Sharing the Goal of Increased College Attainment
Jamie P. Merisotis, President, Lumina Foundation for Education
Atlanta Education Donors Network, Atlanta
April 23, 2009
Thank you, and good morning everyone. It's good to be with you. I feel so welcome here today because I know I am among dedicated, like-minded people. As education funders, you clearly share my passion for increasing college access and success. You understand the importance of broadening opportunity. And you're not just talking here in Atlanta; you are acting on that passion.
I think of the wonderful work Danny Shoy and his colleagues at the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation are doing in the Pathways to Success program. Hosanna Johnson and her colleagues at the Atlanta Education Fund have long contributed to this effort through the College Success Network. And just last week, I was pleased to read news accounts of Mayor Shirley Franklin's efforts to help local teens find their way to college through the Mayor's Youth Program—and through Atlanta's involvement in the CEOs for Cities project.
I commend you for all of this important work—and for the many other efforts that I simply don't have time to mention. Without a doubt, Lumina Foundation and I are among friends this morning.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the organization I represent, let me explain. Lumina Foundation for Education is a private foundation based in Indianapolis. We're the largest national foundation that focuses exclusively on getting more Americans into and through college. College access and success is what we're about. We have more than $1 billion in assets, and last year we paid out in excess of $50 million in grants. That may seem a significant amount, but as you all are aware, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the challenges facing higher education today.
That's why, in addition to our grantmaking, we at Lumina try to use all of the tools we have at our disposal to increase college success rates, particularly among underserved students. Broadly, this means we provide funds to support student-success programs; we engage in public policy advocacy; and we work to encourage change among the public. More specifically, this means Lumina convenes business, policy, and educational leaders to develop strategies that advance student success. As a large national foundation with a specific mission, we try to use our own bully pulpit to communicate reliable and actionable information to broad audiences. We emphasize collaboration and network-building as a tool to broaden the ideals of college access and success to diverse constituencies.
At Lumina, we do all of these things in pursuit of one specific aim—what we call our "Big Goal." In case you haven't heard, our Big Goal is this: By the year 2025, we want 60 percent of the American population to hold high-quality, two- or four-year college degrees. Right now, and for the past four decades, U.S. degree attainment has hovered around 39 percent, so you can see we have a big job ahead of us. In fact, to reach the Big Goal, the nation will have to produce 16 million more graduates than are expected at the current rate.
Clearly, if we hope to hit that Big Goal, the issue of student success needs to take center stage. It needs to be a national priority—not just on the nation's college campuses, but in K-12 systems, in the philanthropic community, in the policy arena at both the state and federal levels, and in living rooms and around kitchen tables all over the country. Families need better and more timely information about the college-enrollment and financial-aid application processes. Students need to be better prepared for the academic rigors of college—and that preparation must start not in high school, but in grade school and middle school. More public and private dollars must be made available to help struggling families pay for college. And policymakers must find ways to encourage the higher-ed system to be more efficient—and colleges and universities must embrace these efficiencies and adopt innovations that can improve productivity and increase degree attainment.
At Lumina Foundation, we're working hard to make progress on all of these fronts. But, as I said, our goal is big, and we need lots of help. As education funders, you understand the magnitude of the challenge we face. More important, you appreciate the importance of meeting that challenge. You know that unless we want demography to dictate destiny, we must find ways to ensure that every American has the opportunity to succeed in higher education. You know that business as usual is no longer a viable option in American higher education ... that change is vital if we hope to reverse the nation's disturbing economic trend and position our citizens for success in the global economy.
And it's not just about numbers; it's also a matter of fairness and justice. There is no doubt that our system of higher education faces significant, persistent challenges in its efforts to foster and ensure equity. The gap between Americans with college degrees and Americans without college degrees has always been too wide ... and it's actually getting wider. So closing the achievement gap isn't just the right thing to do; it's also the smart thing to do—for all Americans.
As I said, we at Lumina are attacking this challenge on multiple fronts, and we've been at it now for several years. Long before I arrived at the Foundation in early 2008, the people who helped to create Lumina launched College Goal Sunday—a multi-state effort in which volunteers help low-income families complete financial aid paperwork. Over the years, College Goal Sunday has helped more than 100,000 students and families in more than 40 states, and Lumina remains very actively involved in that program.
Three years ago, we launched another pre-college access initiative called KnowHow2GO—an effort that starts a bit earlier than College Goal Sunday in helping students and families negotiate the college-going process. KnowHow2GO—which we support in collaboration with the Ad Council and the American Council on Education—is a national public awareness and direct-service effort aimed at helping middle-schoolers and their families get an early start in preparing for higher education. We all know that if students aren't prepared academically and socially, the path to college can be a very rocky one—if it is even taken at all.
And now, more than ever, financial barriers can block that path, derailing the dreams of tens of thousands of students. KnowHow2GO works to address those barriers by linking students and families with a local network of advisers who can share information about financial aid as well as stress the importance of being academically prepared.
Is KnowHow2GO working? In a word, yes. A new national survey of the target group of eighth- to 10th -graders shows some very encouraging signs since the campaign began three years ago. For example:
- The percentage of students who said they are regularly taking steps to prepare for college has grown significantly—from 26 percent in 2007 to 35 percent in 2009.
- Nine in 10 students said they have spoken to an adult about getting prepared for college, up from 80 percent in 2007.
- When asked what they talked about with adults, 69 percent of the young people said they discussed being academically prepared for college—up a full 20 percentage points from 2007.
Of course, we can't claim that KnowHow2GO is responsible for all of these positive trends, but we are convinced that the effort is having an impact. And we know that a big part of KnowHow2GO's success is the one-on-one assistance it provides to students and families at the local level. After all, public service campaigns can raise awareness and even prompt initial action, but real change—substantive change—happens at ground level. And it's happening here because dedicated counselors and advocates are working tirelessly in college-access programs and organizations all over the country.
Some of those people are working right here in your city, and they very much need and deserve your support. They're working in organizations such as Summerbridge Atlanta, Project GRAD Atlanta, and Helping Teens Succeed. They're in the Talent Search programs at institutions such as Georgia State University and Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University. They're in the Upward Bound programs at places like Atlanta Metropolitan College and GSU-Atlanta Gwinnett. Truly, without the dedication and the passion of these front-line soldiers in the battle to increase college access, all of our work would be in vain—and Lumina's Big Goal would be little more than a dream.
Still, our excitement about KnowHow2GO—and about all efforts to enhance college access—is tempered a bit by an important realization: Access isn't really the end game here; it's just the first step. The ultimate goal—the one we must all work toward—is actually student success.
That's why I want to direct your attention again to the local institutions where this vital work is being done. If you look closely at the names of those institutions, you'll note that many of the state's leading Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are included. Lumina Foundation believes that HBCUS and their colleagues at Hispanic-Serving Institutions and American Indiana Tribal Colleges—which together we often refer to as Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs)—are one of the nation's most important but underappreciated educational assets. These institutions as a group are a vital resource when it comes to fostering student success.
Nationally, MSIs educate more than 2.3 million students, or about one-third of all students of color, and these numbers are growing rapidly. They confer nearly half of all teacher-education degrees awarded to African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans in United States. They make major contributions to our nation's workforce in the important STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). And they are a major economic and social link to the communities that many of their students call home.
Given demographic projections that show that underrepresented populations are the fastest-growing in the nation, it is clear that MSIs must be recognized as a leading voice for the students who represent the backbone of our future workforce. These populations find that MSIs offer uniquely valuable educational experiences.
In my own career I've had the honor and privilege of working with many leaders of HBCUs and other Minority-Serving Institutions, and I have profound respect for the work they do. Many of these institutions have done amazing work for many years, assisting students who might not otherwise have gone to college—and they have often done this with severely limited resources. MSIs have decades of hands-on experience in fostering impressive achievement levels among huge numbers of low-income, first-generation, and other traditionally underrepresented students.
What distinguishes many MSIs is that they are deeply and personally engaged in their students' success. In fact, recent research from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) points out three major aspects about HBCUs and HSIs that set them apart from mainstream institutions in terms of boosting success rates among underserved students. The first is high levels of student-faculty interaction. The second is a supportive campus environment. And the third is that these institutions provide what NSSE Founder George Kuh calls "a blanket of intrusive educationally effective policies and practices"—including academic clubs, service learning, and campus-community activities.
All three of these attributes reflect and reinforce a sincere commitment to student engagement—a commitment that is individually deep, but at the same time, institution-wide. Kuh and others have shown that this approach works—and that it has important lessons, not just for other MSIs, but for all colleges and universities.
At Lumina Foundation, we are committed to supporting MSIs, not merely to assist the good work they do on their own campuses, but to help spread the important lessons they have learned to all of higher education.
So this is why we recently launched a multimillion-dollar effort we call the MSI-Models of Success program. In that program—for which we issued a Request for Proposals on March 31—our goal is to help MSIs become even more effective and to help others recognize these institutions for what they truly are: national leaders in fostering the academic success of students of color.
The MSI-Models of Success program is meant to fund projects designed to do at least one of the following:
- Improve MSIs' capacity to collect, analyze and use data to inform decisions that promote student success.
- Strengthen policy and practice to improve developmental education.
- Create a collective voice for policy advocacy on behalf of MSIs.
- Increase MSIs' commitment to transparency and effectiveness in improving student outcomes.
- Increase completion or graduation rates among underserved students, especially men of color.
We'll be reviewing proposals this summer, and we plan to announce the grant awards in early September. I hope you'll follow the progress of the MSI-Models of Success program as it unfolds. More important than that: I hope this effort persuades you to take a new look—perhaps a closer and more informed look—at the MSIs here in your own backyard. Partnerships with these institutions can be immensely powerful and productive, and they can pay dividends far beyond the limits of any one program or campus.
For us at Lumina, that type of widespread applicability—that potential multiplier effect, if you will—is an important aspect of the work we fund. It's not that we devalue innovation. Quite the opposite. We try to foster innovation in very tangible ways.
First of all, we purposely identify a small portion of our grant funds to respond to what we call "blue-sky" ideas that seem likely to help us reach our Big Goal. Even though much of our grant-making is proactive in nature, we also want to be open to the expertise of those in the field, to seize on interesting and unexpected programs that come to our attention.
Second, we're looking for innovative ideas coming out of other countries—particularly those in Europe, where the Bologna Process is helping to build a more seamless and interconnected higher education system. In fact, the European success with expanding the attainment of high quality higher education over the last decade may be one of the most important developments in this field in the last 40 years. Lumina recently jumped into this work by supporting a pilot initiative in three states to test some of the key concepts that have driven dramatically higher levels of both access and student success in Europe over the last decade. You'll be hearing more about this work, which is called Tuning USA, over the next several months.
Finally, we're actually trying to institutionalize innovation—to fully unleash higher education's transformative power—through our newest initiative, called Making Opportunity Affordable (MOA). MOA is a multi-year initiative focused on innovative ways to increase productivity at two-year and four-year public institutions. We want to help these schools become more productive so they can use the savings that they generate to serve more students and serve them better.
Naturally, we at Lumina are excited by the promise of all of these innovative efforts. But we know we can't stop there—and we don't want our grantees to stop there either. Just as access to college is only the first step toward our ultimate goal of achievement, so is innovation just a first step toward the kind of widespread change that we all know is needed.
An innovative program can be wonderful, but if it lacks scalability—in other words, if it can't be adapted and replicated widely—its impact will necessarily be limited. That's why Lumina is so committed to policy advocacy. Once good ideas are identified and tested, we want to help them spread, to get them in the "water supply" of higher-ed systems and states so they can do the most good for the most students. To help make that happen, Lumina works hard to inform state and federal policymakers about the critical issues affecting college access and success and to craft effective ways to approach those issues.
We at Lumina believe the time is absolutely right to pursue new ideas, to take bold steps. And we are encouraged by recent signs that policymakers—at the federal level and in individual states—are also eager for new ways to increase college access and success. Certainly, the need is urgent. There are millions of students who want and deserve every chance to succeed—and we as a nation very much need them to succeed.
As we continue with our policy work—and with all of our steps toward the Big Goal of 60 percent degree attainment—we will certainly continue to share the lessons we learn. As an organization dedicated to fostering success in higher education, we're keenly aware that knowledge is power, and that power works best when it's shared.
In fact, that's the fundamental purpose of the Big Goal: We want to magnify the power of postsecondary education, to share it as broadly as possible so that it can be used to improve individual lives and ensure our society's economic health and social stability. We are committed to this cause, and we are very grateful to share it with so many committed partners—including all of you and the organizations you represent.
I look forward to strengthening that partnership—and to working with all of you now and in the coming years. Thank you very much.
Board