Last week (July 21,
2014) Vice Provost Sukhwant Jhaj and I attended the kick-off meeting in
Washington DC for a Gates Foundation grant that PSU has received from the
Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) and the Urban Serving
Universities (USU). You can read about
the work PSU will be engaged in related to this grant at https://www.aplu.org/page.aspx?pid=3003&srctid=1&erid=2084940
This effort is one of the first significant investments the Gates Foundation
is making in universities. Much of their
(Gates Foundation) focus and funding thus far has been at the K-12 and
community college levels. At the meeting
in DC, a Gates Foundation representative commented on how they now realize how
important the entire educational ecosystem is; that investing in universities
is an important part of that. Of course,
we all know that is true, but to have external recognition of that from an
influential (and well endowed) foundation was validating for us.
PSU was awarded one of the 7 grants because we are seen as a leader
among urban serving universities in our goals to advance student success and
student completion—creating access for students, making it affordable, and
helping them complete their degrees.
These are the foundational goals of reTHINK PSU (http://www.rethink.pdx.edu/). It is exciting to know that the work we have
articulated in creating pathways for success for students from community
colleges and creating flexible degrees that serve a range of students is seen
by others as one of the important directions for the future of higher
education.
Having said this, these grants do not just land at our feet and the
competition for this award was fierce.
Sukhwant Jhaj and Hans VanDerSchaafer did a great job in writing a
proposal that made the case for why PSU needed to be one of the 7 universities
in the country that the Gates Foundation should invest in their inaugural
effort to support universities. We
imagine that the work ahead of us will not always be easy. My guess is we will run into challenges and
divergent views on how to accomplish things, and we will need to make decisions
at times without all the information we would like to have. But, it is important that PSU be a leader in
these efforts and influence the paths of others.
I will be writing more about this effort in upcoming blogs and welcome
your thoughts on this topic and our work, now or at anytime.
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