Colleagues,
I’m glad to be writing to you for the first time as interim director of the Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Learning & Navigation team.
I hope you’ve read about the next chapter of our U.S. education work. Our goal is ambitious : double the rate of growth of 18-to-34-year-olds in America attaining credentials of value, resulting in 10 million more learners than current estimates show, achieving those credentials by 2045. As part of this update to our education work, we have also made changes to our division structure to help advance this work. So, amid all this big picture, long-term thinking and planning, I thought I’d introduce myself with a quick look back at how we—and I—got here.
I’ve spent much of my career on college campuses. I’ve seen institutions at their best: faculty finding new ways to engage students in their learning; advisors helping students see and pursue options they didn’t know were available to them; leaders bringing people together across departments to fix something that simply wasn’t working.
I’ve also seen how hard students must work to navigate systems that weren’t necessarily designed around their journeys. Access, completion, and value reinforce one another: learners need the opportunity to pursue education after high school, support to finish what they start, and confidence that what they earn will help them build the life and career they want.
But I’ve also seen how straightforward propositions can become complicated for learners trying to map out their futures. At key points in the journey, too many lose momentum—costing them time, money, or the value of learning they’ve already completed. These challenges aren’t new, and neither is our work to address them. What is changing is our focus: we’re bringing the knowledge, relationships, and solutions our teams and partners have built over many years to three parts of the learner journey where we believe we can make the greatest difference.
First, helping learners get to and through college.
Long before students enroll in college, they’re making decisions that can shape what comes next: what they want to “be,” which courses to take, whether and where to go to college. Once enrolled, the stakes don’t diminish. Students must navigate new academic expectations, balance school with work and family, choose or change majors, transfer between institutions, and, often, return to education after time away. And at every step, the people and systems around them can help them move closer to a credential—or make the path longer, more expensive, and harder to navigate.
We’re working with Achieving the Dream, DataKind, MDRC, CanyonGBS, and the National College Attainment Network to connect information that sits in different systems to give high school and postsecondary advisors a clearer picture of what’s happening with a student so they can offer the right support at the right time.
Second, helping learners master foundational college courses that can determine whether they stay on track.
Through our work with Carnegie Mellon University and Learnvia, faculty are shaping new approaches to introductory math courses that can determine early on whether a student stays on track toward a degree. The technology may be new, but the idea behind it isn’t: give faculty better tools and give learners more opportunities for feedback, support, and meaningful learning.
Third, helping learners get the full value from the knowledge and credits they have already earned.
Transfer is part of navigating to and through college. But there is a second problem when students move: too much of what they have already accomplished can get lost along the way. Credits may not transfer, or they may transfer without applying toward a credential—adding time, cost, and frustration and putting a learner’s momentum at risk.
Partners like Ithaka S+R are making it easier for learners to understand how their credits will apply before they make a transfer decision—not after they’ve already invested more time and money.
What learners already know and have earned should help propel them forward, not require them to retrace ground they have already covered.
At the same time, the environment around learners is changing quickly—from AI to new providers, credentials, and pathways.
That's why we're also committed to seeding innovation: staying close to changing learner needs, testing promising approaches, and asking whether our strategy remains relevant –concentrating our effort without narrowing our field of vision.
As I begin this chapter, my first priority is maintaining the momentum of the good work already underway. Leadership change shouldn’t mean losing ground on promising work—or losing the relationships and knowledge that got us here.
Over the coming year, we’ll also keep learning: looking closely at what is producing meaningful results for learners, what has the potential to reach many more, and where we need to adjust or invest more deeply. That will help us make thoughtful choices about where our resources and partnerships can make the greatest difference.
We enter this next chapter with significant knowledge, strong relationships, promising solutions, and real momentum. Our task now is to put those assets to work at critical moments in learners’ journeys while staying alert to how their needs—and the world around them—are changing.
Because learners shouldn’t have to do the work of connecting systems that were built separately. We can do more of that work for them.
Regards,
Dale Whittaker,
Interim Director of Postsecondary Learning & Navigation
Quick Takes
New evidence on college advising in high school at scale
Two studies highlighted by the National College Attainment Network show different ways high-quality advising in high school can improve postsecondary outcomes. The findings underscore an important distinction: helping students enroll and helping them ultimately complete requires different—but connected—supports, with sustained relationships with professional advisors playing an important role.
Teaching with AI, not around it
In this opinion piece, University of Michigan professor Jason Corso writes about moving beyond policing students’ AI use to instead focusing on redesigning his classroom around active learning, human interaction, and using AI as a tool for practice and feedback. We are investing in AI-enabled courseware that helps scale what great teaching already looks like and remain interested in hearing a range of perspectives about what this work can and should deliver for students and faculty.
Improving the community college transfer experience
In the latest episode of Inside Higher Ed’s The Key podcast, Josh Wyner, executive director of the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute and John Fink, senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center, talk about what institutions can do to create clearer pathways that help more community college students transfer to bachelor’s degree programs and reach their goals. Success means more learners complete credentials, which is why we’re supporting the development of shared infrastructure and tools that make learning count.