This Foundation Measures Its Impact by One Number. Is That a Model for Success?

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The candidate brought an unconventional, even radical, idea to his interview to become CEO of a major foundation: What if the foundation threw virtually all its grant making — hundreds of millions of dollars — at just one problem?

So began the Lumina Foundation’s 17-year quest to reach a goal defined by a single metric. More recently, as its holy grail shimmered on the horizon, Lumina set a new, more difficult target likely to occupy the $1.5 billion foundation for the next 15 years.

The executive behind Lumina’s Captain Ahab-like chase of a number is Jamie Merisotis. After his interview pitch to board members, Merisotis joined the foundation in 2008 as CEO and president. At the time, he was a well-regarded higher-education policy advocate but new to grant making. The Indianapolis-based Lumina — created only eight years earlier from the sale proceeds of a student-loan guarantor — was supporting a range of programs to increase college accessibility and affordability.

After Merisotis’s arrival, the foundation shifted focus to one objective — lifting the share of Americans with college degrees, certificates, or industry credentials from 38 percent to 60 percent. The modern economy demands high-skilled workers, the foundation said, and the path to prosperity for individual Americans runs through higher education. Another benefit: narrowing the country’s yawning education divide, which fuels economic inequality and political division.

It’s rare for foundations to pour themselves into moving the needle on a single measure. Success is rarer still. San Francisco’s Tipping Point Community recently poured $100 million into a bid to cut chronic homelessness in the city by half. It fell short.

Chicago community groups are midway through a five-year, $400 million effort to reduce gun homicides by half — this after a wave of pandemic violence swamped a similar campaign to pull the number of firearm deaths under 400.

Lumina, by contrast, reached its magic number — or at least came close enough to declare victory. Those holding college or other credentials now account for 55 percent of adults — 5 percentage points shy of Lumina’s goal. After four years of what Merisotis describes as R&D, it focused on encouraging states and institutions to set attainment goals and then work to increase affordability, enhance the quality of offerings, and boost the often small share of students who complete their program of studies.

“It worked,” the foundation declared last year.

Merisotis called the increase “one of the most significant but least-recognized success stories of the past decade and a half.”

‘College for All’

The foundation started its journey to the 60 percent goal with the wind at its back, thanks in part to a “College for All” movement headlined by then-White House occupant Barack Obama. Democrats throughout the 2010s and early 2020s pushed for tuition-free community college and student loan debt relief.

But in recent years, America has soured on higher education. Costs soared, scrutiny of higher education’s ideological tilt increased, and artificial intelligence scrambled the job market for recent grads — all leading more people to question the value of college. Just 42 percent of Americans have confidence in higher education today — down from 56 percent a decade ago.

This shift guided Lumina as it shaped its new goal, announced this spring. It again aims again to increase the share of Americans with degrees or credentials — to 75 percent by 2040. But this time, it is stipulating that the credentials must have “value,” meaning recipients earn at least 15 percent more than adults with only a high school diploma.

“We need to make sure that higher ed serves more people better. And in order to be able to do that, you’ve got to focus on these questions of value,” Merisotis said in an interview with the Chronicle. “It’s got to help people prepare for and prosper at work as well as in their communities.”

Merisotis talked to the Chronicle about what philanthropy can learn from what will ultimately be its 30-year campaign. This excerpt has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What did you say to the board during your job interview?

I said that Lumina had an opportunity, as a relatively new funder that also was single-issue focused, to actually be a leadership organization. And I said we should develop a time-limited, quantitative goal to try to drive the work that we wanted to invest in. We should see ourselves as a catalyst for the country.

We recognized, of course, that there was no way we could do this on our own, that the way to do this was to see ourselves as helping to build an ecosystem. And that’s what we set out to do beginning in 2008 and 2009.

Why set a numerical goal?

It’s like when you get in your car and the first thing you do is you set the destination on your GPS — you decide where you want to go. We believed that the best way to count whether or not we were contributing toward increasing attainment was not some sort of abstract metric — a doubling or something like that. It was literally a quantitative goal measured as a percentage of the population, 60 percent, with a time horizon in place.

In some ways, we didn’t realize that we were doing something fairly unusual.

Why don’t others pursue a numerical target?

It’s just challenging for philanthropic organizations to put themselves in the mindframe that they are a catalyst towards these kinds of ambitious goals. It’s not that foundations don’t want to focus on outcomes. Most do. But for many foundations, it’s difficult to be as precise and locked in as we were over an extended period of time because of their missions and their histories.

There’s also the risk of failure, right?

You have to have confidence that the target you’re setting is both ambitious and realistic. We believed ours was both, and we’ve mostly been proven true. The fact that we will fall just short is certainly not a disappointment to us. We’re very, very pleased with the large scale of progress that we’ve achieved. But sometimes those numeric targets can be challenging.

How did the work unfold?

From roughly 2008 to 2012, we were in the experimental and knowledge-building phase. So we made a lot of smaller grants. And then we realized, “We know enough now that we’ve got to start investing in stuff that we think works.” So the average grant size increased. We had confidence to make larger grants because we believed they had the opportunity for more impact.

The next stage was two-part: helping to build the platform for states to set their own attainment goals, and at the same time advancing ambitious, specific ideas that evidence suggested would influence attainment — things like affordability and increased quality of education.

The 2017 to 2020 time frame was really about building out the entire ecosystem. We did a lot of work with technical-assistance organizations, training entities, think tanks — lots of organizations focused on system-level change. And in the last phase, right before 2025, we focused on older students, adult learners. We wanted to make sure that people understand that more than two out of five college students today are over the age of 25.

Did you fear falling woefully short?

There was definitely a fear, particularly in the early years. We thought in those first few years that our intent at being incremental and trying to drive progress might take a lot longer than the 15 to 17 years that we had in mind.

Ultimately, we landed on using states as a primary, but not exclusive, driver of change. We did not have that idea at the beginning. At the beginning, we were thinking very much of a national effort at a national level. What we realized was that you’ve got to get to a level where people have the leverage and the influence in order to create that change.

During those early years, what didn’t work?

We came out of the blocks in 2009 believing that we could directly influence public opinion. And yet we realized that we didn’t have the capacity to do a public media campaign that would get every American saying, “We need to get to 60 percent.”

How did the organization change over the 17 years?

Our ambition for outcomes and driving toward results means that we have to see ourselves differently. We do have to see ourselves as not just grant makers, not just cash registers with a conscience. We also need to see ourselves as leadership organizations. And that means being transparent about what we’re doing, being clear about our goals, and being honest about where we’ve gone wrong and where we want to retool.

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Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content.