Rising Tides Don’t Create Racialized Change: Analyzing Institutional Change Projects in Postsecondary Philanthropy’s College Completion Agenda

ABSTRACT

This paper uses critical archival analysis, paired with textual analysis of grant descriptions, to understand how nine foundations — all with endowments derived from the student loan industry — have motivated their college completion work and the relationship between these commitments and grantmaking over time (2000–2019). Mobilizing concepts of theorization and racialized change work (RCW) to analyze the relationship between funders’ deployed racial frames and their theory of change, this paper offers three primary contributions: 1) A methodological approach to analyzing philanthropic or intermediary-led reform campaigns (e.g. the college completion agenda) as a form of theorization — a core mechanism of institutional change and diffusion — inclusive of funders’ racial projects; 2) Insights on the qualitative, causal pathway by which one foundation created organization-specific interest convergence that facilitated engagement in RCW, and 3) Evidence demonstrating how race-evasive theorizations, even if efficacious mechanisms for change, fail to deinstitutionalize a core mechanism of racialization: investment in deficit-minded, individual-level projects. These insights speak not only to the material differences between race-evasive and race-conscious theorizations, but also organizational pathways toward durable race-conscious commitments in higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Race and racialization
• institutional change
• philanthropy
• intermediary organizations
• policy advocacy
• college completion agenda

Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my warmest gratitude to many trusted colleagues for their generative input including my peer reviewers, the Journal of Higher Education editors, and especially Aireale Rodgers, Krystal Villanosa, Román Liera and Hayley Weddle for their thoughtful feedback along the way.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. USA Funds later became Strada Education Network.

2. Conversely, representation as the sole metric for predicting the disruptive potential of an individual or organization is complicated in cases where minoritized actors have material connections to hegemonic interests. It is worth noting, too, that while minoritized actors do in fact have greater proximity to contradictions and therefore on the whole are indeed more likely to challenge the status quo, the commodification of diversity under neoliberalism positions minoritized actors as more likely to advance into institutions of power when they hold fewer or weaker commitments to challenge those institutions (e.g., Mayorga-Gallo, 2019). In a parallel example, while gender representation on the Supreme Court has long been associated with liberal hopes for protections of reproductive rights, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s commitments to patriarchal systems offer a stark reminder of the limitations of representation, on its own, as a politic of disruption.