Education for everyone

It’s no secret that a college degree is a bridge to opportunity in the United States. Statistically, getting more education after high school means greater income and a lower risk of unemployment throughout life.

Unfortunately, the likelihood of earning a college degree still directly correlates with race, ethnicity, and income. Soaring tuition costs and changing work/family schedules are dissuading more potential students from enrolling. The COVID-19 pandemic has further increased dropout rates and depressed college enrollment, particularly among lower-income students. Given that virtually all of the good-paying jobs created in recent years require some form of postsecondary education, these trends threaten to reinforce the cycles of inequality that widespread access to higher education was meant to dismantle.

Real changes with real impact

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works all over the world to help ensure that everyone has the chance to live a healthy and productive life. In the United States, where income disparities continue to affect educational opportunities, that means expanding access to quality education at all levels so everyone, regardless of background, can go to college, earn a degree, and pursue a career that aligns with their interests and goals. Over the past two decades, we have donated nearly US$7 billion to help more people obtain a good education, improve programs that help students stay in school, and push K-12 schools, colleges, and universities to become more innovative, collaborative, and student-centered.

These efforts have resulted in proven and positive changes for students all over the country, including in postsecondary education. At the University of Texas at Austin, student advising reforms that cost only US$25 more per person brought about a 20-point increase in graduation rates for underrepresented students. At Georgia State University, the use of more effective data tools helped the university eliminate disparities in graduation rates by race, ethnicity, and income. In Tennessee, revamped remedial courses significantly improved student success rates at 13 community colleges, prompting foundation partner organization Strong Start to Finish to expand this approach to reach 5 million students in 12 states.

A tried, tested, and student-centered approach

In all of these efforts, the Gates Foundation works to make a difference for students through data, innovation, and collaboration. For example, because both students and universities need good data to make more informed decisions about the path forward after high school, the foundation has pushed states to link K-12, postsecondary, and workforce data systems in order to better track what is and isn’t working. (Now 43 states are doing so, up from 15 in 2010.)

Using this data, the foundation can identify the real challenges young people face when working toward a degree and can support innovative solutions to address them. This includes improving digital classes for students who are balancing work and family obligations, pushing the federal government to simplify the student aid process, redesigning catch-up courses where they’re needed, and creating campus programs that put students first. And by taking advantage of the foundation’s diverse and collaborative partnerships with colleges and others working on these issues, programs that are proven to work can spread more quickly, giving more schools the chance to share best practices and more students across America the opportunity to benefit from them.

Through this tried, tested, and student-centered approach, the foundation’s efforts are helping more young people get on and stay on a path to a postsecondary degree and reap all of the benefits that result.

Published: Mar 31,2021