HHMI decides it takes a community to improve undergraduate science education | Science
Bridget Trogden thought she knew the drill for winning a research grant: Write a proposal with her colleagues at Clemson University, where she is a professor of engineering and science education; submit it to a funder; and then pray it beats out hundreds of worthy competitors for a handful of awards.
So Trogden was stunned when the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), one of the nation’s largest science philanthropies, informed her earlier this year— before she had even submitted a detailed proposal—that Clemson would be sharing in an $8.6 million grant for improving undergraduate science education. Clemson was already part of a network involving more than 100 of its competitors, but Trogden and her colleagues had assumed they would have to compete for funding.
“We were floored when they told us ahead of time that we were all going to be funded,” she says. “That was a whole new type of grantsmanship.”
Trogden was reacting to HHMI’s decision to substitute collaboration for competition in funding the third round of its high-profile program, called Inclusive Excellence 3 (IE3). It enticed 104 institutions, including Clemson, to work together in small “learning communities.” And it broke one of the cardinal rules in competitive grantmaking by choosing the winners before they had even submitted detailed proposals—and then allowing the winners to come up with a plan on how to spend the money.
On 30 November, HHMI officially unveiled the list of participating institutions—and the fact that each of the seven learning communities will receive roughly $8.6 million over 6 years. It has also doubled the original IE3 pot to $60 million.
In 2019, when HHMI first announced IE3, it asked applicants to pick one of three challenges facing undergraduate science: how to improve course content, how to boost the quality of teaching, and how to grow the pipeline by making it easier for students at community colleges to transfer to 4-year schools offering bachelor’s degrees. In addition, every participant needed to commit to improving the diversity of the student pool pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math training.
In January 2020, some 354 institutions told HHMI they planned to apply for a piece of a $30 million pot. But a few months later, the pandemic had shut down U.S. campuses and HHMI suspended the competition.
That’s when David Asai, HHMI’s education guru, decided to go in a different direction. “The pandemic gave us time to reflect,” Asai recalls. “And we decided that a competition is not all that well suited to achieving the changes that we would like to see.”
Asai is betting that institutions are more likely to sustain their commitment to improving undergraduate education after the HHMI grant ends if they are part of a larger consortium. “We wanted to create a community of schools that would hold themselves accountable rather than simply building a short-term, one-on-one relationship with HHMI,” he says.
So HHMI changed the format for selecting winners. After enlisting outside reviewers, Asai gave a thumbs-up to 108 of the schools that had expressed interest in IE3, raising the success rate from an expected 7% in the initial solicitation to a robust 30%. The list reflects the full range of U.S. higher education, including research powerhouses, community colleges, tribal colleges, minority-serving institutions, and those offering only online learning.
Asai then assigned the 104 schools that agreed to participate (four declined the offer) to one of seven “learning communities” based on their expressed interest in pursuing one of the three grand challenges. (Trogden and Clemson were put in a learning community focused on addressing the needs of transfer students.)
Making new friends
Adopting a team approach wasn’t HHMI’s only new wrinkle. Most academic consortia are made up of institutions that have chosen their partners. But Asai worried such familiarity could stifle innovation.
“I think that the outcomes might be better if you’re not just hanging out with your friends and with similar institutions,” he says. To avoid that, “Our assignments [into learning communities] were rather arbitrary—not by geography, and not by type of institution. We wanted to stimulate new connections, drawn from the full range of participating institutions.”
Sean Decatur, president of Kenyon College and chair of HHMI’s advisory committee on undergraduate and graduate education, praises HHMI for trying something new. “I’ve been really impressed with … HHMI’s willingness to think about these projects as experiments,” says Decatur, a biochemist who this month was named the next president of the American Museum of Natural History.
Kelly Neiles, a chemical education professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a member of a learning community focused on faculty training and assessment, says her colleagues appreciate the unusual terms of the award. “Having a funder give you that type of autonomy is unheard of,” she says. “But HHMI recognized that this is something that will be evolving over time, and that nobody knows what it will eventually look like.”
Some participants are “uncomfortable” with what they see as minimal guidance from HHMI, Neiles says. But she and other participants think that ambiguity is a strength.
“HHMI is trying to be disruptive, and that level of stress is intentional, to keep people from reverting to their old ways,” says chemist Susan Shadle, vice provost for undergraduate studies at Boise State University, which is in the same learning community as St. Mary’s. “If it were easy to increase excellence and inclusion, we’d have already done it.”
Asai, meanwhile, is already looking ahead to the next, and possibly final, round of IE awards. (The first two rounds funded a total of 57 institutions using the traditional model of making individual awards after a stiff competition.) “When we do this again, it’ll be a collaborative approach from the start,” he says. “We’ll tell schools that they must work together and ask them how they plan to do that.”
Fueled by the grant, each team is still deciding how to implement its plan. But most have already decided to divide their funds evenly among the member institutions, meaning each will get about $500,000 over the life of the grant. Although that is half of what individual schools would have received under the earlier format, several communities have also agreed to put some of their money into a common fund to pay for shared personnel and joint activities.
That approach should help keep the teams from splintering, Shadle says. “The learning community is a great vehicle for sharing best practices while recognizing the uniqueness of each institution,” she says. “The danger is that, once the money is passed out, we’ll go back to our corners as we would with a regular grant. But HHMI hopes we’ll continue to work as a team.”
Bridget Trogden thought she knew the drill for winning a research grant: Write a proposal with her colleagues at Clemson University, where she is a professor of engineering and science education; submit it to a funder; and then pray it beats out hundreds of worthy competitors for a handful of awards.
So Trogden was stunned when the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), one of the nation’s largest science philanthropies, informed her earlier this year— before she had even submitted a detailed proposal—that Clemson would be sharing in an $8.6 million grant for improving undergraduate science education. Clemson was already part of a network involving more than 100 of its competitors, but Trogden and her colleagues had assumed they would have to compete for funding.
“We were floored when they told us ahead of time that we were all going to be funded,” she says. “That was a whole new type of grantsmanship.”
Trogden was reacting to HHMI’s decision to substitute collaboration for competition in funding the third round of its high-profile program, called Inclusive Excellence 3 (IE3). It enticed 104 institutions, including Clemson, to work together in small “learning communities.” And it broke one of the cardinal rules in competitive grantmaking by choosing the winners before they had even submitted detailed proposals—and then allowing the winners to come up with a plan on how to spend the money.
On 30 November, HHMI officially unveiled the list of participating institutions—and the fact that each of the seven learning communities will receive roughly $8.6 million over 6 years. It has also doubled the original IE3 pot to $60 million.
In 2019, when HHMI first announced IE3, it asked applicants to pick one of three challenges facing undergraduate science: how to improve course content, how to boost the quality of teaching, and how to grow the pipeline by making it easier for students at community colleges to transfer to 4-year schools offering bachelor’s degrees. In addition, every participant needed to commit to improving the diversity of the student pool pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math training.
In January 2020, some 354 institutions told HHMI they planned to apply for a piece of a $30 million pot. But a few months later, the pandemic had shut down U.S. campuses and HHMI suspended the competition.
That’s when David Asai, HHMI’s education guru, decided to go in a different direction. “The pandemic gave us time to reflect,” Asai recalls. “And we decided that a competition is not all that well suited to achieving the changes that we would like to see.”
Asai is betting that institutions are more likely to sustain their commitment to improving undergraduate education after the HHMI grant ends if they are part of a larger consortium. “We wanted to create a community of schools that would hold themselves accountable rather than simply building a short-term, one-on-one relationship with HHMI,” he says.
So HHMI changed the format for selecting winners. After enlisting outside reviewers, Asai gave a thumbs-up to 108 of the schools that had expressed interest in IE3, raising the success rate from an expected 7% in the initial solicitation to a robust 30%. The list reflects the full range of U.S. higher education, including research powerhouses, community colleges, tribal colleges, minority-serving institutions, and those offering only online learning.
Asai then assigned the 104 schools that agreed to participate (four declined the offer) to one of seven “learning communities” based on their expressed interest in pursuing one of the three grand challenges. (Trogden and Clemson were put in a learning community focused on addressing the needs of transfer students.)
Making new friends
Adopting a team approach wasn’t HHMI’s only new wrinkle. Most academic consortia are made up of institutions that have chosen their partners. But Asai worried such familiarity could stifle innovation.
“I think that the outcomes might be better if you’re not just hanging out with your friends and with similar institutions,” he says. To avoid that, “Our assignments [into learning communities] were rather arbitrary—not by geography, and not by type of institution. We wanted to stimulate new connections, drawn from the full range of participating institutions.”
Sean Decatur, president of Kenyon College and chair of HHMI’s advisory committee on undergraduate and graduate education, praises HHMI for trying something new. “I’ve been really impressed with … HHMI’s willingness to think about these projects as experiments,” says Decatur, a biochemist who this month was named the next president of the American Museum of Natural History.
Kelly Neiles, a chemical education professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a member of a learning community focused on faculty training and assessment, says her colleagues appreciate the unusual terms of the award. “Having a funder give you that type of autonomy is unheard of,” she says. “But HHMI recognized that this is something that will be evolving over time, and that nobody knows what it will eventually look like.”
Some participants are “uncomfortable” with what they see as minimal guidance from HHMI, Neiles says. But she and other participants think that ambiguity is a strength.
“HHMI is trying to be disruptive, and that level of stress is intentional, to keep people from reverting to their old ways,” says chemist Susan Shadle, vice provost for undergraduate studies at Boise State University, which is in the same learning community as St. Mary’s. “If it were easy to increase excellence and inclusion, we’d have already done it.”
Asai, meanwhile, is already looking ahead to the next, and possibly final, round of IE awards. (The first two rounds funded a total of 57 institutions using the traditional model of making individual awards after a stiff competition.) “When we do this again, it’ll be a collaborative approach from the start,” he says. “We’ll tell schools that they must work together and ask them how they plan to do that.”
Fueled by the grant, each team is still deciding how to implement its plan. But most have already decided to divide their funds evenly among the member institutions, meaning each will get about $500,000 over the life of the grant. Although that is half of what individual schools would have received under the earlier format, several communities have also agreed to put some of their money into a common fund to pay for shared personnel and joint activities.
That approach should help keep the teams from splintering, Shadle says. “The learning community is a great vehicle for sharing best practices while recognizing the uniqueness of each institution,” she says. “The danger is that, once the money is passed out, we’ll go back to our corners as we would with a regular grant. But HHMI hopes we’ll continue to work as a team.”
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