Bill Gates offers cash for degrees not families

Source: Agencies  |   2008-12-10  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

THE Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would like to encourage more 20-somethings to get a post-high school degree or certificate before starting a family.

To that end, the foundation announced yesterday an initial round of US$69 million in grants to 1,200 United States community colleges and their students.

The foundation is joining a group of charitable organizations that support community colleges and plans to spend up to a half-billion dollars over the next four years on the project, said Hilary Pennington, director of special initiatives in the foundation's US program. The grants will compliment the foundation's efforts to reform American high schools, get more kids into preschool, support charter schools and hand out millions of dollars in college scholarships.

"We felt that the biggest and most important thing the foundation could do was keep investing in education," Pennington said, noting that the project is a response to the foundation leaders' desire to do more to reduce inequity in the US.

The Gates Foundation has always played a role in the US, but most of the grants from its US$35.1 billion endowment support programs elsewhere, focusing largely on fighting diseases such as AIDS, malaria and polio, and supporting agriculture and clean water in Africa and Asia.

The foundation's overall higher education goal is to double the number of low-income adults who get a degree or certificate beyond high school by age 26.

It hopes to do that by focusing on college completion, arguing that while college enrolment has grown dramatically in the past 40 years, most students are not graduating.

The project is intended to provide money for scholarships for low-income students and research into higher education.