Gates Foundation Calling For New Higher Ed Tech Initiatives With $20M Fund

Citing an education system that is failing American students, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is pledging up to $20 million in grants to individuals and organizations to develop technology tools to help secondary students better prepare for and graduate from college.

The Gates Foundation on Monday, Oct. 11, said it has released the first in a series of RFPs (requests for proposals) for grants ranging from $250,000 to $750,000 to develop technology to improve education.

For the grants, part of the new Next Generation Learning Challenges program, the Foundation is teaming up with EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit organization aimed at improving the use of IT in higher education, as well as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Foundation released RFPs in four specific areas, including tools to better combine face-to-face instruction with online learning; interactive applications to better engage students in learning; develop high-quality open courseware for core subjects with low rates of student success such as math, science and English; and improving the use of analytics to measure student progress.

Other RFPs will be released every six to 12 months.

Next: Big Challenges For Students

In a new white paper released on Monday, Oct. 11, the Gates Foundation wrote that nearly 30 percent of U.S. students, and nearly 50 percent of African American, Hispanic and low-income students, specifically, do not finish high school.

Furthermore, only 42 percent of students who enroll in college complete a bachelor's degree by the age of 26, while only 12 percent complete an associate's degree. Those students are facing future competition with millions of college graduates from China, India and other countries, who are getting degrees in such fields as engineering, science and business, and are working for salaries much lower than U.S. employees enjoy, the Gates Foundation wrote.

By 2018, the Foundation wrote, 63 percent of all U.S. jobs will require some sort of postsecondary education, but the U.S. will fall short of its needs by about 3 million graduates.

’American education has been the best in the world, but we’re falling below our own high standards of excellence for high school and college attainment,’ said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in a statement.