Postsecondary Success Notes | Adjusting to new realities

Colleagues,

First and foremost, I hope that you are well and safe. Please see this message I sent to partners about this time. Like all of you, we’re moving quickly to adjust to new realities, and as funders, are doing what we can for the most vulnerable—low-income students, first-generation students, and students of color—in this unprecedented situation.

Our foundation’s core postsecondary commitments—innovation, transformation, data/information, policy advocacy around issues like access and affordability and value—remain the same. At the same time, in this new landscape we are prioritizing four areas of work within those commitments:

• Holistic Student Support: Ensuring that federal and other emergency aid programs support those with the greatest need and deliver that support as efficiently and effectively as possible while drawing on learning in aid delivery and student advising.
• Quality Teaching and Learning: Drawing on years of investments and lessons in digital learning to support quality teaching and learning during the broad-scale pivot to remote instruction.
• Student Mobility: Supporting students to continue on their postsecondary pathways in the face of economic and geographic disruption and potential institutional closure.
• Institutional Viability: Building on our institutional transformation efforts to promote a post-COVID system that is more sustainable and equitable.

In the coming days, we will be sharing more information about the work within these areas.

As always, we appreciate all you are doing to preserve and expand opportunity and eliminate race and income as predictors of that opportunity. We will continue to stand with you in those efforts.

Regards,

Patrick Methvin