The future economic growth of the United States, our standard of living, and the success of all of our young people depend on surmounting the crucial challenges confronting higher education. How can the nation ensure that students are learning more and acquiring the essentials to compete in the global economy? How can America educate its low-income and minority young people to ensure that a higher percentage of them graduate with the ability to meet changing workforce demands?
Lumina Foundation for Education is committed to helping find the answers–while containing institutional costs. The multi-year Making Opportunity Affordable initiative is focused on assisting states and institutions in addressing three fundamental problems: stagnant educational attainment; escalating spending; and eroding quality. These trends point to a dangerous “productivity gap” in higher education: Students and taxpayers are spending significantly more and getting less.
Through Making Opportunity Affordable, which JFF manages, Lumina Foundation and its national partners help states and institutions transform the delivery of postsecondary education to serve more students without sacrificing quality. By introducing more cost-effective approaches, states and their higher education systems can invest more in boosting attainment and improving quality.
A Framework for Progress
Making Opportunity Affordable will promote the redesign of institutional practice and public policy around three priorities:
- Increasing degree attainment access across all groups of students
- Assuring educational quality, measured in terms of student learning outcomes
- Containing institutional costs, measured on terms of per-student spending
The initiative will:
- Spark a national dialogue about the
interaction of attainment, quality, and cost that will facilitate consensus
around new ways of thinking and new strategies for improvement, and
challenge conventional wisdom. For instance, a strong education does
not mean that per-student costs must rise. Colleges and universities
can simultaneously pursue—and achieve—expanded attainment and higher
quality while containing expenditures.
- Mobilize and support leaders eager to take action.
- Unite courageous innovators in a national network to share ideas and strategies
- Develop useful tools to help colleges and policymakers better identify and monitor institutional spending and reforms.
- Fund model programs in states and institutions. The initiative will award multi-year Opportunity Grants to selected states and their higher education systems. These grants will help states audit current campus practices and system/state policies that need redesign to strengthen core academic functions, streamline student transitions into college, and promote accelerated degree completion.
- Identify, document, and disseminate what is learned about existing models and new ideas to foster implementation in additional states and their higher education systems, and in a wider array of public and private institutions.
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Adding It Up: A State and National Imperative 
