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Draft: Do not cite without permission from the authors. 0 Draft: Do not cite without permission from the authors. Unlike K-12, which has been the subject of a well-financed reform movement for the past decade and a half, higher education has largely flown below reformers’ radar screens, often viewed as a bright spot in America’s otherwise troubled education system. While Americans tend to give their local school high marks, they are far more skeptical about the quality of the public school system as a whole.1 In contrast, the U.S. higher education system has traditionally been viewed as the best in world, and Americans think much more highly of their colleges and universities than they do their public schools.2 Even though policymakers and the public have often griped about tuition increases, few have asked serious questions about whether the system performs as well as it should. For many, if the K-12 schools are America’s problem child, its colleges and universities are its overachieving golden one. Private donors, too, have tended to view colleges very differently than elementary and secondary schools. In K-12, philanthropic money has generally sought to change and improve K-12 schools, first by providing additional resources to particular schools and districts and more recently by changing the policies that govern them. In higher education, however, grants have traditionally subsidized colleges to do more of what they were already doing: more research, more fields of study and new curricula, more physical space and operating support to run it, and more scholarships to enable more students to get access to it. These investments help colleges accomplish their goals, but do little to change the way students outside of those campuses are educated or financed.3 More recently, however, elites’ rosy view of America’s higher education system has started undergoing serious revision, and higher education philanthropy has changed with it. According to data collected by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and 1 Draft: Do not cite without permission from the authors. Development (OECD), while the United States ranks fourth in overall degree attainment for adults ages 25 to 64, the country ranks twelfth among the youngest cohort of workers (25- to 34-year-olds).4 While college enrollments are up, graduation rates have remained stagnant, hovering around 60 percent at four-year colleges and 30 percent in two-year schools.5 Student debt has ballooned past $1 trillion6, and labor market data suggest that nearly 45 percent of college graduates are underemployed—working jobs that do not require a college degree.7 In light of this evidence, policymakers on the left and right have started asking tough questions of colleges and universities. In 2006, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings commissioned a hard-hitting report on the shortcomings of our higher education system. The report’s conclusion was blunt: “higher education has become . increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive.”8 President Obama has been similarly critical of the state of American higher education. In his first State of the Union address he warned that the “countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow” and set a bold goal—that America would once again be the most educated nation in the world.9 By 2012, the President put colleges “on notice” for failing to keep tuition prices affordable,10 and in 2013 he proposed a set of reforms that would “shake up the current system, create better incentives for colleges to do more with less, and deliver better value for students and their families.”11 A far cry from all that best in the world talk. The changing politics of higher education did not occur in a vacuum. As we show in our data analysis, this change in perception of higher education has paralleled a shift in higher education philanthropy toward the policy and advocacy-oriented approach that had 2 Draft: Do not cite without permission from the authors. previously taken hold in K-12. Led by the Bill and Melinda Gates (Gates) and Lumina Foundations, a loose coalition of grantees has promoted a “completion agenda” focused on the need to improve student success rates at American colleges—and not just at elite schools, but at the thousands of other institutions where the bulk of American students enroll. Both organizations have set ambitious attainment goals—Gates aims to double the number of young, low-income Americans with a postsecondary credential while Lumina’s goal is to reach a 60 percent college attainment rate by 2025.12 In contrast to the access agenda that has dominated higher education policy for the past half-century, this emphasis on completion has entailed a lot more criticism of colleges—and the public policies that govern them—than has been the norm. Other scholars and journalists have already charted the rise of “advocacy philanthropy” in higher education, noting that it reflects a very different conception of American colleges than foundations have espoused in the past.13 Rather than seeing America’s institutions as the “best in the world” and as great social levelers, these new funders view traditional higher education (and the policies that govern it) as a sector that is deeply troubled, organized to serve the interests of administrators and faculty over those of students and taxpayers, and poorly designed to meet the needs of a changing student body. And, as scholars Scott Thomas and Cassie Hall argued in a 2012 paper, this perception is coupled with “distrust that higher education institutions can successfully enact reforms” on their own.14 In this chapter, we explore the evolution of this worldview and illustrate how it has driven Gates and Lumina to adopt a very different strategy of giving in higher education, one focused on making a public case for reform and empowering outside 3 Draft: Do not cite without permission from the authors. organizations to serve as credible counterpoints to the higher education establishment. We start by discussing the traditional approach to higher education philanthropy and the changing politics of higher education. We then analyze grant data from 15 large foundations that give to higher education, providing an empirical snapshot of the landscape that highlights the different approaches. We move on to discuss the pushback advocacy philanthropy has catalyzed and conclude with a discussion of whether the new approach is “good” for American higher education. Traditional Approach to Higher Education Philanthropy: Subsidizing More College In Rick Hess’s first edited volume on education philanthropy, With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy is Reshaping K-12 Education, University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene argued that the vast majority of philanthropic dollars given to K-12 education merely amounted to “buckets into the sea:” while the investments made by philanthropists may be substantial in absolute terms, they represented a tiny fraction overall spending on America’s public school system.15Therefore, such giving would be unlikely to effect change in the system over the long haul. This includes, for example, money for activities that schools would likely engage anyway using public dollars—such as professional development—or niche programs that would be difficult to sustain once philanthropic support ran out. In contrast to this “low-leverage” giving, Greene argued, “if philanthropists aspire to improve public education more broadly…Their private dollars have to be leveraged by redirecting future public expenditures.”16 Greene’s definition of low-leverage giving describes much of the philanthropic activity in higher education prior to the emergence of Gates and Lumina. But before 4 Draft: Do not cite without permission from the authors. exploring why that might be the case, it is important to distinguish between two very different varieties of grant making to higher education. One category of giving is broadly designed to affect higher education itself: scholarships; curriculum development; interventions to boost student success; research funding to study various aspects of higher education; and assorted projects that expose students and faculty to new ideas, fields of study, and cultural opportunities. This category includes efforts to improve individual campuses by funding new initiatives and capital projects (new buildings). A second category of grants leverages universities’ research capacity to improve the world in ways that may be unrelated to education: funding research to promote public health and medical breakthroughs, the development of new technology, and the preservation of the past. These research grants are directed toward colleges and universities and account for a substantial proportion of the philanthropic money that flows to higher education every year, but they are clearly distinct from category one in that they do not seek to affect education directly. Therefore, since our focus is on education, we focus on the first category here and in analysis below. For that category of giving, we posit that most foundations give the majority of their money to “low-leverage” grants. Why might that be the case? In the rest of this section, we explain why key characteristics of higher education might tilt the scale in favor of low-leverage giving even more so than in K-12. Colleges Are Held in High Esteem The first and most important difference is the one we started with in the introduction: colleges and universities occupy a very different—and more revered—place in the 5 Draft: Do not cite without permission from the authors. hierarchy of American institutions than the public schools. American universities dominate international rankings of research institutions, making up 15 of the top 20 schools on the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and 8 of the top 10 on the Shanghai Jiao Tong World University Rankings.17 And each year the world’s best students flock to these campuses to seek what the world perceives as the best undergraduate education money can buy.