Gates Foundation Awards $9 Million to Support Innovative Postsecondary Education Models
Gates Foundation Awards $9 Million to Support Innovative Postsecondary Education Models
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced grants totaling $9 million to nonprofit organizations and institutions working to boost the number of students in the United States with postsecondary education credentials that have value in the labor market.
Awarded as part of a larger effort to spread best practices and promising models across the postsecondary sector, the grants will support programs aimed at providing more students with the opportunity to attain an affordable high-quality credential. To that end, a number of strategies and activities will be pursued by the grantees, including competency-based learning, online and hybrid formats, open education resources, adaptive assessment, and social media. All grantees will focus on building programs of quality that can be widely replicated and will participate in a common evaluation process so as to better understand the quality of their programs, their impact on student outcomes, and the cost of delivery compared to traditional learning models.
Grant recipients include the MyCollege Foundation, which was awarded more than $3 million to establish a nonprofit college that will blend adaptive online learning solutions with a suite of services that enable students to earn a high-quality college degree at an affordable cost; the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (CUNY), which received $1 million in support of the New Community College at CUNY, the first new CUNY college in four decades; University of the People, which was awarded $500,000 to pursue accreditation; and the League for Innovation in the Community College, which received $450,000 to develop a national consortium of leading online two- and four-year colleges designed to increase seat capacity in the community college system and enable more low-income young adults to attain a postsecondary credential in less time and at a lower cost.
"We have to challenge ourselves to rethink our longstanding assumptions about postsecondary education in the United States," said Josh Jarrett, deputy director of postsecondary success at the Gates Foundation. "Postsecondary education faces very real challenges in helping more students, particularly low-income students and students of color. Seat capacity is tight, tuition is skyrocketing, completion rates are low, and millions are unqualified for highly skilled jobs. We have to do something differently, and that's what these investments in breakthrough learning models are about."
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