Gates Grants Aim to Help Low-Income Students Finish College

With concerns growing that the recession will make it even harder for low-income students to remain in college, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Monday announced nearly $70 million in grants as part of an ambitious initiative: to double the number of low-income students who earn a college degree or vocational credential by age 26.

The foundation hopes to encourage other nonprofits, religious organizations and the federal government to join its mission to help low-income students get the education required for steady employment in higher paying jobs, said Hilary Pennington, who will direct the Gates Foundation’s postsecondary effort.

The statistics behind the initiative are stark. While growing numbers of students in this country enroll in college, most of them never graduate. With large numbers working full time to pay for college and a lack of institutional support for struggling students, only about 25 percent of low-income students earn any kind of postsecondary degree, experts say. The rate for black and Latino students is about 20 percent.

“We console ourselves that we’re going to be fine in the world because we have this great higher education system and all our kids are going to college,” Ms. Pennington said. “But they’re not finishing. That is enormously debilitating for young people.”

And the lack of a higher education degree or credential is particularly debilitating in a recession, said Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.

“The people who survive the best have always been and continue to be the ones with postsecondary education,” Dr. Carnevale said, adding that the unemployment rate for people without a college education was generally four times as high as for those with a two- or four-year degree.

Most of the foundation’s money would go not directly to students but to programs intended to help them make it through college.

The Gates Foundation said that doubling the numbers of low-income students who earned a postsecondary degree or vocational degree by age 26 would translate into an increase of about 250,000 graduates each year.

The goal is attainable, said Dr. Carnevale, whose research shows that each year there are 560,000 students who graduate in the top half of their high school class — and have the test scores that show they could succeed in college — but who fail to earn a two- or four-year degree within eight years of graduating.

The vast majority of these students are from families earning less than $85,000 a year.

Included in the Gates Foundation’s initiative are $33.2 million in grants for improving postsecondary education, so lower income students can quickly learn the skills they need to succeed at college.

A second set of grants is intended to strengthen institutional support for low-income students, including a $13 million award to MDRC, a nonprofit education research organization, to expand its performance-based scholarships for low-income college students. These scholarships will be delivered through three colleges in Ohio, two in New York City, one in New Mexico and statewide in California.

The Gates Foundation’s announcement came a week after a report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education concluded that the spiraling cost of college — even before the recession — threatened to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, with the greatest burden falling on low income families.

The share of income required to pay for college, even with financial aid, has been growing especially fast for lower-income families, the report found.

“The timing could not be better,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow with the Century Foundation, in Washington, who is an expert on income inequality and education, referring to the Gates Foundation’s announcement.

“With college endowments declining and states cutting higher education budgets,” Mr. Kahlenberg said, “low-income college students will be more squeezed than ever, and attrition rates are likely to increase. The Gates Foundation can’t address the financial burdens by itself, but its focus on what types of programs work best may help spur action by the federal government.”

The Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy, has in the last eight years become a leader in secondary education reform, spending close to $2 billion to improve high schools, from New York City to Boston to Los Angeles, and raise their graduation rates and students’ college preparedness.

While the foundation has spent an additional $2 billion on minority college scholarships, the new grants represent its first major push in the area of postsecondary reform.

The foundation will continue its work with high schools, said Vicki Phillips, who directs that effort, though with a greater emphasis on strengthening teaching and the curriculum.

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