Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Supports Postsecondary Retention Policy Research Initiatives

Over $6.4 million in grants to leading national policy organizations were announced today by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. These grants support new efforts to identify why many young Americans drop out of college and to propose new policies and practices necessary to help low-income, African American, and Hispanic students complete their educations.

Grants Announced Today:
• American Enterprise Institute (AEI) will receive $1.25 million to launch a significant new research project, which will include commissioned papers, major conferences, and a book about accountability in higher education. These projects will be data-driven and non-ideological, and will be designed to encourage a national conversation about postsecondary accountability. Founded in 1943, AEI sponsors research, conferences, and publications on issues of government, economics, and social welfare. The Institute is committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise. www.aei.org

• The Center for American Progress (CAP) will receive $800,000 to study and report on more than a dozen topics related to college completion. CAP’s work will result in policy recommendations that would bring coherence to a fractured national system of higher education institutions, give low-income students the targeted assistance they need to complete their educations, and bring accountability to institutions that are receiving evermore public money but graduating fewer and fewer of their students. CAP was founded in 2003 and is headed by John D. Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. CAP is designed to provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement. www.cap.org

• Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) will receive $1.5 million to support a new Center on Postsecondary and Economic Success within its organization. The Center will promote federal and state policy innovation to help low-income students, including working students, out-of-school youth, and other nontraditional students earn marketable postsecondary credentials through research, analysis, educational activities, and technical assistance to states and anti-poverty organizations. CLASP develops and advocates for policies at the federal, state, and local levels that improve the lives of low-income people. www.clasp.org

• The College Board will receive $675,000 to create the Center for Innovation and Advocacy. The Center will study policies and programs that increase college access and success, with a focus on increasing college completion among traditionally underrepresented students. For example, the Center will support the College Board’s ongoing Rethinking Student Aid project, which aims to redesign the federal student aid system to make it simpler, more efficient, and more focused on encouraging college success. The College Board is a national not-for-profit education association comprised of more than 5,600 college, university, and school members driven by a simple but powerful mission statement: To connect students to college success and opportunity. Each year the College Board serves 7 million students and parents, 23,000 high schools, and 3,800 colleges through major programs in college admissions, guidance, assessment, financial aid, enrollment, teaching, and learning. www.collegeboard.org

• Excelencia in Education will receive $600,000 to raise awareness about the significance of accelerating Latino college completion rates to meet the country’s human capital needs through a new campaign, Enhancing America’s Future. This campaign will be developed through high-level meetings with postsecondary policy leaders, benchmarking national and state level Latino college degree completion, and an outcomes-driven focus on dissemination of promising practices. Launched in 2004, Excelencia in Education is a national not-for-profit that links research, policy, and practice to support higher educational achievement for Latino students and all students. www.excelencia.org

• Institute for Higher Education Policy will receive $1.58 million over three years to support research to improve policies related to academic excellence and degree attainment by publishing reports, issue briefs, and fact sheets as well as connecting that research to policy and practice. Key beneficiaries of this work will be federal and state policymakers, media, higher education funders and organizations, institutional leaders, and researchers. The Institute for Higher Education Policy is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving access and success in postsecondary education around the world. www.ihep.org

"Secondary-Postsecondary Learning Options"

I spent my lunch-hour today listening to an informative webinar on “Secondary-Postsecondary Learning Options,” a catch-phrase coined by the American Youth Policy Forum (www.aypf.org) to describe schools and programs that link secondary education with two- and four-year institutions of higher education and allow high school students to participate in college-level courses. The webinar was presented by the Educational Policy Institute (www.educationalpolicy.org), which excels in disseminating knowledge of educational opportunity policy issues to a wide audience of policymakers and practitioners.

I particularly enjoyed the comments of Betsy Brand, the president of the American Youth Policy Forum, who shared her thoughts on the common characteristics of successful SPLOs: supports for students; transferability of academic credit; and rigor of classes. Providing support for secondary students pursuing college-level credits is essential for their success, and Betsy pointed out that the most successful programs had a “caring adult advisor” assigned to each student. She also noted that academic assistance and tutoring and the presence of a peer support network were also characteristics of successful SPLOs. The transferability of credit, while a common characteristic of these programs, can also pose a problem: Credits are too often not portable between institutions of higher education, even within the same state, and too often the responsibility for figuring out which credits transfer and which don’t fall on the student. The solution, Betsy suggested, is the use of articulation agreements at the local level but also, ideally, at the state level. The rigor of the curriculum is also important, supported in large part by the proper preparation of teachers and faculty who teach the courses.

Much of this webinar was inspired by The College Ladder, a recent publication of the American Youth Policy Forum, which is available on the AYPF website. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was one of the reviewers of this publication.