Sloan Foundation
"The greatest real thrill that life offers is to create, to construct, to develop something useful. Too often we fail to recognize and pay tribute to the creative spirit. It is that spirit that creates our jobs. There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different."
-Alfred P. Sloan Jr., 1941
By any measure, higher education is an enormous enterprise in the United States. It encompasses about 2,100 four-year colleges and universities and 1,500 two-year colleges. These enroll more than 15 million students, including 2 million in graduate and professional schools. Faculty number about 900,000 and the institutions grant more than 2 million degrees annually. The plant of American higher education is valued at more than $200 billion.
In recent years, numerous leaders in higher education and research have expressed concerns about how individual institutions and the sector as a whole can best adapt to changing times. Concerns include the basic purposes of the institutions, their cost-effectiveness and productivity, particularly in times of diminished growth. How can individual institutions explain, evaluate, and improve their performance? Could the United States use something quite different from the current set of qualifications and graduates? What adjustments in the individual institutions and the set of institutions might be feasible and beneficial?
In 1934, Alfred P. Sloan Jr. established the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a non-profit institution, as a way to extend beyond his lifetime the philanthropic activities that were of importance to him. Virtual U is a critical component of a Sloan initiative entitled "The University as a System and the System of Universities," and serves as a powerful means to improve understanding of the intricacies of university management.
Drawing on actual data about American higher education and the best available research, the primary objectives of the Sloan initiative are to advance the understanding of managing a university system and to educate higher education administrators on new management tactics and strategies.
The Sloan Foundation focuses on science, technology, and the health of American industries, and is also the primary source of funding behind the creation of Virtual U.
The programs and interests of the Sloan Foundation cover three main areas:
- Support of Science and Technology
- Studies of US Standard of Living and Economic Performance
- Education and Careers in Science and Technology
Among the well-known results of the Foundation's recent grants are:
- PBS documentaries including, "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", "Nerds 2.01: A Brief History of the Internet," and "The Wizard of Photography" about Kodak Founder, George Eastman
- Books about science and industry including Jonathan Weiner's Time, Love, Memory, which received the 2000 National Book Critics Award for general nonfiction, and Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter
- The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), which the Foundation helped initiate with $3 million in support
- Major research programs, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is providing a three-dimensional database of one million galaxies and 100,000 quasars, and the Census of Marine Life, which aims to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the world's oceans.
|
