Meeting the Competitiveness Imperative Head-On

Council for Opportunity in Education annual conference, Washington, D.C.
Sept. 20, 2008

KnowHow2GO PSA is played during Introduction

Good morning. Did you like our KnowHow2GO PSA and the Tough characters—Foreign Languages, Biology, and everyone's favorite, Algebra 2? Let me say a little more about that in a few minutes.

It's great to be back in Washington; and it's especially great to be in the company of so many long-time friends. We have quite a history, you and I. We go way back. When I first arrived in Washington more than two decades ago—a recent graduate hired by the College Board to do policy research—I immediately became aware of the TRIO programs and their success. COE's job of serving as a national voice for TRIO programs was a real challenge back in the 1980s. And it still is. But COE enjoyed a bipartisan reputation for the fact that the TRIO programs worked, making a difference in the lives of low-income, first generation, and students with disabilities. That success continues, and it is in no small part due to the professionalism of the TRIO directors and staff members who work every day to improve the lives of the students served. Thank you for all that you are doing on behalf of students across the nation.

During my years here in DC as president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, I applauded your ability to rally bipartisan support at a time when no program was immune to funding cuts. TRIO didn't just soldier on. You were able to expand your reach because your programs worked, your people delivered, and Capitol Hill knew it.

In my new role as President and CEO of the Lumina Foundation for Education, my job description and my address have changed. What has remained constant—and this is another connection we have—is my dedication to increasing the number of students who go to college and stay in college until they earn the degrees that will keep them and our country competitive. At no time in our history has this been more important. As Baby Boomers retire, our economy will depend increasingly on a workforce dominated by minorities, first-generation college-goers, and students from low-income families who struggle to afford and succeed in higher education.

College access and success. Buzz words, maybe, but if we can collectively make them a reality, I believe, like you do, that lives will be changed and society will be transformed.

When I took the job as CEO of Lumina Foundation for Education in January, I enthusiastically inherited what we call The Big Goal. It's specific; it's measurable; it's ambitious; and it comes with a deadline. Our Big Goal is this: By the year 2025, we want 60 percent of Americans to hold high-quality degrees from two-year or four-year post-secondary institutions. Sixty percent. That's an increase of 20 percentage points over what's been the status quo for the past 40 years. This means that we have a decade and a half to direct all our energy and all our resources to boosting the number of college graduates by 16 million. You can see why we call it The Big Goal.

At Lumina, The Big Goal informs virtually every discussion we have, every decision we make, and every dollar we spend. It's the 800-pound gorilla in the conference rooms at 30 South Meridian Street in Indianapolis; and no one is ignoring it.

This morning I want to tell you about the work we're doing and the plans we're developing to help achieve our big goal. I think our work and our plans mesh nicely with your work and your plans. Simply put, we are working at Lumina Foundation to meet the competitiveness challenge head-on. As an example, the public service announcement that you saw a minute ago is a small piece of our efforts…one of the more visible pieces. This important collaboration involving Lumina, the American Council on Education, and the Ad Council is obviously not modest in its presentation or abstract in its intent. It targets kids in grades eight through 10 with a very direct and clear message: There are no short cuts. You've got to take the tough classes. But they aren't that scary, and you can succeed. I think this perfectly complements and underscores what you're doing with Talent Search, Upward Bound, and all of the TRIO programs.

But there's much more to our efforts at Lumina than PSAs and other information-oriented campaigns. Specifically I want to update you on Lumina's plans to:

Accelerate progress through grant-making
Organize support among diverse groups
Advocate for effective policy formation, and
Mobilize change by being what we call a "constructive irritant"—a role that I relish.

Taken together, we believe that these four courses of action will help us accomplish The Big Goal and take the leadership responsibility that we believe our mission mandates.

First, let me tell you about our plans to accelerate progress through grant-making...

Lumina is a private foundation with more than 1 billion dollars in assets. This means each year we award about $50 million in grants. These grants go to organizations, people, and programs that share our vision and have the potential to bring it to fruition. Fifty million dollars a year. It sounds like a lot of money…until you consider the size of the job.

We currently support three major initiatives that take distinct paths to achieving The Big Goal. Some of you already may be familiar with these because they are taking place on your campus. One initiative reaches out to the sometimes-fragile, often-transient populations of community colleges. We call it Achieving the Dream, and it's now on 82 community college campuses in 15 states. A second initiative, Making Opportunity Affordable, helps colleges streamline their practices and boost their productivity so they can offer more opportunities to more students and turn out more graduates. A third program is a public-awareness campaign we call KnowHow2GO that captures attention with public service announcements like the one you just saw and then directs students to an interactive Web site and a comprehensive support network on the ground.

These are our flagship initiatives. They consume a major chunk of our time and resources—as they should. But as these initiatives become more mature—Achieving the Dream has been around for five years—they attract more partners, and they become more self-sustaining. This gives Lumina the flexibility and the funds to survey the field and identify our next Big Bets.

We want our grant portfolio to resemble a well-balanced stock portfolio. As we've learned with the crisis that has rocked the financial markets in the last few weeks, diversification is essential. You need some blue-chip programs that have proven their value over time and then you need some well-chosen speculative opportunities that have the potential to become models that we can take to scale and endorse as change agents.

An example of a proven program is College Goal Sunday, a program that will mark its 20th anniversary next year. As you may know, College Goal Sunday hosts local events to help families fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). We estimate that College Goal Sunday annually helps about 35,000 students in 36 states to negotiate this critical step in the college-application process. I know that many of you in this room have been involved in this important work, and I thank you for your dedication and support. Lumina has been a supporter of College Goal Sunday from the get-go, but looking ahead we are hoping to have an even greater impact. Next year the funds will be used to help bring College Goal Sunday and KnowHow2GO more closely together and help get to a much larger audience of potential beneficiaries through an expanded partnership that reaches directly into communities. This is a natural "next step" for both programs since they share the common purpose of educating families on gaining access to higher education.

College Goal Sunday and KnowHow2GO are two specific examples where the TRIO programs can directly help us to reach the Big Goal. Both of these important projects depend on grassroots efforts to help us identify and work with the students. Your programs have direct contact with students on a daily basis. These are the kinds of partnerships that we need. The KnowHow2GO campaign is built on what we call the "air campaign"—the public service announcements like the one you just saw—and the accompanying "ground campaign" that provides the caring adults to help students go to college. Local TRIO programs can be involved in the 12 states that have KnowHow2GO ground campaigns and the 36 College Goal Sunday states. Both have national Web sites that you can use to find out how to get involved and connect your students to these resources.

We're counting on programs like College Goal Sunday and KnowHow2GO to accelerate progress toward the goal that we've set. As we monitor and manage our grants portfolio, we also are implementing plans…

To organize support among diverse groups…

Since arriving at Lumina, I've talked at length about seizing the opportunity to convene the nation's best thinkers—particularly those who bring new voices and perspectives to the debate about college access and success. I want to gather around the table people from a range of sectors. This includes business executives, higher education administrators, faculty—who are too often left out of these conversations—policy wonks, as well as my counterparts at other philanthropic organizations. I want to foster discussion, debate, strategies, and support that lead to real, implementable solutions.

The timing is right on. Last month I was in San Francisco to speak at a meeting of a group called Grantmakers for Education (GFE). GFE is an organization that brings together more than 200 foundations, corporate giving programs, and individual donors on topics ranging from early childhood education through higher education. When Lumina Foundation came on the scene eight years ago, very few foundations supported college access and success initiatives. Even fewer were interested in working for systemic change to improve the lives of students at the margins. The San Francisco gathering drew capacity participation from scores of enthusiastic attendees interested in college readiness and success. This is real progress, and we want to capitalize on this momentum. As the only national foundation with the singular mission to expand college access and success, we have sought and accepted a leadership role. In this capacity we have convened diverse groups in an effort to solicit ideas, raise awareness, build public will, and forge partnerships around issues related to access and success. As recent examples:

In June we invited 25 international executives to spend two days with us here in Washington looking at global trends in higher education attainment. The guest list included participants who represented universities, foundations, think tanks, and government offices located on four continents.
In July we brought the presidents and CEOs of nine companies and philanthropies to our Indianapolis headquarters. We discussed how the business community and foundations can better work together to prepare America's future workforce.
Next month we'll convene dozens of leaders of minority-serving institutions to share best practices and promote joint ventures. Participants will include top administrators from tribal colleges and universities, historically and predominantly black institutions, and Hispanic-serving colleges, plus key representatives of higher education organizations, as well as several state and federal policymakers.

The fact that we are inviting policymakers to join us for this October gathering should come as no surprise, given my background as the former leader of a Washington-based think tank. I know first-hand how policy can act as a lever for systemic change in higher education. I also know first-hand that there is a regrettably limited group of people who have the expertise to develop effective public policy related to higher education. That group needs to grow. For that reason, as we consider strategies to achieve The Big Goal, we intend:

To advocate for effective policy formation…

As you may know, private foundations such as Lumina historically have hesitated to get too involved in public policy because of lobbying prohibitions. They've limited their activities to supporting research, analyzing issues, and underwriting demonstration projects. We endorse all of those traditional activities, and we intend to continue to support them. But we want to go beyond merely offering information and advice.

Let me assure you, Lumina Foundation is not going to lobby government officials. But we believe we have a leadership responsibility to use all of the tools we have at our disposal to help succeed in our mission. Certainly one way you get to the scale envisioned under our Big Goal is to improve government policy that can lead to dramatic increases in the number of Americans with high quality degrees and credentials. We can do this in part by supporting organizations and advocacy groups that share our commitment to helping students acquire the skills and knowledge they need to lead successful, productive lives. We also can seek ways to educate people who directly or indirectly shape education policy. These might be aides to legislative leaders, senior staff members who work at state or federal agencies, or key advisors to political candidates. To illustrate, let me tell you about a couple of policy-related grants we recently made:

The first will focus on aligning state and system policies to increase college success for students who require remedial and developmental education. This project will work with state education and policy leaders to improve the delivery of developmental education and reframe the developmental education conversation by highlighting the added value of effective developmental education policies to better equip students with high academic need.

The second will work with an extensive network of organizations to ensure that data can be shared between P-12 and postsecondary education for the purpose of improving academic outcomes at all levels. This includes making sure that the data at the state and federal levels is used effectively and appropriately by policymakers.

Over the next few years, you will see an increasing number of these kinds of investments at Lumina Foundation. Existing education policy groups… new entities…and organizations that have been around for a while but haven't focused on the competitiveness imperative that this conference has emphasized…all will be a part of our portfolio. Clearly, we're not playing favorites or choosing one side of the aisle over the other. Like TRIO, we don't need to. I've spent my entire career working comfortably in the middle. Having led a bipartisan federal commission and a nonpartisan think tank, I understand that the middle ground is a useful and often influential base of operation. Our responsibility is to work in a collegial way with anyone who believes what we believe—that access and success in higher education has long-term economic and social benefits for the country.

And that leads me to our fourth and final strategy to achieving The Big Goal. Lumina Foundation plans:

To mobilize change by being what we call a "constructive irritant…"

I'm not suggesting an endless series of in-your-face confrontations. To the contrary, Lumina Foundation wants to stir up interest in The Big Goal and keep the issue of college access and success high on the public agenda. We will do this by constantly reminding people—through print, through electronic media, and through personal communication—of what is at stake. We'll use our bully pulpit to carry the message:

That the gap between Americans with college degrees and Americans without degrees is getting wider.
That the United States has slipped from first place to 10th place among industrialized nations in the percentage of young adults with postsecondary credentials.
That to prepare America's workforce for the future, we need to graduate 1 million more students a year than our colleges and universities currently graduate.

We will be specific. Over time, our investments will make choices about specific policy strategies that show the greatest potential to achieve the dramatic gains we think are essential to our nation's future. Not everyone will be happy with at least some of our choices. But we believe that we will need to take some well-calculated risks. This is a role that private philanthropy not only can, but must, play in meeting the national competitiveness imperative.

When I accepted the invitation to join Lumina as CEO, it was with the understanding that I would spend time on the road talking with as many people as possible about the importance of college access and success. In part, that's what brings me to Washington today.

But you don't need me to convince you of the importance of this issue. As I said at the beginning of my talk: We're old friends; we have a history. For a long time we have known about the competitiveness imperative—an appropriate and timely theme for your conference, by the way. Although the public sector and the private sector may approach the issue from different angles and with different solutions, we're all moving in the same direction, toward the same big goal.

And we are moving. In my travels around the country, I've sensed a growing concern about America's tenuous place in the global economy. We've got the public's attention. People are seeing the link between an educated workforce and a thriving marketplace. I feel a gradual but growing momentum. And our research tells us that momentum is key to achieving The Big Goal.

We know that once college becomes part of a family's DNA, it's passed on from generation to generation. We know that parents who attend college expect their kids to do likewise. We know that children of college grads are twice as likely to enroll in postsecondary programs as kids whose parents didn't continue their education past high school. We know that the majority of low-income people who earn a degree effectively eradicate poverty in their families forever.

The work you're doing and the work we're doing is helping to create the momentum. I'm excited about the progress we're making. None of us has all the answers or all the resources or all the skills that we need. But by working separately and collaboratively we can anticipate the time when together we can celebrate the accomplishment of our shared Big Goal.

Congratulations, TRIO and COE, on another great conference. And thank you, COE members, for the important work you do each day to improve access and success for all Americans.