Description
The Higher Education Program provided a grant to the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (WWNFF) in 2016. This grant enabled WWNFF to pilot a new initiative to improve communication and collaboration between state policymakers and higher education leaders.
WWNFF President Arthur Levine and his colleagues had observed a growing divide between policymakers and political leaders on one hand and academic leaders on the other. With the support of the Luce Higher Education grant, Woodrow Wilson designed and implemented a program to educate state leaders about the complexities of higher education and higher education policy and to build enduring relationships between academic and policy leaders within a state.
The pilot focused on four states where Woodrow Wilson had strong relationships—New Jersey, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Indiana. Each state team comprised two representatives of higher education and two of state government. The inaugural group included, among others, the president of New Jersey’s Montclair State University, a Georgia state senator with responsibility for higher education, Indiana’s higher education commissioner, and the president of Bunker Hill Community College in Massachusetts.
During two convenings, the teams learned from one another and from experts in the field. They also, unexpectedly, conceived projects in their states that would address specific challenges they faced. New Jersey, for example, recognized the need for a strategic plan for higher education in the state. Indiana, meanwhile, determined that its existing plan to increase enrollment at two-year institutions needed to be broadened to address the higher education pipeline more generally.
WWNFF reports that the teams were enthusiastic about the pilot and are eager to continue work. Woodrow Wilson itself has committed to continuing the program with some adjustments and has begun recruiting a second cohort of state teams. WWNFF has received partial support from the Mellon Foundation to launch this second cohort and is likely to approach the Luce Foundation for the remaining funding for the second cohort in 2019.
Meanwhile, the first cohort of four state teams is working to implement their projects. But they have no funding to enable them to carry out their work. The original proposal aimed to educate and to foster camaraderie; these goals were accomplished. But WWNFF had not anticipated that the teams would commit to carrying out specific projects in their states.
Woodrow Wilson would like to make micro-grants of $10,000 available to each team to support these projects. The teams might use the money to pay for in-state convenings of the higher education community, to commission studies, to bring in experts, etc. The teams will also use the funds to document their projects so that they can be shared with the second cohort. A small amount of the grant would support WWNFF staff time and travel to the four states.
Patrick Callan, former head of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and Judith Rizzo, former director of the Hunt Institute, which works on public education policy, will oversee this special grant-funded project. They were the pilot project leaders as well and have good relationships with the four teams.
