Research

Strategic Plan

Friends and Colleagues:

Greater Texas Foundation recently completed a six-month planning process, under the guidance of FSG Social Impact Advisors, in which the foundation examined current and projected educational needs in Texas and how the foundation’s efforts might be best aligned to address them.  Through this process, we learned a great deal about the challenges Texas students face on the road to post-secondary completion and how we can focus our efforts to help students overcome these challenges.

The resulting strategic plan is not a departure, but an evolution, from where the foundation began.  The foundation will continue its commitment to improving educational outcomes for Texas students; however, in order to have a greater impact on the tough and persistent challenges facing education in Texas, we are making a shift toward being more focused in our funding.  By targeting specific points in the education pipeline, we will work toward increasing post-secondary access and persistence and improving math and science education, with a focus on increasing the number of students who are prepared to succeed in post-secondary education.

Going forward, we will allocate a significant portion of our grants toward strategic initiatives, efforts that focus our resources on pressing education needs related to post-secondary preparation, access, persistence, and completion.  In addition, we will focus strongly on convening partners to exercise leadership in education and work toward specific, common goals.

Through its philanthropy, the foundation intends to impact students across the state of Texas and has a strong desire to focus on measurable, research-based, and outcomes-driven work.  The foundation also wishes to capitalize on its strength in partnering with other organizations, including other funders, governmental agencies and educational institutions.  By following its strategic plan, Greater Texas Foundation aims to bring greater clarity and coherence to its philanthropy, with the goal of creating greater impact on the educational success of Texas students.

Research Brief: As part of our process, FSG Social Impact Advisors conducted extensive secondary research.  This document addresses areas relevant to the foundation as well as provides the rationale and reasoning behind our final decisions.

Summary Slides: This document is a summary of the recently board-adopted strategic plan and provides a high level overview of the foundation’s future strategic direction.

**Expanded Research Brief:  While this document has many similarities to the one above, the scope is wider and contains interesting and important information not directly related to strategic areas pursued by Greater Texas Foundation.

**THECB 1995 7th Grade Cohort Data: This chart by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which summarizes from 2006 the educational progress of Texas students who were 7th graders in 1995, was key to our strategic planning research. For example, as described in detail in the research brief and summary slides,  the 1995 7th grade cohort data indicates only one in five Texas youth who entered high school completed a post-secondary degree or credential. Additionally, of the 126,000 students who enrolled in post-secondary education, 74,000 did not earn a degree or credential.

Texas Regional Action Plan

In 2010, Greater Texas Foundation, Communities Foundation of Texas, Houston Endowment, and The Meadows Foundation engaged FSG Social Impact Advisors to identify and research historically underserved regions in Texas where targeted postsecondary completion efforts could be most impactful. The regions were identified based on several factors, e.g. postsecondary completion data and number of students receiving Pell grants.  Drawing upon FSG’s work, several state and national stakeholders are engaging in ongoing discussions about their interest in the development of a regionally-structured public-private partnership focused on improving postsecondary outcomes for students in the following regions: Central Texas, El Paso, Gulf Coast, Metroplex and South Texas.

We are pleased to share the final materials FSG developed for this work. Click on the links below for an overview of the Texas landscape and for region-specific summaries. The overview of the Texas landscape includes a summary of the Texas higher education landscape and opportunities, a plan for improving postsecondary outcomes through collective impact, and a description of the need for a statewide and regional approach. Under each region are two summaries at varying levels of detail: a short summary of 8-10 slides with regional data and synthesis of findings and a full-length summary of 20+ slides including all regional data and detailed findings.

TEXAS REGIONAL ACTION PLAN DOCUMENTS

Texas Overview
Full Length State Findings

Central Texas
One page summary located in Texas Overview Slide Deck, page 37
Short Regional Summary
Full Length Regional Findings

El Paso
One page summary located in Texas Overview Slide Deck, page 41
Short Regional Summary
Full Length Regional Findings

Gulf Coast
One page summary located in Texas Overview Slide Deck, page 38
Short Regional Summary
Full Length Regional Findings

Metroplex
One page summary located in Texas Overview Slide Deck, page 39
Short Regional Summary
Full Length Regional Findings

South Texas
One page summary located in Texas Overview Slide Deck, page 40
Short Regional Summary
Full Length Regional Findings

Dollars for Degrees

College scholarships have long played an important role in ensuring access to post-secondary education in the U.S. However, we are now as a nation increasingly recognizing the imperative of focusing on post-secondary persistence and completion as well. An example of why this shift in focus has come about can be seen in data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board which tracked the cohort of students who were 9th graders in 1997. Of those 250,000 students, thirty percent enrolled in post-secondary education and did not complete a credential within six years compared to twenty-nine percent who did not graduate from high school. In absolute terms, seventy-five thousand students who graduated high school and enrolled in college left empty-handed. In response to this issue, Greater Texas Foundation (GTF) engaged FSG Social Impact Advisors to examine how scholarship funders, including GTF, could design their programs to improve post-secondary persistence and completion, in addition to improving access. Forward-looking scholarship funders have an opportunity to structure and target their post-secondary scholarships so that they enable student success.

Full reports are listed below:

Dollars for Degrees: Structuring post-secondary scholarships to increase student success

Dollars for Degrees: Financial aid and its impact on post-secondary degree completion in Texas

What We’re Reading

Click on the links below to see what we’re reading.

Complete College Texas (Complete College America)

Taking College Courses in High School: A Strategy for College Readiness (Jobs for the Future)

Cornerstones of Completion:
State Policy Support for Accelerated, Structured Pathways to College Credentials and Transfer (Jobs for the Future)

Rethinking Remedial Education: The Role of MSIs in Serving Underprepared Students in the 21st Century
A policy brief from the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) on work by institutions from the Lumina MSI-Models of Success program to better serve students in need of remedial education.

Broadening the Benefits of Dual Enrollment:
Reaching Underachieving and Underrepresented Students with Career-Focused Programs (Community College Research Center)

Keeping the Promise of Opportunity:
Redesigning Financial Aid to Support Post-Secondary Completion Among Low-Income Young Adults (FSG Social Impact Consultants)

Remediation: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere (Complete College America)

What’s a Degree Worth?

Annotated Bibliography

Each quarter, we compile an annotated bibliography of recently released reports related to the foundation’s strategy.

Annotated Bibliography: October 2012

Annotated Bibliography: July 2012

Annotated Bibliography: April 2012

Annotated Bibliography: January 2012