Dive Brief:
- The second White House summit on higher education is set to take place Thursday, with hundreds of college presidents expected to attend.
- The price of admission: Promises aimed at producing more graduates, more low-income student admissions, and more low-income students with science, technology, engineering, and math degrees, Inside Higher Ed reported.
- Also promised: New donations, including $30 million from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation to increase low-income-student graduation rates and $10 million from the Helmsley Charitable Trust to help underserved students studying STEM subjects.
Dive Insight:
This is set up as a giant public relations opportunity for all involved. Local media outlets are running stories about their local college or university president or state higher ed officials traveling to the event, and the Obama Administration has produced a 211-page report describing more than 500 commitments from college leaders, companies, nonprofit organizations, and other entities. Not that the commitments are a bad thing, but whether they were produced because of the White House summit is a debatable point. One main goal of the Obama Administration was to promote partnerships between higher ed institutions, as well as between those institutions and K-12 schools.