Dear ECMC Foundation Community,

At the onset of the global pandemic, U. S. higher education responded with unprecedented speed. Since then, however, it appears that we’ve lost momentum. Our traditional colleges and universities face both extraordinary challenges and new opportunities as they work to serve the needs of an increasingly diverse body of students. The well-reported landscape shows a general drop in public confidence in higher education. Although enrollment in our colleges and universities is on a modest post-pandemic upswing, equity gaps in college completion remain significant, especially for students from underserved groups. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate, almost one per week since the start of 2024.

Even as these challenges cast a relentless cloud over higher education, there are less well-reported trends that reveal a remarkably resilient higher education system. The influx of new populations of students, especially those who have been traditionally underrepresented in higher education, continues to grow, promising a diverse academy that better reflects America’s population. Advances in technology—AI, machine learning, digital access—provide opportunities for individuals to earn postsecondary credit and skills in ways that are changing how postsecondary education delivers the curriculum, expands its reach, evaluates transfer credits and advances students toward the completion of credentials.

At ECMC Foundation, the advantages of a postsecondary degree or credential for students and their families motivate us to address the fundamental challenges of transforming colleges and universities in the United States. Our belief in the unalloyed power of a college credential to change lives for the better fueled the announcement of our ambitious North Star goal earlier this year.

Our passion is to advance the social and economic mobility of students. It is a commitment born of discipline. We are humbled by the opportunity to support projects throughout the United States that are aligned with a carefully designed strategic framework that we believe advances the goals in which we are so deeply immersed.

A part of our grantmaking is the result of our six Board-approved initiatives. Each initiative advances either a theory of action in service to specific groups of students—men of color, single moms in college, students living in rural America—or by addressing specific structural barriers that prevent students from earning a credential, including food and housing insecurity their inability to transfer college credit from one institution to another, or the lack of quality postsecondary career-technical education programs.

Equally vital in addressing our mission are grants we call “strategically responsive.” These grants and program-related investments address emerging issues in higher education, often tackling cross-cutting challenges that may affect multiple student constituencies enrolled in one or more sectors of higher education. These portfolios use a variety of funding and investment structures to support nonprofit organizations, community colleges and broad-access four-year universities, higher education systems, government entities and for-profit ventures. At ECMC Foundation, we believe that by supporting a diverse range of strategies in ways that are especially timely, our grantees and partners are better prepared to improve persistence and degree completion for students pursuing postsecondary credentials of value.

To be strategically responsive means being open to various strategies that operate at the core of higher education’s superstructure. For example, two years ago, the National Association of Higher Education Systems (NASH) approached ECMC Foundation to help support a nascent idea they called “the power of systems.” NASH is a member-driven organization whose systems of higher education encompass 75 percent of all undergraduate students in the United States. The proposal was designed to tackle a variety of specific (and familiar) higher education issues—closing college completion gaps, increasing student social and economic mobility, and improving student transfer and credit mobility, among others. But the bigger concern was to test whether the solution to these problems could be handled at scale simultaneously. Rather than approach problems incrementally, one issue and one campus at a time, NASH members wanted to assess innovation rapidly and at scale. Outcomes could then be evaluated and, if effective, implemented across multiple institutions. Given higher education’s well-earned reputation for incorporating change modestly, this nontraditional approach promised faster insights.

A second example is the American Council on Education’s (ACE) effort to revise the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Like NASH, its aim was not only to update what is a familiar feature of American higher education but also to reanimate it in ways that advance and improve outcomes for students by changing the incentives under which institutions are recognized and rewarded. The Carnegie Classifications is the preeminent framework for classifying colleges and universities in the United States. Developed in the early 1970s to support research and policy analysis, the classifications have become the national standard for grouping colleges and universities mostly around the kinds of awards and degrees they offer. ACE’s transformative goal is to revise this system’s current goal by implementing a student social mobility index that will incentivize colleges and universities to devote resources toward learner-focused activities such as college completion rates and post-collegiate workforce success. ACE’s effort is to improve higher education in one transformative swoop by galvanizing hundreds of institutions to rethink and revamp how their students are served.

Both the NASH and ACE projects are early in development with hoped-for outcomes still on the horizon. And they represent only two ECMC Foundation grants that exemplify strategically responsive investments. As we support transformation in higher education in ways that help close equity gaps in college completion, our initiatives, strategically focused grants, and program-related investments will continue to provide a balanced set of strategic levers to better serve students in postsecondary education.

Sincerely,

Jacob Fraire
President
ECMC Foundation