Career Development at the Foundation: Keeping Sight of the People Carrying Out the Work

When the William T. Grant Scholars award began in 1982, Foundation staff were concerned that declining federal funding for research would make it harder for early-career scholars to launch their careers.1 Initially called the Faculty Scholars Program, the award was a way to combat this concern by providing early-career researchers with five years of funding and support to expand their skills and produce meaningful research that holds potential to improve youth outcomes.

Since then, career development has remained a cornerstone of the Foundation’s approach to grantmaking. This interest in providing funding that supports career development among researchers has expanded to include the Mentoring grants and the Early-Career Reviewer program. Piloted in 2005 as a supplement to the William T. Grant Scholars award, the Mentoring grants support principal investigators’ development as mentors to junior researchers of color. The Early-Career Reviewer program, which launched in 2021, supports researchers’ ability to provide high-quality assessments of grant applications in the Foundation’s focus area on improving the use of research evidence.

We periodically review our career development grantmaking programs to assess whether they are achieving their aims and how they may be strengthened. For instance, we reviewed the Mentoring program in 2008 and 2015. Recommendations to strengthen the program included developing better guidance for interested applicants, creating written resources that document best practices for effective mentoring relationships, providing more in-person opportunities for mentors and mentees to reflect on their progress, and expanding the pool of eligible applicants to include major grant principal investigators as well as William T. Grant Scholars.

In 2023, we sought to review the Foundation’s career development efforts from a different vantage point. Instead of orienting this review around a particular grant program, we aimed to take a cross-cutting perspective by analyzing how and where themes of career development emerge across our grantmaking.

The review answered four main questions:

1. How does the Foundation define and support career development?
2. How do the Foundation’s efforts compare to other grant makers?
3. How do our career development offerings complement university efforts?
4. How does career development support the Foundation’s goals?

The review used various data sources, including grant award data, application guides, annual progress reports, literature reviews, comparisons with other career development awards, and discussions with academic leaders and grantees.

This essay provides an overview of what we learned and our plans to expand upon career development investments at the Foundation. In sharing these details, we anticipate applicants and grantees will have a deeper appreciation for how we aim to support their development. Because it provides a window into a peer organization’s processes, we expect fellow funders will find this essay of interest too.

How does the Foundation define and support career development?

Staff wanted to gain common language from this review. This way, when using the term “career development,” we would be sure that we were talking about the same set of activities. A common understanding is helpful in evaluating whether proposed work advances the types of career development the Foundation intends to encourage.

We arrived at a multifaceted definition of career development after careful review of the application guides, progress report narratives from grantees, and discretionary funding grant applications. These ideas were then intersected and triangulated with relevant research and theory on career development.

As public facing documents, our application guides highlight the Foundation’s philosophy on how grantmaking enables scholars to expand their expertise. The Scholars application guide calls attention to the role of grantmaking in providing opportunities for investigators to take measured risks in their research and expand expertise in new disciplines, methods, and content areas. The Mentoring application guide focuses on the way grantmaking can contribute to greater facility in supporting junior researchers of color.

The annual progress reports offer cases of how grantees increased their ability to become more proficient at problem solving research and relational dilemmas. Whether it was addressing challenges associated with study recruitment or adjusting performance expectations for a mentee, grantees expanded their capacity to solve issues that emerge around research and relationships.

We came to understand the major influence that the Foundation’s discretionary grantmaking—Officers Discretionary Grants and capacity-building and communication grants—has on career exploration by defraying the cost to participate in programs that form community around research careers and topics. For example, a grant to the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) for their Undergraduate Scholars Program funded room, board, and travel expenses for undergraduates to attend the biennial meeting and interact with designated junior and senior mentors during the meeting.

Because we prioritize funding efforts that plan to actively engage scholars of color, these discretionary grants support career exploration among populations that have been historically excluded from higher education opportunities. For example, the SRA Undergraduate Scholars Program maintains a goal of encouraging talented ethnic and racial minority undergraduate students to seek graduate training and pursue research careers in adolescent development.

To the extent that external funding can allow faculty to devote more time to research, grant seeking is an important component of career development.

We placed the information gained from reviewing our internal materials alongside the peer-reviewed literature on career development and mentoring to ground a definition. For instance, Zacher et al., defined career development as:

…the process by which employers as well as scholars working in research, teaching, and/or administrative roles in academic and higher education contexts manage various tasks, behaviors, and experiences within and across jobs and organizations over time, with implications for scholars’ work-related identity. (2019, p. 357) .

The authors also note that career development refers to “how individual and contextual factors influence changes in people’s careers over time.” (Zacher et al., 2019, p. 357)

Incorporating evidence-based perspectives on career development allowed staff to contemplate grantmaking as a contextual factor that influences people’s careers. With this understanding, we came to define career development as the process by which grantmaking enables scholars to expand their expertise, increase their capacity to identify solutions for research and relational dilemmas, and sustain an interest in research careers among junior scholars from groups that were historically excluded from higher education opportunities.

How do the Foundation’s career development efforts compare to other sponsored awards?

This review provided the opportunity to understand how the Scholars award fares in comparison to awards sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), and the Foundation for Child Development (FCD). Each foundation sponsors a multi-year award that provides significant funding for early career researchers.

Starting with the eligibility criteria for these awards, several foundations, including William T. Grant, focus on how many years have passed since an applicant earned their doctorate or completed their first medical residency. The Foundation for Child Development and the National Institutes of Health do this. The FCD’s Young Scholars Program (YSP) has a 10-year eligibility window. Eligibility to NIH K01 Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award varies per directorate but centers how much time has passed too. Some directorates have a 5-year limit, and some have a 7-year limit, and, notably, the National Institute on Aging has no limit. The National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program limits applications to those who’ve yet to earn tenure. When you consider that most tenure clocks are 6 years long, then the Scholar award 7-year limit compares well here too.

When it comes to the duration of the award, again the Scholars award compares quite well to other grants. Five years is typical for these career development awards including many of the NIH’s and the NSF’s award. The Scholars award provides more years of funding than the FCD (2–3 years) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Harold Amos Faculty Development Program (4 years).

The grant amount is where the Scholars award has compared less well to what other funders offer. At $350,000 over five years, the Scholars program has provided less funding than the four multiyear grants that serve a similar purpose. The NSF’s CAREER program provides a minimum of $400,000 for 5 years; the NIH’s K program provides a minimum of $525,000 for 5 years; the RWJF’s Harold Amos program provides $420,000 for 4 years.2 The FCD’s program provides $225,000 for primary data collection and $180,000 for secondary data collection. These figures appear lower than the Scholars, yet differences in grant duration can result in a higher level of funding per year for Foundation for Child Development grantees.

Equipped with these figures, in October 2024 staff proposed to the Foundation’s Board of Trustees an increase of $75,000 in the Scholars Award amount. This would bring the total award amount to $425,000 and would represent the first increase in the award since 2006. We are happy to report that the Board approved this request and those who receive the award in 2025 will be the first to benefit from this change.

Comparing grants also highlighted that at least one funder, the FCD, supports a small number of unsuccessful applicants in their efforts to re-apply to a career development award. A few finalists in the Young Scholars Program competition who do not receive the grant are designated as Promising Scholars Program participants. They receive $15,000 for 1 year and are provided resources to assist in refining their research skills. They are expected to reapply to the YSP in a future cycle.

Most foundations do not provide this type of support to unsuccessful applicants; however, this is an area where we plan to experiment. Given budgetary constraints, we do not plan to provide funding to support reapplying to the Scholars program. Instead, we intend to explore staff-led efforts to support reapplication. Our goal in doing so is to increase awareness of the Scholars program’s goals. We expect these resources will position re-applicants to better align their proposals with the program’s aims, particularly those that support career development.

How do the Foundation’s career development activities relate to campus led efforts?

Most of our grantees work at colleges or universities. The review provided an opportunity to learn how our grantmaking helps faculty meet campus defined career markers and how our support works in conjunction with campus led development activities. I spoke with academic and research deans, as well as department and program chairs. These campus leaders represented Carnegie classified3 Very High Research Activity institutions (R1), High Research Activity (R2), and Master’s Colleges and Universities.

All the university leaders who spoke with me identified career development as an important activity at their institutions. Each person provided specific examples of how their college or university supports career development. Activities range from hosting grant writing workshops, to facilitating membership to the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity, to connecting junior faculty with mentors, to internal grant competitions to spur research productivity.

Though no one offered a definition of “career development” during these conversations, these activities fit the contours of the one we’ve developed. We anchored our definition to grantmaking, yet the core components—expanding expertise, increasing capacity to problem solve, and sustaining interest in research careers—certainly applied to the examples of campus career development efforts noted above.

These conversations highlighted the ways that foundation funding enhances people’s ability to conduct research. All my conversation partners noted the role of research productivity in meeting career milestones, most notably tenure. To the extent that external funding can allow faculty to devote more time to research, grant seeking is an important component of career development.

At the same time, these conversations surfaced challenges that faculty working at Carnegie classified High Research Activity (R2) institutions, Doctoral Universities, and Master’s Colleges and Universities face when trying to secure external funding. A robust infrastructure that supports seeking external research funding or administering external funding once secured is not present on all campuses.

The goal may be to fund high-quality research, but we should never lose sight of the people carrying out the work and how securing funding fits within the larger context of their careers.

While addressing campus grant infrastructures is outside the scope of the Foundation’s work, these conversations did spur an analysis of how institutions move through the Scholars application cycle. We found that all applicants working at Carnegie classified Doctoral- and Master’s-level institutions were declined at staff review stage, as were half the applicants working at High Research Activity institutions (R2). Staff issues most declines at this stage due to lack of fit with the Foundation’s interests and/or lack of clarity that the grant would support career development.

With this data in hand, we will explore ways to better support application submissions from researchers working in these institutional types. Our goals here will be to increase awareness of the funding priorities and what distinguishes a Scholars award from a typical research grant.

How do the Foundation’s career development efforts support the two funding priorities?

The William T. Grant Foundation has two focus areas:

The Reducing Inequality focus was launched in 2014. The defining feature of this initiative is a focus on responses to inequality, not its causes or consequences. We support studies that help to understand how programs, policies, and practices reduce inequality in outcomes among young people in the United States.

The Use of Research Evidence focus was launched in 2008 and refocused in 2015. The defining feature of this initiative is its focus on strategies to improve the use of research evidence, not on the barrier to use. We support studies that help us understand how to create the conditions that improve the production and use of research evidence in ways that benefit youth.

Reviews of the Scholars annual progress reports and survey assessments of the Early-Career Reviewer program helped us understand these career development efforts’ contributions to reducing inequality and improving the use of research evidence respectively.4

Scholars Program

Reviewing the Scholars annual progress reports revealed three ways that these grantees’ work supports the reducing inequality priority area: contributing to relevant literatures, building intellectual communities, and spurring research-practice partnerships.

Contributing to relevant literatures
The Scholars program assembles diverse grantees in each cohort. Consequently, as a career development effort, the program has seeded the expansion of the knowledge base in a wide variety of fields including education, e.g., Laura Hamilton (2016), Jacob Hibel (2016), and Parag Pathak (2015); family studies, e.g., Laura Tach (2015); criminal justice, e.g., Kristen Turney (2016); and adolescent reproductive health, e.g., Julie Maslowsky (2017), to name just a few .

Building intellectual communities
Several grantees fostered connections among like-minded scholars to sustain their research pursuits. Laura Tach founded Cornell Project 2Gen, a hub for research on vulnerable children and their caregivers. Laura Hamilton created the HERE Lab to address disparities in higher education and the economy.

The Foundation cannot fund everyone whose research aligns with the reducing inequality area. Yet, through these intellectual communities, those who have received funding play an important role in expanding the Foundation’s reach. These communities bring energy and attention to questions and methods aligned with producing insights into reducing inequality. While not as direct as funding a study, the presence of these communities suggests that the Foundation’s early-career investments contribute to expanding the reducing inequality knowledge base indirectly, too.

Spurring research-practice partnerships

The Foundation defines research-practice partnerships as “long-term, mutually beneficial collaborations that promote the production and use of research” in ways that benefit youth (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013).

Research-practice partnerships can improve both the relevance of research produced by Scholars and the use of research by those working in youth-serving settings. Partnerships provide youth-serving organizations with knowledge and tools that equip them to better serve youth in ways that can reduce inequality.

As they conducted their projects, several Scholars began to partner with practitioners to produce relevant and actionable research. For example, Parag Pathak partnered with New York City Department of Education, as well as Boston, Denver, and Chicago Public Schools, on school choice and student assignment algorithms.

Early-Career Reviewer Program

The Early-Career Reviewer program recruits early-career researchers to serve as peer reviewers for grants submitted to the Improving the Use of Research Evidence portfolio. Participants receive feedback from Foundation program officers and gain access to the reviews prepared by senior external reviewers.

Reviewing program assessments highlights how the program increases the number of researchers capable of submitting high-quality applications to the focus area. Participants noted that the program was most valuable for providing a glimpse into what makes for a successful grant application. Two participants noted that they had applied for funding unsuccessfully before becoming early-career reviewers. Completing the program encouraged them to apply again with a stronger application. One received an Officers’ research grant after completing the program. Another participant who had not applied prior to becoming a reviewer noted that gaining insight into what the Foundation looks for in applications was extremely helpful. This participant went on to apply for and receive an Officers’ research grant.

In this way, the program contributes to the future knowledge base of the use of research evidence. Given the relative newness of this program, it’s not yet possible to point to specific contributions to the literature in the ways discussed for the reducing inequality priority area. However, these are clear signs that the program is creating a context to add to what is known about the conditions that improve the use of research evidence in youth-serving settings.

Conclusion

In the forty-three years since the Scholars program began, career development has remained a core principle at the William T. Grant Foundation. We plan to continue in this spirit for years to come.

We hope this review has shown prospective applicants and current grantees how the Foundation aims to support their careers. From the point of application through the post-award review process, we seek to ensure that all who interact with the Foundation receive guidance and feedback that will move their research forward. We organize the application review process to prioritize developmental feedback at every stage of evaluation. This extends beyond the specific career development grants to the research grants portfolio as well. For instance, senior program team members refer prospective research grantees with promising letters of inquiry and proposals to statistical and methodological consultations during the application review process when appropriate. Once a grant is awarded, senior program staff organize additional developmental opportunities including workshops and convenings to provide grantees with the opportunities to learn from experts and build supportive communities.

We also hope this review encourages funders to pause and reflect on how their grantmaking supports careers. The goal may be to fund high-quality research, but we should never lose sight of the people carrying out the work and how securing funding fits within the larger context of their careers. Supporting grantee development is not only critical for producing research that furthers a Foundation’s aims, but also to assist grantees as they seek to build meaningful careers that will last beyond time limited research funding of a given project.