Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan are teaming up once again to help bring more kids to college. The announcement, which was made on Tuesday, will be giving an undisclosed amount of wealth for this partnership.
Zuckerberg and his wife have created a philanthropic vehicle they called the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) where they funneled most of their wealth to worthy causes, such as science and technology innovations.
And now the latest, they are partnering with College Board, a non-profit which is responsible for many standardized test keys for college admission and preparation.
According to the announcement, it will be a two-year partnership to provide students with personalized learning pathways that will help them prepare better for college.
The project will focus more on low-income students and those who are in the rural areas. College Board CEO David Coleman called it the "Manhattan Project on academic motivation" because they will also underwrite research on student achievement and motivation focusing more on praising the student's effort rather than their intelligence.
The partnership seems to be the next logical step after SAT was revamped in 2014 making it more than just an aptitude test to something that accurately tracks what students learn so they can work on the areas they need to improve.
Moreover, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative builds on an earlier collaboration with Khan Academy in 2014 which provides free SAT preparations for students. College Board released a data earlier this year indicating that students who spent 20 hours of SAT practice on Khan Academy showed an average score gain of 115 points.
Meanwhile, when asked how much the couple is giving away for the project, CZI's Jim Shelton did not disclose anything but emphasized that it is one of the most significant projects of the initiative. Coleman, on the other hand, referred to it as a multi-million dollar grant.
