Editor’s Note: June 18 through 20, 2018, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (Stanford PACS), the academic home of Stanford Social Innovation Review, hosted the annual Rockefeller Foundation Junior Scholars Forum at Stanford University. The event, now in its fifth year, brings together new researchers, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty, whose work covers civil society, the nonprofit sector, and philanthropy. Its purpose is to promote the scholarly community and to enhance the overall quality of research in the field. This report is one of four on research papers by scholars who participated in the forum.
(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
Major US foundations are shifting the way they fund higher education, moving away from giving money directly to universities and instead donating to outside organizations to promote initiatives they favor. Between 2006 and 2012, these foundations began to focus on carrying out policy ideas, specifically involving getting more students to graduate from college, a new paper finds.
Nabih Haddad, a PhD candidate at Michigan State University’s College of Education, examined data on $1 billion worth of educational grants, modeled funding flows, and interviewed officials from foundations and representatives from outside organizations.
“Higher-education funders have increasingly relied on intermediaries to engage in policy-focused grants,” he says.
Part of this change can be attributed to a new generation of foundations making grants in different ways. Traditionally, funders would help universities build capacity by giving money for new buildings or programs under the school’s aegis. But new funders, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation, are more likely to donate money to intermediaries dedicated to higher education policy, he says.
“There’s been an increase in funding organizations that operate outside traditional universities as well as membership organizations like think tanks, advocacy organizations, media outlets, and more for-profit firms,” he says.
Haddad looked at six foundations: Gates, Lumina, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. All are family-founded philanthropies, except Lumina, which was created in 2000 after USA Group, a guarantor and administrator of student loans, sold most of its assets and used the proceeds to form an endowment.
He filtered data from the foundation’s Form 990 tax filings, using information from 1,700 grants to create a snapshot of grantmaking in 2006 and 2012. That allowed him to track the shifting priorities.
“These dates were important because they represent a policy shift in higher education, in which the completion agenda displaced the goals of advancing postsecondary access,” he writes about the move toward a focus on college completion rates.
The paper is notable because of its methodological ambition, combining three approaches, which is “a really unusual and sophisticated thing to do,” says Patricia Bromley, of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education.
“It has the regression to look at statistical associations between the funding sources, trying to show there’s more policy-advocacy funding; the interviews to help explain why those associations exist; and the network analysis of the types of organizations that are being funded,” she says.
The paper extends the findings of other researchers who have looked at the role that wealthy philanthropists increasingly play in setting educational policy in the K-12 arena, Bromley says. Just as foundations have supported ideas such as school choice for younger students, they are supporting college-completion programs for students in higher education. This sparks the question of whether elites are driving the shift of focus from access to college education to degree acquisition.
Haddad’s work doesn’t claim causation, “but it’s an interesting correlation,” Bromley says. The paper is also in line with research that has studied how foundations have adopted a more neoliberal approach of shifting giving away from institutions and toward outside organizations, says Carrie Oelberger of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
What’s novel about his paper, Oelberger says, is his finding that foundations are now enabling a human-capital approach to advancement, rather than building institutions. “I don’t think I’ve seen work that has approached it in particularly that way before,” she says.
These findings go along with the overarching crisis of confidence that institutions face in society today, she says. This is evident everywhere from Haddad’s work to her own students, who increasingly look for private routes toward a public-service career.
“We’re seeing much less interest and commitment to public institutions,” Oelberger says.
Nabih Haddad, “Philanthropic investments and higher education: Is funding moving away from the university?” working paper, 2018.
Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.