Philanthropy as a Catalyst for Higher Ed Innovation
Some of the most important challenges in higher education are also the hardest to solve through traditional philanthropy. Expanding access through technology innovations, supporting learner pathways at every stage and context, and building stronger connections between education and work all require institutions to take thoughtful risks. Yet budgets are often meant to sustain existing operations, not to fund experimentation whose impact may take time to prove.
This is where philanthropy can play a distinctive role with social risk capital: funding that allows mission-driven institutions to explore promising ideas, move faster on urgent needs and build evidence for approaches that can eventually reach many more people.
Philanthropic investors increasingly want to understand not only what their gifts support, but what becomes possible because they give. At WGU, we feel one of the most pressing needs is innovation focused on removing barriers and expanding opportunities for learners. Working adults, low-income learners, caregivers, rural students and people changing careers may face barriers that are not solved by tuition support alone. They may need emergency assistance, technology, or mentoring to build the social capital needed to persist.
Nursing Talent Pipeline Funding
For example, DeLuca Philanthropy invested $15.5 million in WGU to expand nursing education and address the urgent national nursing shortage. They provided the catalyst funding of $10 million needed to test out a new innovative funding model — the ReNEW Fund — which helped 658 aspiring nurses overcome financial hardships in FY26 while creating a sustainable talent pipeline for employers. An additional $5.5 million established the DeLuca WGU Clinical Learning and Simulation Center in Orlando, increasing WGU's capacity to prepare practice-ready nurses through immersive clinical training. Student demand is well-proven, but scaling it requires additional employer partners and philanthropic support.
Why Early-Stage Ideas Need Capital
Philanthropy can be especially valuable at the early stages of an idea. Institutions may see a need but lack the resources to test a solution on a meaningful scale. A philanthropic investment can create space to pilot an approach, gather data, learn what works, and improve the model before broader adoption.
Coming from a long career in tech, I know that pilots can include the possibility of failure. While I have seen first-hand what investing in innovation can do at scale, I also know that for innovation to thrive, you can’t guarantee that every first attempt will succeed. Like tech, higher education doesn't suffer from a shortage of ideas; it suffers from a shortage of resources that can be deployed against ideas before their outcomes are certain. Donors who understand that can become true partners in learning because they are focused on the outcomes, not the activity.
What Donors Are Asking For
When I speak with donors, the recurring themes I hear are “I want to hear from the students. I want to hear how this is impacting their lives. I want to talk to them about what this has enabled them to do.” Those conversations may start with funding a program or idea, but at their core, they are really about solving societal and national problems together.
Helping one learner complete a degree can strengthen a household, improve an employer's talent pipeline, and contribute to a community's economic resilience. When philanthropy supports scalable approaches, the impact extends far beyond the initial recipient.
That is one reason I believe fundraising and institutional strategy must be closely connected. Donors should not be presented with a collection of disconnected funding opportunities. They should be invited into the toughest challenges an institution is trying to solve. The strongest philanthropic partnerships begin with shared purpose: Here is the problem. Here is what we believe could change it. Here is what we need to learn. Here is the difference success could make.
Proof at Scale: Achievement Wallet
An example is the WGU Achievement Wallet, initially funded in part by Walmart and Lilly Endowment, which enabled 140,000+ students last year to document verified skills alongside traditional credentials, making their capabilities more visible to employers. The platform documented more than 1.7 million verified skills and students translated their experience into 38,057 résumés, helping connect competencies with career opportunities. That’s impact at scale.
Higher education is under pressure to become more affordable, more responsive, and more clearly connected to economic and social opportunities. If you think about it, these are similar attributes to what many have long expected of technology companies. Those expectations should push institutions to innovate, but innovation requires resources that can absorb uncertainty and support learning before a model is proven.
Achievement Wallet: One Year In
Philanthropy can provide that capacity. It can help an institution move from a promising idea to a tested solution, from a personal intervention to a scalable model and from an identified barrier to a new pathway for learners.
This is where a gift can have an outsized impact: not sustaining what exists but building what should exist next.
That is the promise of catalytic philanthropy in higher education: the ability to move faster and think bigger in service of learners whose potential should never be limited by the design of the existing systems around them.
