Higher Education's Role in Social Impact
Worth the Read: The Future of Higher Education Is Social Impact
While our U.S. education system has extended the reach outside our own domestic borders, our Higher Education system can and should play a more engaged role in leveraging the billions of academic spend to combat poverty and securing a better life for many of the poorest communities in the world. In a rapidly increasing environment where Impact Investing is playing a meaningful role in funding social entrepreneurs developing innovative business models that blend traditional capitalism with Impact-based funding, Higher Education too has an equal role to play, especially in educating abject poverty nations.
Amidst these rapidly evolving models for social impact, imagine a world where our public education system can work collaboratively with local communities, developing innovative and life changing education delivery models with governments, businesses, NGO’s, and philanthropy in an attempt to eradicate poverty in the poorest of communities. Now, more than ever, U.S. Higher Education has the greatest chance of scaling business models that deploy a combination of on ground human capital and technology and enabled solutions in ways never seen or accomplished.
Extreme poverty is a generational affliction. The same persistence in educating and supporting students in the U.S. can be modified and applied in ways that target marginalized and poor populations bringing radical change to the complex and systemic issues found in remote communities across the globe. We need to develop a more acute sense responsibility in developing solutions that contributed to lifting up abject poverty communities to drive long term economic development. Equity in education, very clearly, can be a means to an end to restrain poverty between generations. Consider the following facts from the Global Partnership for Education;
171 million people could be lifted out of extreme poverty if all children left school with basic reading skills. That’s equivalent to a 12% drop in the world total.
Education increases earnings by roughly 10% per each additional year of schooling.
For each $1 invested in an additional year of schooling earnings increase by $5 in low-income countries and $2.5 in lower-middle income countries.
If workers from poor and rich backgrounds received the same education, disparity between the two in working poverty could decrease by 39%.
In 2050, GDP per capita in low-income countries would be almost 70% lower than it would be if all children were learning.
Of equal importance is our education systems responsibility in taking a broader approach to social impact education, while also making it accessible and inclusive.
The time has come for our U.S. Higher Education systems to take an active role well beyond the boundaries emerging markets into those communities most in need. We have in our grasp today the necessary assets, human capital and design imperative in ways true social impact to the poorest of poor, can be radically advanced.
Let's do this