Hereâs what leaders from six of the biggest higher-education grantmaking foundations say theyâre prioritizing.
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Iâm Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, covering innovation in and around academe. As the Covid-19 crisis continues to reverberate, hereâs what Iâm thinking about this week.
How higher-ed grantmakers are changing course.
Grantmakers to higher education suddenly face a new reality. In less than a month, just about all of face-to-face higher education moved to remote operations. The American economy shifted from near full employment to a spiral that could end up [exceeding the joblessness levels of the Great Depression](. And of course our country â and most of the world â is still struggling to meet the growing medical needs of far too many.
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Even as the ground continues to move, several of the biggest philanthropic influencers are already shifting gears. This past week I spoke to leaders of six of the biggest higher-education grantmaking organizations, who collectively account for some $370 million annually in grants to hundreds of colleges, associations, and other organizations.
Each had a slightly different take, which I share below, but these are three of biggest priorities for giving across the board:
- Efforts to get more emergency aid directly into the hands of students in financial need right now.
- Organizations that can help facilitate quality online learning as well as access to it.
- Academic services for populations of students who were already at a disadvantage in getting to and through college, and will now be even more affected by the economic turmoil.
The grantmakers also raised concerns about the needs of students and families not met by the three federal stimulus packages, the value in building more capacity for holistic crisis planning, and the ramifications of the economic upheaval that has already begun to roil most colleges â and close some of them.
The six leaders I spoke with oversee postsecondary philanthropy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ascendium Education Group, the Lumina Foundation, the ECMC Foundation, the Strada Education Network, and the Kresge Foundation. (I listed them in order of the size of their annual giving to higher ed.)
Their empathy for the most vulnerable students wasnât surprising, but knowing that was top of mind was edifying, especially with news of massive job layoffs continuing to flood my news feeds.
Amy Kerwin, vice president for education philanthropy at Ascendium, told me that sheâs worried especially about two groups of students: the cohort of high-school seniors who will find it even more challenging to secure the money to go to college, and âall those students who need to drop outâ now for financial reasons. âHow do we get them to eventually come back for their degrees?â she wondered.
Kresge, which is based in the Detroit area, has a focus on cities. Bill Moses, managing director of its education program, said heâs been thinking a lot about the low-wage working students his grantees serve, âwho are more likely to lose their job, or theyâre working with a certain level of dangerâ because they work in groceries, warehouses, or other essential jobs where protection against the coronavirus might not be as good as it should be.
How does all this concern translate into concrete action? Well, for one, several of the foundations said they would be looking to support better systems for distributing collegesâ emergency aid, including [a start-up called Edquity, the evolution of which Iâve been watching for two years](. Peter Taylor, the head of ECMC, said he plans to ask his board next week to approve $2.25 million in new grants to Edquity, the University Innovation Alliance, and other groups.
With the grand shift to remote learning, the focus on digital learning is understandable. Patrick Methvin, the head of postsecondary-success programs at Gates, said heâll turn to existing grantees for advice on where to put additional money. That direction is a natural for Gates, which has traditionally funded adaptive courseware, data analytics, and other tech-based projects, and now does so through the Every Learner Everywhere consortium. But even foundations that never had online learning as a high priority are now reconsidering. As Kerwin told me, training faculty for online teaching wasnât historically a huge issue for Ascendium. But, she said, âit has to be today.â
Hereâs what else struck me from my conversations:
Jamie Merisotis, president of Lumina and also currently chair of the Council on Foundations, expects the economic turmoil will place even more demands on collegesâ capacity to be adaptive. âWeâll want to be serving adults more and better,â he said, and the challenges people face in trying to upgrade their skills âare going to be magnified.â Taking a lesson that foundations learned from the 2008 financial crisis, he said Lumina would concentrate on shoring up the organizations that are already out there doing the work. Lumina happened to grant more money last year than this year, ($80 million, rather than $60 million) so many of its grantees are in good shape. âTheyâve got capacity now,â he said.
Bill Hansen, president and chief executive of Strada, which calls itself a social-impact organization, predicts that many of the best responses to the crisis will arise from the local level. Strada has previously funded the National Governors Association and the Education Commission of the States â two groups with strong local connections â and it will rely on them for guidance. (Its grants exceed $20 million a year.) Stradaâs ownership of ventures like the economic-modeling company Emsi and its partnership with Gallup, Hansen said, could help highlight important public-policy issues and economic trends. âWeâre not GM, and we canât build ventilators,â he said, but this kind of information could be useful to governments and institutions and employers.
Kerwin fears for the future of postsecondary-education programs in prisons, despite emerging political support for â[second chance Pell Grants]( Prison education has been a top priority for Ascendium. (Its annual grants total $108 million.) Right now, of course, the highest priority for prisons is to keep closely housed incarcerated people from dying of Covid-19. Those education programs are likely suffering, and once the crisis passes, Kerwin worries âthat they will be the last to come back online.â
Taylor, who was chief financial officer at the University of California from 2009 to 2014, when it endured deep cuts in state funding, wonders what the economic havoc will do to the higher-education business model. He came to UC after 16 years in investment banking. That experience, he said, taught him that the hardest adaptations to make in higher education arenât the practical ones or even the technical ones, but the âcultural changes.â Now, as a grantmaker (ECMC spends $40 million in grants annually), he said he wants to be attuned to that.
Methvin, who noted that âitâs difficult to imagine a fall 2020 where there arenât some closuresâ of colleges, highlighted the importance of developing better safety nets for students left stranded by colleges shutting down. Grim, yes. But smart, too. And he wasnât just talking about financial safety nets, but also an academic safety net, like having better systems in place to help students more easily transfer credits. Methvin recalled the chaos that thousands of students faced when the Corinthian Colleges chain abruptly shut its doors â not to mention ITT Tech and other schools since then. (Gates spends $120 million on grants in postsecondary education.)
Moses, noting the âabsence of strong leadership at the national level,â emphasized the key role colleges can play in providing âintellectual leadership and problem solving.â In fact, Kresge (with an overall higher-ed grant portfolio of $18 million) has just funded a $50,000 grant to the National Academy of Sciences to hold two virtual convenings for the purposes of better enlisting institutionsâ expertise to deal with Covid-19 crises on practical matters such as how to allocate scarce [PPE]( (an acronym many of us just learned in the past two weeks) or where to set up temporary hospitals. And itâs not just for research universities. Minority-serving institutions know their communities, he noted, and community colleges have work-force expertise. As Moses put it, âit goes back to that idea of the university as an anchor.â
I ended with that on purpose. Seemed like a nice thought to hold onto right now, especially with all the frenzy around us.
Four groups join forces to advocate for quality online education.
There is a new [National Council for Online Education]( and it is stepping up its profile just as colleges race to remote teaching in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Itâs doing so, one of its leaders told me, to make clear that this âduct tape version of onlineâ is recognized for what it is: an emergency response to a crisis and not whatâs considered a program of quality.
That characterization comes courtesy of Robert Hansen, chief executive of Upcea, an association for professional, continuing, and online education. Upcea is one of four groups that make up the council, along with the Online Learning Consortium, Quality Matters, and the Wiche Cooperative for Educational Technologies. Each of the groups has a particular niche and will maintain their own structure and memberships but will collaborate on matters like policy advocacy. For the moment, though, Hansen said their highest priority is to ensure that people donât look back on the distance-learning efforts now underway and treat them as anything but emergency make-shift efforts.
Virtual greetings from âmy friendsâ in Durango.
Was it just last month that I wrote about the angst I was hearing from professors at Fort Lewis College, [worried that the outside consultants would be pressing them to shift more of their teaching to online formats]( Yup a month ago, in a different life.
Well angst or no, like the rest of higher ed, Fort Lewis has moved online. On Monday, the folks there sent word that it was Day 1 of its âall-virtual campus.â They also shared [a short video]( they produced to keep the college community together while students and faculty dispersed, with some nice views of scenic Durango, Colo., and some touching messages from professors. I donât know when Iâll be back there for my next reporting trip chronicling the consultantsâ work. So Iâll let that video stand in lieu of my personal message for this week.
Hope youâre all still staying safe, sane, and humane. Also, please, #StayAtHome.
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