Since its founding, the Carnegie Corporation has endowed or otherwise helped establish institutions including the United States National Research Council, Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (formerly known as the Russian Research Center),[3] the Carnegie libraries, the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, and the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop).

[8] His vision for adult education drew from both Victorian values of character as well as democratic ideals of freedom of thought and reasoning.

His theory that this task should be done by someone unencumbered by traditional attitudes or earlier conclusions led to Myrdal's widely heralded book American Dilemma (1944).

"[11] The report sought, in part, to forestall the historically inevitable accession of a communal, class based, democratic socialist movement aimed at uniting the poor of each race in common cause and brotherhood.

The corporation determined that the U.S. increasingly needed policy and scholarly expertise in international affairs, and so tied into area studies programs at colleges and universities as well as the Ford Foundation.

During Gardner's time in office the Carnegie Corporation worked to upgrade academic competence in foreign area studies and strengthened its liberal arts education program.

In the early 1960s it inaugurated a continuing education program and funded development of new models for advanced and professional study by mature women.

The corporation sought out projects that would produce knowledge leading to useful results, communicated to decision-makers, the public, and the media, in order to foster policy debate.

[17] The corporation considered itself a trendsetter in philanthropy, often funding research or providing seed money for ideas while others financed more costly operations.

[18] A foundation's most precious asset was its sense of direction, Gardner said,[19] gathering a competent professional staff of generalists that he called his "cabinet of strategy," and regarded as a resource as important to the corporation as its endowment.

While Gardner's opinion of educational equality was to multiply the channels through which an individual could pursue opportunity, it was during the term of long-time staff member Alan Pifer, who became acting president during 1965 and president during 1967 (again of both Carnegie Corporation and the CFAT), that the foundation began to respond to claims by various groups, including women, for increased power and wealth.

Grants were made to reform state government as the laboratories of democracy, underwrite voter education drives, and mobilize youth to vote, among other measures.

Many other reports on US education the corporation financed at this time, included Charles E. Silberman's acclaimed Crisis in the Classroom (1971), and the controversial Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America by Christopher Jencks (1973).

At the University of Cape Town, it established the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa, this time to examine the legacies of apartheid and make recommendations to nongovernmental organizations for actions commensurate with the long-run goal of achieving a democratic, interracial society.

In its more than ninety reports, the commission made detailed suggestions for introducing more flexibility into the structure and financing of higher education.

One outgrowth of the commission's work was creation of the federal Pell grants program offering tuition assistance for needy college students.

David A. Hamburg, a physician, educator, and scientist with a public health background, became president in 1982 intending to mobilize the best scientific and scholarly talent and thinking on "prevention of rotten outcomes" - from early childhood to international relations.

Its major publication, A Nation Prepared (1986), reaffirmed the role of the teacher as the "best hope" for quality in elementary and secondary education.

After the end of the USSR, corporation grants helped promote the concept of cooperative security among erstwhile adversaries and projects to build democratic institutions in the former Soviet Union and Central Europe.

[25] More recently, the corporation addressed interethnic and regional conflict and funded projects seeking to diminish the risks of a wider war resulting from civil strife.

The corporation's emphasis in Commonwealth Africa, meanwhile, shifted to women's health and political development and the application of science and technology, including new information systems, to foster research and expertise in indigenous scientific institutions and universities.

The corporation increasingly used its convening powers to bring together experts across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries to create policy consensus and promote collaboration.

Continuing tradition, the foundation established several other major study groups, often directed by the president and managed by a special staff.

Jointly with the Rockefeller Foundation, the corporation financed the National Commission on Teaching & America's Future, whose report, What Matters Most (1996), provided a framework and agenda for U.S. teacher education reform.

These study groups drew on knowledge generated by grant programs and inspired follow-up grantmaking to implement their recommendations.

Abroad, the corporation sought to devise methods to strengthen higher education and public libraries in Sub Saharan Africa.