Bill Gates To Give Low-Income Students $70 Million In Grants

Published 10 December 08 05:16 PM | Student Loan Girl

To help ensure that low-income students can afford a college education in the midst of a recession, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committing nearly $70 million in grants toward its goal of doubling the number of low-income students who earn a college degree or vocational credential by age 26, The New York Times reports (“Gates Grants Aim to Help Low-Income Students Finish College,” Dec. 5, 2008).

Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, says the foundation’s latest efforts to assist low-income students couldn’t come at a more opportune time since college-educated employees are more likely to get jobs during a recession. The unemployment rate for people without a college education is generally four times as high as for those with a two- or four-year degree, he says.

Low-income students are already at a disadvantage, graduating from college at only a 25-percent rate. And a majority of the 560,000 high school students in the U.S. who graduate in the top of their class, Carnevale adds, don’t earn a degree within eight years of their high school graduation and come from families that earn less than $85,000 a year.

“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,” said Hillary Pennington, who will direct the Gates Foundation’s postsecondary effort. “But [low-income students are] not finishing. That is enormously debilitating for young people.”

Foundation Proposes Far-Reaching Initiative

While the Gates Foundation — the world’s largest philanthropy — has given almost $2 billion to help U.S. high schools make needed improvements over the last eight years and dedicated another $2 billion for minority college scholarships, this is the foundation’s first endeavor into postsecondary education reform and it hopes to gain the support of other groups and organizations.

“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,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow with the Century Foundation.

If the foundation meets its goal, the number of U.S. college graduates each year would increase by 250,000.

The foundation will dedicate $33.2 million of its $70-million grant initiative to help prepare postsecondary education students to better succeed in college and $13 million in grants to assist the MDRC, a nonprofit education research organization, in expanding its performance-based scholarships for low-income college students.