The Goodgrant Challenge

Background:

The Goodgrant Foundation is a charitable organization that wants to help improve educational performance of undergraduates attending colleges and universities in the United States. To do this, the foundation intends to donate a total of $100,000,000 (US100 million) to an appropriate group of schools per year, for five years, starting July 2016. In doing so, they do not want to duplicate the investments and focus of other large grant organizations such as the Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

Your team has been asked by the Goodgrant Foundation to develop a model to determine an optimal investment strategy that identifies the schools, the investment amount per school, the return on that investment, and the time duration that the organization's money should be provided to have the highest likelihood of producing a strong positive effect on student performance. This strategy should contain a 1 to N optimized and prioritized candidate list of schools you are recommending for investment based on each candidate school’s demonstrated potential for effective use of private funding, and an estimated return on investment (ROI) defined in a manner appropriate for a charitable organization such as the Goodgrant Foundation.