Hi everyone, I’m Alex Usher, and this is the World of Higher Education podcast.

Back in 1999, something kind of miraculous occurred in Indiana. A local student loan guarantee agency, known as the USA Group, was bought out by what was then known as the Student Loan Marketing Association, or Sallie Mae, now known as Navient, but because USA Group was a non-profit organization, the law said that the proceeds of the sale needed to be put towards some charitable endeavor. And thus a few months later was born the Lumina Foundation with its headquarters in Indianapolis, endowed at its start with over 1 billion U.S. in assets, all to be used for the purpose of expanding access and success in post secondary education.

Now there are very few foundations in the world with Lumina’s combination of firepower and focus. Sure, other foundations like Ford, Kellogg, Sloan, and others might have bigger endowments, but all of them are involved in a lot more than just higher education. Lumina was different. Lumina had heft. But then it also started proclaiming hefty goals, like trying to increase U.S. attainment rates by over 20 percentage points in 15 years, like trying to get states to take definitions of quality in higher education seriously.

Even if Lumina was the giant in the room, philanthropically speaking, it still only had about 50 million a year to spend. How could it actually influence an industry worth hundreds of billion dollars a year? With me to discuss that today is Courtney Brown. She’s the Vice President of Impact and Planning at Lumina Foundation and the person most responsible for making sure the foundation hits its goals and develops new and even more meaningful ones.

Now, full disclosure, I was on Lumina’s international advisory board for a number of years. So, take my enthusiasm with whatever grain of salt you want. In this conversation, we’ll talk about how Lumina went about its goal setting process, what tactics it’s used to build a wide network of alliances across the U.S., how close it’s come to succeeding in its goals, and what the organization’s next set of goals might be. I hope you find Courtney’s answers to these questions to be as thought provoking and heartening as I did.

But enough from me, let’s listen to Courtney.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 2.21 | Lumina Foundation & National Education Attainment Goals

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): When the Lumina Foundation started life in 1999 or 2000, it was mostly about access to education, broadly defined. How did its agenda grow over time to encompass something more than just simply getting people through the door?

Courtney Brown (CB): Great question. Lumina was created in 2000 and it was actually when two organizations merged and a profit came out, so they had to create a private foundation. The two that merged were about higher education. So, Lumina knew when they were created that they wanted to focus on higher education. Around 2000, as you may remember, at least in the U. S, it was a lot about access. How do we get more people in the door? How do we think about low-income families? First people in their families to go to college? people of color? And there’s a lot of talk around access. So for the beginning, probably the first 8 years of Lumina’s existence, it really focused a lot on access, big ideas, trying to move large things and get people more aware of college and figure out how to get them in the door of college.

AU: How did that change over time? You start in 2000 and that’s the way it is. By 2009, you adopted an extremely ambitious goal to make sure that 60 percent of American adults had some kind of high-quality credential by 2025. That’s a really specific goal and it’s much broader than just access. So, what was it that inspired, or maybe possessed, the organization to take on that kind of broad yet very specific goal?

CB: Around 2008 Lumina was looking for new leadership and trying to think about what the next direction is. We brought in a new CEO, Jamie Merisotis and part of the board and Jamie’s negotiations was really thinking about where Lumina could go. What they did was they looked at where we were as a nation and understood that access while important isn’t sufficient. We had to think about how do we get more people, not just into the door of college, but through the door. The purpose of getting them through the door to a credential is to help our labor market. We did a lot of looking at research, some work that Tony Carnevale did at Georgetown Center on Education in the Workforce, and they were showing that by 2020 that we would need at least, 60% to 62% of people with credentials. While we are looking at what Tony’s work was showing that we were going to need a much better educated population, we also looked around the world. I think many people in the United States think “oh, the U.S. is the best higher ed system in the world and we do it so well,” but the reality when we started comparing the US to other countries where we were about 12^th in the globe with regards to higher education attainment. We recognized if we not only wanted to fill the labor market needs in the US, but if we wanted to be globally competitive, we needed to up our game. We need to increase attainment. So around the end of 2008 and into 2009, Lumina set a goal for the nation. So, this is not Lumina’s goal. This is the U. S. national goal that by 2025, we wanted to increase the people living in the United States that had high quality credentials or degrees to 60 percent by 2025. So yes, an incredibly ambitious goal that was set in 2009.

AU: I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about this before, but is this the first time that people had made a goal about participation that was explicitly rooted in labor market demands? I always think of the US access debate as being driven by social justice or equality demands, but you’ve just said that you focused it specifically on, for instance, Tony Carnevale’s work. Did that make a difference to the way you approach this?

CB: In some ways, yes. Access is absolutely important. Lumina was always at its very core equity-minded and we define equity about racial equity. In the US, that is the most important thing that we believe we need to focus on. To reach the 60%, we have to focus on the people that are being left behind. The people that are being left behind are the students of color, they are the low-income people, they are the people that are in rural communities and so we. We had to continue to focus on those populations in order to reach the 60% goal, in order to reach the labor market needs we have, in order to reach the diversity of opinion, perspectives, and knowledge and skills. All those things are very important at its core. But, at the end of the day, we have to think about what does the nation need? And we need talent. We need diverse talent. To do that, we believe that the key is through higher education attainment.

AU: Interesting. In 2009, what was the completion rate? You had a goal of 60%. What were you working from?

CB: Great question. So just a caveat: when we set the goal, it said 60% degrees and other high-quality credentials by 2025. When we set the goal in 2009, the only thing we could measure were degrees. We put in other high-quality credentials because we recognize there are other credentials out there that are extremely important to the labor market and to people that still offer good lives and good jobs to individuals, but we had no way to count them. So, in 2009 when we first started measuring where we were with attainment and set that threshold, we could only count degrees, and we were at 38%. It didn’t include those certificates and certifications that we started counting along the way, but we sat at 38%, which is a far cry from the 60% we were aiming for in 2025.

AU: Yeah, that’s huge. Of course, one of the things that was evident, even at the time, was that this goal had a lot of moving pieces. This was a much tougher goal than the one Lumina originally had, because you’ve got pieces about financial aid, you’ve got pieces around institutional practices with respect to attainment and degree granting and that kind of stuff, and then some of it was about defining what a quality credential is. So, let me take these in order. What was it that Lumina thought at the outset it could do to move a system of student aid, that was worth hundreds of billions of dollars, to move the needle on access? What was the theory of change and what did you do to undertake it?

CB: I would say the first thing that we really had to focus on was to get about getting people to buy in. Remember, the nation was focused on access and there was some talk about completion, not really about attainment. So getting mindsets to change was one of the most important things we had to do. Really, in that first four years of setting this goal, our first strategic plan was just about that changing hearts and minds. What’s interesting is when we set the goal for the nation, we recognized that in order to accomplish this, we needed states to act. We need communities to act. It wasn’t just about national changes. When we set the goal in 2008 only one state had an attainment goal that was quantitative, that spoke to about equity gaps, whatever equity gaps that existed in that state that was set in statute. So only one state, and that was Hawaii. Over the course of time, we started working with states to talk about why making this a priority is so important and over the course of time, we have 49 states who set goals between 2008 and today. 48 additional ones because we already had Hawaii.

AU: Who’s the holdout?

CB: The hold out is New York. What’s interesting is just because they don’t have a statewide goal does not mean they’re not focused on this work. New York systems do incredible work on attainment and access and completion and all of that. They just haven’t come up yet with a statewide goal.

AU: What about institutions and their practices? I remember you doing a lot of work around things like stranded credits and how do we get more degrees to all these learners who have partial degrees? How did you think about instigating change in a sector that’s got 4000 institutions or so? How do you work with that group?

CB: Like I said, the beginning was that we worked with states to try to think about that because some state policies had to change to address some of these issues. A lot of states had funding formulas that funded institutions based on the number of people they don’t let in rather than how many they complete on the other end. So, thinking about some of those things is really important as it impacts the institution. But you’re right, the students attend institutions, they don’t attend states. So, institutions have to change in order to better serve students. A lot of work we’ve done since 2009 until today is really thinking about how institutions can be more student centered and really focusing on the student and getting them through to the finish line. We thought a lot about, what does a degree mean? We thought a lot about “credit when it’s due”. Credit when it’s due was some work we did to think about how some students that leave a 2-year institution and they transfer to a 4-year institution before they get the 2 year degree. By the time they’re at the 4-year institution, we see a lot of people stop out and so they end up with nothing. They should have received that associate degree. You’re getting credit when it’s due. You’re getting this this degree because you actually earned the degree.

One of the most important things I would say we did and continue to do is focus on what we say today’s students are. Today’s students are important because a lot of our policy makers and institution leaders still think of college students as the 18-year-old that come on to a college campus, they’re going to be there for four years, they’re going to live in a brick building and then they’re going to graduate and have a job for life. That could not be further from the truth in the US. We know that in the US that over 1/3 of college students are over 25. Almost half of them are first generation college goers. Many of them are independents and they have no parents paying for it. They’re financially responsible. We have about a third that have actually their own children, their own dependents that they would focus on. So thinking about how institutions can be more student centered and really focusing on the students that they are serving today, not in the 70s, was one of the really important things we had to do. Once they recognize that, then they can be more student centered with regards to their provided services and other things to help those students get through.

AU: Finally, there was your work on quality credentials, which I think was maybe the most original, certainly unorthodox, thing that Lumina did in the past 15 years. Tell us about the degree qualifications profile you developed and how you work to promote this and other measures of quality across the 50 states.

CB: Quality has always been important to Lumina where the two important pillars that we have are equity and quality. We’re not just counting pieces of paper for the 60%. We want people to have quality credentials that actually mean something on the other end. Again, we looked internationally to say what’s going on? How are other people thinking about this? Many countries do something called tuning. Where within one area, for example you’ll say history. What does a history degree mean? A history BA should mean the same thing at this institution as it does at another institution so really thinking about what you need to know and be able to do with a history BA. That then led us to the degree qualifications profile, which was like looking at the degree overall rather than a specific content area. The degree qualifications profile said, these are the things you need to know and be able to do with the BA and these are the things you need to know and be able to do with an associates. You’re able to change the dials, depending on the type of institution you were. Are you going to lean more into civic education or more into global learning or different things like that, depending on who you were. It was really the first time the US had some sort of qualifications framework. Many other countries have them and they work really well but the US doesn’t have one. The degree qualifications profile really forced institutions to rethink their degrees and make sure that students were getting, all of these things that really make a good, quality degree that leads to good jobs and good lives.

AU: How much take up was there? How many states took it up or how many institutions took it up?

CB: I don’t know as far as states. We didn’t really have a state that said, “we’re going to take over that degree qualifications profile.” We had hundreds of institutions that tried it. But what really happened is a department with an institution would take it on In many ways, they were tuning, but to have a whole institution taken on not so much. Now, yeah. We haven’t really focused a lot of resources in recent years on the degree qualifications profile specifically. However, as my colleagues and I are traveling around and as we hear from institutions, many people are still doing it and they still find great value in it. I think, as we think more about some of the problems we’re facing nowadays with people questioning quality, that this is going to become even more important. I think we’re going to see more of an uptake in people thinking about a degree qualifications profile are really thinking about quality and what that means.

AU: Courtney, it seems to me that an awful lot of what Lumina is doing, to a much greater extent than most of the big philanthropies, was being engaged in coalition building, right? You’ve got to change hearts and minds. That was your first 4 years, as you said. Then you’ve got so many players in the game. You can’t do this alone. You had staff in DC to focus on federal policy. You had staff that dealt with state governments. You did those regular Gallup polls. Did you have a strategy or a set of tactics or a playbook for coalition building? How successful do you think you were in terms of building a wide coalition for greater credential completion?

CB: I would say we have been both successful and unsuccessful in some coalition building. You’re absolutely right. Coalition building is essential. Lumina set this goal for the nation. This is not just Lumina’s work. We certainly can’t do it alone. We know institutions can’t do it alone because they need policy to change. We also know communities need to be at the heart of this. We need people at the heart of these institutions that live within communities. We need business leaders as part in part of this role. We have done coalition building in a number of different ways. Sometimes its coalition building within a state with their state policymakers and institutional leaders, system leaders and community. Sometimes it is across states or institutions and thinking about how we come together and learn from each other. We’ve done a couple things that were specifically branded. One of them was talent hubs, those talent hubs really focused on bringing some community leaders to the table. Let’s bring the education leaders to the table, the business people to the table, industry, and the policy makers to say, “okay, what do we need to do in Tulsa to think about how we can increase attainment here.” We recognize all those voices have to be at the table because if somebody is left behind, you’re not going to be as successful. Building those local coalitions was extremely powerful in driving change. I think this is one of the things where, it’s hard to say was it successful or unsuccessful. Sometimes we’re hard on ourselves and we said we don’t we didn’t see the numbers change in three years. So sometimes we go “Oh my gosh, I guess it wasn’t successful.” The reality is these things are slow moving. We’re not going to see large increases within three years on completion. It takes a bit of time, to get people in the door and then to completion, but many of these efforts are still going. Many of the relationships and the coalitions that were built continue to thrive today.

AU: You’re a small group in Indianapolis and there’s got to be 100 Tulsa’s in the United States. Did you end up focusing maybe on a dozen or two dozen that were promising and had some momentum of their own? Or did you really try and go with a full 50 state strategy?

CB: Although we focus on the whole nation and we try not to leave anybody behind, when we focused on the community work we had then we could take the lessons learned from those couple dozen learning hubs to spread it to other communities around the nation. Sharing the lessons learned and being really transparent about what we’re learning and the data have been really important. One of the things Alex, you’re right. We’re a pretty small organization. We’re about 60 people. We’re nationwide where our home base is in Indianapolis, Indiana. One of the things we have done when we set the goal is we created something called Stronger Nation. It’s an online tool. It’s accessible. Anybody who’s listening can just Google “Stronger Nation Lumina Foundation” and you’ll see this tool that is our way of staying accountable to the goal and keeping the nation accountable to the goal. It shows the data, we don’t hide from it. We outline it for every state, every county, metro area. So, you can see where we are and how much further we need to go. It disaggregates by race, ethnicity, and age. It’s actually a pretty cool tool. I encourage everybody to go play on it, but I think in doing that, we set the stage and said “We’re a trusted partner. We’re here to provide the information. We’re going to be accountable to ourselves and we want you all to be accountable also.” I think that kind of set a level playing field that we can be trusted with this information.

AU: It’s now 2024, you’re one year away from your destination. What’s the score? How far has America come in the last 15 years and how much that do you think you can claim credit for? I understand it was a national goal, but you must be able to claim some success for a little bit in the nudge.

CB: Remember I said in 2009 we were at about 38%? The nation today sits at just over 54% attainment rate. So that’s about a 16 percentage points increase since we set the goal. Now, also remember when I said in 2008, we couldn’t count short term credentials. Over the course of time, we have found a way to measure quality certificates and certifications. We don’t count all of them. That accounts for about 8%, but we still have seen over an 8 percent point increase in degree attainment, which is really impressive. The other thing that’s really impressive that I’m excited about is when we set the goal in 2008, the younger population (25–35-year-olds) actually had a lower attainment rate than the full population, the 25 to 64 which is really bad news for the nation, right? You’re thinking, oh, we’re at lower attainment rate. Our future doesn’t look that great. So since then, the younger population have not only actually matched the working age population, but they far exceeded it. So, the 25- to 34-year-olds today sit at 56%. We’re excited. That is great news for the United States and in our future. When you ask, can we take credit for it? Absolutely not, right? This is an effort that everyone has contributed to states, institutions, everyone. We don’t confer degrees. I think what we can say is that we changed the conversation. We provided the data. We got people to focus on the things that matter that is closing equity gaps and increasing attainment. We’re excited about all the work that everyone has done and come together on, but we also recognize we’re far from done in a year. There’s much more work that needs to be done here.

AU: I’ll come to the next steps in one minute here, but I do want you to look back just one more time over the last 15 years. What do you think you could have done differently? You’re an evaluator. What were the least productive things you did as an organization? What do you wish you could change looking back?

CB: I think some of the things that we learn is just because we build it doesn’t mean they’re going to come. If there isn’t a need from the field, it just falls flat. There are things that we thought, “oh, of course, the nation needs it.” The degree qualifications profile is a really good example. It takes longer to get buy in on those sorts of things. You got to get faculty buy in, and other things. Just because we built it didn’t mean that overnight, everyone was going to say, “oh, you’re solving a problem that we’ve had.” Over time, I think they’ve recognized that this does have some legs to it and it does solve some problems. That’s important. But, I think that one of the most important things that to really drive this immense type of social change, you have to meet people where they are, you can’t talk down to them. You have to understand what they need and create it together.

AU: Let’s look forward to 2025. I take it you’re adopting a new goal in the next year or so. If you know it, you probably can’t tell us but what’s the direction? Is it still going to be a percentage of the population? Is it going to be quantity oriented or quality oriented?

CB: All great questions, and I don’t have a great answer for you right now. It’s definitely something that we are working on, and we think is really important. Some of the work that we’re doing right now is a lot of that look back: what worked, what didn’t work. One of the things that was really important impactful was the goal, setting the goal. It was easy to understand. It’s a quantitative, time-limited goal, and nobody else had one when we set this. It was easy to understand, you know what we were doing and where we want to go. To replicate that is hard. The other thing is that everybody else is set goals. Every day I read about a new organization that’s setting a goal, which is fabulous for our nation, for students all over the place, because it’s really focusing on helping them be more successful. I know that we will still focus on attainment. Attainment is still important. We sit at 54 percent today. We know that in the future, we’re going to need way more than 60% of the population to have a quality credential. Tony Carnevale’s recent work said by 2031, 70 percent will need to have a quality credential. As we think, even further from that, I can only assume that it’s going to go higher. And so, we know we need to focus on attainment. The other thing that I think concerns us are a lot and what we think about is what does the nation need? What does the United States need? If you hear the chatter not just in the US but I would say globally, people are questioning the quality of the credentials. I think they’ve lost confidence. So, when we measure and look at Gallup data for example, we see that people understand the value of credential. They know they need one to get a job. They understand that value. We see that even higher amongst people of color, low-income people, they know that this will change their future. However, they’re losing confidence that our system can deliver what they need. They’re losing confidence because at least in the US and other places around the world, the cost is far exceeding what they think they’re going to get on the other end. They’re questioning that it’s going to really give them the skills for what they’re going to need and tomorrow’s workforce. I think that they understand how important it is to have a credential, but they want to make sure that credential actually provides a good job and a good life for them moving forward, and they’re not crippled by debt. So, I think that’s something like we keep in our mind. We’re focused on what does the nation need? It’s not about what Lumina needs, not about our egos. It’s really about what the nation needs. So, we’re really trying to unpack that and understand what does the nation need? And where does Lumina provide some value in doing that work?

AU: That’s fascinating. We’ll look forward to seeing that new goal when it comes out next year, Courtney. Thanks so much for being with us.

CB: Thanks so much, Alex.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you have any questions or suggestions about this or any future episode, please get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guests will be WonkHE’s David Kernohan, who’s joining us to talk about England’s new lifelong learning entitlement scheme and how it fits into the long-term evolution of the UK’s student support system. Bye for now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.