Grant programs that had been relatively open-ended were now tightly drawn, grounded in the foundations' own carefully articulated take on issues and receptive only to proposals that responded appropriately. Initiative and creativity had shifted heavily from prospective grantee to grantor. As foundations embraced this funding-by-agenda, it burdened…

America's community colleges are a key link in the chain of upward mobility, and they need more support than they're getting. This is an obvious statement for many in the community-college world, but with the growing challenges facing the system that educates almost half of the nation's undergraduates, the author contends that there is need to…

Public college and university foundations are undergoing a significant transition that could change their relationships with the boards and presidents of the institutions with which they are affiliated. Such foundations have been around for over a century. The growth in the value of assets held by foundations, and their increasing significance to…

The analysis in "Benchmarking 2011" is based on data from an unduplicated sample of 184 education grantmaking organizations--approximately two-thirds of Grantmakers for Education's (GFE's) network of grantmakers--who responded to an online survey consisting of fixed-choice and open-ended questions. Because a different subset of funders…

The purpose of this study was to determine factors that best describe the philanthropic motivations of female student-athletes when considering making financial contributions to their alma mater. A survey instrument was developed and administered to 2,351 alumnae student-athletes which had 347 respondents. The independent variables chosen were…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation created the Early College High School Initiative in 2002, opening more than 200 hundred early college programs across the nation and every year a new report is created to evaluate the progress of the program (Berger, Adelman, & Cole, 2010). Staff at the Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast (REL-SE)…

In rolling out plans last week to revamp its high school strategy and launch a major new effort on the postsecondary front, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is undertaking a more sweeping approach to grantmaking that appears aimed at reshaping some core elements of the U.S. education system. The philanthropy's agenda on secondary schools…

Universities transform lives. Going to university leads to new ways of seeing the world, to new horizons and networks, and to significantly enhanced job opportunities, but not everyone benefits in the same way. Fewer students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds go to university, and when they do they tend not to do as well as…

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to spend several hundred million dollars over the next five years to double the number of low-income young people who complete a college degree or certificate program by age 26. Foundation officials described the ambitious plan to an exclusive group of education leaders, citing 2025 as a target goal. If…

If there's one quality that WICHE's home region, the West, is famous for, it's endurance in the face of crisis. And if there's another, it's the ability to find--and make--opportunities even in tough times. Over the last fiscal year, WICHE has done just that. The organization has been highly successful in terms of developing new projects and…

Last week, the biggest annual gathering of college fund raisers was held in New York as some of the rockiest business news of the year unfolded. The three-day event, organized by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, was bookended by the federal government's announcement that it would step in to bail out the beleaguered mortgage…

A large sample of 33,000 university alumni records were cluster-analyzed to generate six groups relatively unique in their respective attribute values. The attributes used to cluster the former students included average gift to the university's foundation and to the alumni association for the same institution. Cluster detection is useful in this…

This paper examines the reasons why, in the first half of the twentieth century, Australian librarians were encouraged to adopt professional work practices and educational standards based on US models of "democratic" librarianship. The promotion of US models of library education and association occurred both directly through government…

The National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI), launched by the Kettering Foundation in 1980, provides an opportunity for the engaged university to foster public deliberation with its students and alumni, as well as leaders in the communities where it operates. NIFI publishes three issue books per year on topics of national importance. These…

The SOTL project was based on the goal of developing learning tools that would help students think and act outside the narrow circles of relatives and friends and develop the potential for broader associations through participating in nonprofit organizations and philanthropy. This was done by having students work in groups to invent a charitable…