Educational Credit Management Corporation (ECMC) Foundation

The ECMC Foundation is the charitable arm of the ECMC Group, a Minneapolis-based non-profit corporation that provides financial services to students, including loan guarantees and loan default prevention. ² With $797 million in net assets for the 2020 fiscal year, the ECMC Foundation is one of the largest funders of postsecondary career education in the country. ¹

History and Leadership

Founded in 2000, the Educational Credit Management Corporation Foundation initially provided student scholarships. In 2013, the board of directors of the foundation’s parent company, the ECMC Group, voted to make it a grantmaking organization. ³

In 2014, the ECMC Foundation hired Peter J. Taylor, a controversial former Wall Street banker and member of the University of California (UC) Board of Regents, to lead the foundation in its new direction as a grantmaking organization. ¹

Taylor previously served as a municipal finance banker for the failed investment bank Lehman Brothers, at which time he was also an alumni representative on the University of California Board of Regents and a board member of the UCLA Foundation. Following the financial crash in 2008, the UC Board of Regents paid Taylor $400,000 a year to serve in a new chief financial officer position, in which he oversaw increased borrowing activity. ⁴ In this position, Taylor became a source of controversy when he oversaw financial rate swaps that failed to pay off, causing the University of California to lose tens of millions of dollars and see its debt tripled. ⁵

Grantmaking Activity

After becoming a grantmaking organization in 2013, the ECMC Foundation has made more than $200 million in grants. ¹

While most of its grants are issued through an open application process, some of its grants are part of programmatic initiatives set by the ECMC Foundation, such as its Basic Needs Initiative, which was launched in 2019 to address issues affecting lower-income students such as food and housing security, childcare, mental health, financial assistance and transportation. The Basic Needs Initiative included $3.1 million in grants over three years to a range of organizations. ⁶

Examples of ECMC Foundation grants in 2021 include a grant in February of up to $27,500 to the American Association of Community Colleges to fund partnerships between community and four-year colleges to create transfer pathways that increase transfer opportunities for minority and low-income student populations. ⁷

In March 2021, the ECMC Foundation granted $1.125 million to the American Indian College Fund to finance two programs at tribal colleges in North Dakota and Montana. The grant is intended to support Native American students seeking careers in healthcare and education. ⁸

This was followed in June by a $5 million grant to City Year AmeriCorps, enabling it to place 230 AmeriCorps student counselors in low-income elementary and middle schools across Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, Sacramento, San José, Seattle and Washington, D.C. to address what City Year describes as “educational inequities that have been magnified by the pandemic.” This followed a similar $5 million grant the year prior. ⁹

In August 2021, the ECMC Foundation granted $1.2 million to the for-profit Association of Community College Trustees and Education Strategy Group to help community colleges create more pathways for students to gain credits in fields where well-paying jobs are growing. ¹⁰

August of the same year, the ECMC Foundation granted $560,111 to Georgia State University’s new National Institute for Student Success, which is intended to boost graduation rates for minority students and “eliminate equity gaps based on race, ethnicity and income level.” ¹¹