Academic Exercises

Observers ask tough questions about the potential for success of the Gates Foundation’s $1-billion scholarship program

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s promise last month to give $1-billion over the next 20 years to help at least 20,000 minority students attend college is a landmark in philanthropy: No other donor has ever made such an ambitious commitment to help minorities attain college and graduate degrees.

The pledge also shows how the Gateses intend to carry out their goal of improving the state of American education. Not only are they trying to strengthen higher education by adding to the diversity of students on college campuses over the next two decades, but they have on the drawing board a large-scale grant-making effort intended to improve elementary and secondary education in Washington State, with the goal of expanding the effort nationwide.

Though the scholarship gift has won much praise for its generosity, many observers are now beginning to ask tough questions about exactly how the fund endowed by the Microsoft founder and his wife will translate an ambitious idea into a program that substantially increases the number of minority students who pursue degrees in the sciences, mathematics, and other related fields.

Among the questions:

* Is the promise of a paid college scholarship enough to make sure low-income minority youngsters finish high school and are prepared to do college level-work? Or does it take more-comprehensive efforts at a younger age to make a difference?

* By limiting aid to students who have already shown outstanding academic promise, will the program duplicate scores of efforts by colleges already competing for the best and brightest minority applicants?

* Will the program actually increase the amount of money minority students receive — or will it lead colleges to cut the amount they provide in student aid?

* Is $1-billion enough to help roughly 20,000 students — or could the program run out of money before the 20 years are over, leaving scholarship students in the lurch?

The $1-billion effort, called the Gates Millennium Scholars program, will be administered by the United Negro College Fund, which throughout its 54-year history has raised a total of $1.4-billion.

William H. Gray III, president of the college fund, says he hopes the program will “change the landscape” not only of American education, “but also of America itself.”

The United Negro College Fund, in Fairfax, Va., plans to work closely with the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, in San Francisco, and the American Indian College Fund, in Denver.

The Gates money will lead to a significant expansion of those organizations’ missions, most notably those of the United Negro College Fund and the American Indian College Fund, which have focused much of their energy on raising money to benefit historically black institutions and tribal colleges, respectively.

Gates scholarships will go to American Indian, Asian, black, and Hispanic students who demonstrate academic promise as well as financial need.

Once selected, they will receive money every year until they complete their bachelor’s degree. In addition, the foundation pledged to give students enough money for up to four years of graduate school if they study mathematics, science, engineering, education, or library science.

At a press conference to announce the commitment, Bill Gates said he hoped his gift would not only allow students to attend the college of their choice, but also give them more time for their studies. Because of the scholarships, he said, students wouldn’t “have to be having too many jobs off on the side, or think about the size of the loans they are building up.”

Grant makers involved in efforts to improve the schools that serve poor minority children say that that goal is important but that many students need help beyond just footing their college bills.

Sophie Sa, executive director of the Panasonic Foundation, in Secaucus, N.J., says that “if what we want to do is help all kids have an equal shot” at college, then philanthropists need to find ways to improve the quality of the elementary and secondary schools that prepare them.

While scholarship programs can help individual students attend high-quality schools and colleges, she says, the programs don’t change the school systems attended by the overwhelming number of low-income minority students.

In addition to overhauling the schools that serve poor youngsters, new efforts need to be made to provide counseling and other services to such youngsters, says Eugene Lang. He started the I Have a Dream Foundation in New York City in the early 1980s, when he spontaneously pledged to pay for the college education of a group of mostly poor, minority students who had just finished sixth grade.

Mr. Lang says he was surprised to discover that it was not so much the scholarship pledge that helped the youngsters he promised to support: That idea seemed too remote and abstract to some of them. But what did make a difference was that Mr. Lang himself, as well as a youth-development specialist he hired, spent time with the children, helping them to find internships, extracurricular activities, tutoring, college counseling, and other assistance.

Mr. Lang suggests that Mr. Gates could cement the effectiveness of the scholarship program by committing another $1-billion to similar efforts that help children, starting as early as the third grade.

He also speculates that just as his I Have a Dream Foundation prompted dozens of other philanthropists to join his effort — or develop spinoffs of their own — the Gates gift could trigger numerous other donors to start minority-scholarship programs.

Janice Petrovich, who oversees education grant making at the Ford Foundation, suggested that the Gates gift could be a catalyst to spur foundations already working to increase the number of minorities in higher education to work together more closely. Among them are Ford itself, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Lilly Endowment, which has given $41-million to the United Negro College Fund and $50-million to the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and has just announced a $30-million grant to the American Indian College Fund.

Even if the Gates program does cause many donors to copy the idea, some experts question whether pouring money into helping high-achieving students will increase the total number of minorities enrolled in college.

“If your goal really is to move people along and get them into higher education and keep them in higher education, focusing on the kids who have a B and above average really, really limits you,” warns Brian Fitzgerald, director of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent panel that advises the federal government.

He says that such students are the ones that colleges are “in a bidding war for” and that they already receive big student-aid awards.

Sara Martinez Tucker of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund says the bidding wars notwithstanding, top minority students can’t find enough money to complete their studies. “We had about 10,000 applicants last year, with an average student G.P.A. of 3.4, and I was only able to give about 25 per cent of them scholarships,” says Ms. Martinez Tucker, whose fund has given away $38-million since it was founded in 1975. “There is clearly pent-up demand from students who are not getting the money they need. I know I can use it to make a difference for the kids I support.”

While minority students will certainly gain from the Gates effort, some higher-education observers worry that the money might end up benefiting colleges more than it does students.

Arthur Hauptman, an independent consultant on financial-aid issues, says it is not unusual for institutions to withdraw their own aid when students receive outside scholarships from private donors.

Some might do so to help other needy students, others to reduce their own student-aid budgets so they can channel money to other programs.

Mr. Gray of the United Negro College Fund plans to circumvent that problem by not telling colleges the amount of a student’s scholarship until after the institutions have already determined students’ financial-aid packages.

While students would be notified that they were Gates Scholars sometime in the spring, before they received college acceptance letters and financial-aid awards, the United Negro College Fund would not notify the college of the award until August.

At that time, he says, the fund plans to urge the colleges not to reduce aid that had been earmarked for Gates Scholars.

Aside from worrying about the administrative politics at colleges throughout the country, one of the big challenges for the United Negro College Fund will be to insure that all minority groups get a fair share of the funds to be distributed.

The organization will review the black nominees, and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund will evaluate the applications from its constituents, as will the American Indian College Fund.

No group has been selected to review applications from Asian students — although Mr. Gray says he plans to work closely with experts on Asian students to pick the best candidates.

The United Negro College Fund will get the final say over the proportion of awards that go to each minority group, in consultation with an advisory group.

Ms. Martinez Tucker says the advisory council will need to devise “some kind of mechanism for how to be fair” in the distribution of the awards. She says she hopes that the structure of the scholars program does not lead to minority groups’ competing with each other for a share of the scholarship money. She sees the program as “a challenge to us as minorities to show an ability to work together and see beyond our own lines.”

Over the next 20 years, some $930-million to $950-million will be available for scholarships, says Mr. Gray, who estimates that the rest of the money will be spent on administrative costs.

Even though that amount may seem large compared with other scholarship programs, student-aid experts warn that the Gates program will have to be very careful not to promise more money than it has to offer.

For example, Mr. Fitzgerald notes that a typical medical student has to borrow about $80,000. It is unlikely that all Gates scholars would opt to attend medical school, or that they might all need that much assistance. But if they did, it could easily cost more than $1-billion.

To avoid that problem, Mr. Fitzgerald says, the United Negro College Fund will need to take an actuarial approach, creating complex statistical models that help predict the probability of each student’s going on to graduate school, how long they stay there, and how much assistance each might need.

One difficulty making such predictions, says Mr. Hauptman, the financial-aid consultant, is that nobody has proved that a pledge of aid is all it takes to persuade students to go to college and stay there long enough to graduate.

“There has really been a lack of evaluation both of the federal programs and the private programs,” he observes. “There is an assumption that if we give out money, it must be good to do that, and therefore let’s not worry too much about the details. But there is not a whole lot of systematic evaluation of whether people would have gone to college in the absence of the aid.”

Melinda and Bill Gates say they are convinced that scholarships do provide a powerful way to encourage college attendance — and to make sure that minorities have the same opportunities as do whites.

In announcing the gift, Mr. Gates said one reason that he decided to focus a significant amount of funds on this effort was his concern that the nation’s high-technology work force is not fully representative of the population. More needed to be done, he felt, to make sure minority-group members had a fair shot at the industry’s jobs.

Increasing educational opportunities seemed to be the best tool to achieve that, Mr. Gates said, noting that as he grew up, he had been an “incredible beneficiary of seeing wide-open horizons.”

Likewise, Melinda Gates recalled that during her years growing up in Dallas, her parents constantly reminded her and her three siblings that they could go to any college they wanted. All she had to worry about was to get herself admitted, and they would somehow figure out how to pay for the education.

Ms. Gates noted that it wasn’t easy for her parents to send four children to college, and she contributed her earnings from summer jobs. But her parents’ promise was the key, she said, because “it meant that I had the possibility, at least in my mind, of a future and was able to dream.”

With the new scholarship program, Ms. Gates said, she and her husband want to make a similar promise “to a lot of other young students in the rest of America.”