The Lumina Foundation has recently announced a series of four-year college grants totaling $9 million to seven states hoping to bolster higher education using dynamic new techniques. The foundation’s Making Opportunity Affordable initiative has awarded grants to Arizona, Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. The money will be used to design methods that reward students and schools for improvements in course and degree completion while implementing cost-effective models for serving greater numbers of students. It is Lumina’s aim to increase the percentage of American students with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60 percent by the year 2025.

Criteria for the grants were based on policy innovation, demographic diversity, and the extent to which the states will address tying public funding to increasing the overall number of college graduates. Grants were also awarded to those states identifying operational efficiencies and cost savings that can be reinvested in better serving undergraduate students, as well as to those that have attempted to educate students in innovative and affordable ways. Full grants will ultimately be contingent upon each state’s progress toward these benchmarks.

“This round of grants represents Lumina’s next steps in advancing a national agenda for raising the level of productivity within higher education,” said Jamie P. Merisotis, president and CEO of Lumina Foundation. “Momentum is building to serve greater numbers of students by maximizing the use of existing resources and ensuring quality. These grants will move us toward a deeper understanding of how we can implement policies and practices that elicit more value from our shared investment in higher education.”

Lumina has also recently released its Four Steps to Finishing First in Higher Education, a guide for policy makers and higher education leaders. It is Lumina’s hope to engage more states in the effort beyond those initially awarded grants. The foundation has also partnered with the HCM Strategists policy firm to form a series of ad hoc networks that can advance the discussion on how to promote low-cost, highly efficient models for serving the ever increasing number of students.

The ultimate goal of the Lumina Foundation is to enroll and graduate more students from college – especially low-income students, students of color, first-generation students, and adult learners. Lumina pursues this goal by identifying and supporting effective practice, through public policy advocacy, and by using communications to build public will for change. For more information, please visit Lumina’s Web site at www.luminafoundation.org.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about charity