes 18 months, beginning with identifying colleges the institute invites to apply based on their completion rates, graduate outcomes, and other data. Then comes a winnowing of those contenders, extensive interviewing, and two-day site visits for the top 10. Not quite the intensity of an accreditation review, but still, as Perlstein put it, “a lot of work” for the applicants. Even presidents of colleges that don’t win say the process is worthwhile, she said.
The real prize is the recognition, not the money. But I recall that when the contest was first announced, people were excited about a seven-figure prize for a community college, and even today, it’s often called a “million-dollar prize” (never mind that in actuality, the winner gets $600,000, and other top finalists split the rest). Top honors this year went to San Antonio College.
Not all recipients of Scott’s philanthropy have made public the amount of their gifts, but according to an analysis this week by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, for the 22 community colleges that did, donations totaled $429 million.
Scott hasn’t said much about her criteria for giving, but noted that she was eager to support two- and four-year institutions “successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved.”
San Antonio College received $15 million from Scott. For it and 23 other campuses, developing the attributes recognized by the Aspen Prize paid an unexpected dividend. The prize is supposed to promote promising practices among colleges, Perlstein said, and it’s a bonus “if other people see value in it,” too. Still, the prize is no guarantee of a philanthropic windfall. Over six rounds of competition, 11 finalists haven’t benefited from Scott’s largess. Or or at least not yet.
Last month, in writing about the 11-member University Innovation Alliance’s first seven years of progress, I noted that in 2014, hundreds of other colleges had also made public pledges to broaden access and improve completion rates. Now, gratefully, I can report that at least one organization has responded to my plea for someone to systematically analyze what became of all those pledges. Or at least try.
I’m not at liberty to name the group, and it’s still possible that the analysis won’t be feasible — or all that valuable. It’s not a formal study, but “an effort to allay the curiosity your newsletter piqued,” an official told me. So I’m tempering my expectations. But I’m still delighted. Because, as the official told me, the group is “happy to share anything useful for you or your audience.”
The report — now available online — examines key questions on equity and inclusion, like: How can a task force be most effective? Does diversity training help? It also offers four case studies of campuses that have made racial equity a priority across the institution. Give it a read, let my colleague Sarah Brown know what you think, and feel free to share the link.
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, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.
