Stoking Competition: Background on Grant Programs in Higher Education
The federal government invests over $130 billion annually in higher education through Pell Grants, student loans, tax benefits for students and their families, and other forms of student aid. But relative to those benefits for students, it provides relatively little aid directly to institutions, and even less to colleges to help support implementing and evaluating evidence-based interventions.
Two of the federal government’s largest investments in college, the TRIO and GEAR UP programs, are designed to motivate and assist low-income students and students of color in enrolling in and completing college, with more than $1.4 billion in annual funds. Together, these programs form a patchwork of hundreds of individual grantees working toward similar goals, but often in different ways, with few opportunities to learn and share which strategies are most effective and for which populations.
The Education Department also provides funding directly to minority-serving colleges and universities through an array of formula and competitive-grant programs. Those programs—all of which allow colleges to use the funding to serve students directly—participate in maintenance activities, and even build their endowments, are designed to increase institutional capacity more than necessarily improve student outcomes. These include funding for historically Black colleges and universities; predominantly Black institutions; Hispanic-serving institutions; tribal colleges or universities; Native American-serving nontribal institutions; Alaska Native-serving institutions or Native Hawaiian-serving institutions; and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions.
Finally, Congress funded two years of the Obama administration’s “First in the World” program—an evidence-based, tiered grant competition focused on improving college completion. It offered grants to seed innovations, replicate promising practices, and evaluate their effectiveness, with proven interventions eligible for the largest grants. Unfortunately, Congress stopped funding the program after only two competitions, and it was never codified into the Higher Education Act, so the Department’s efforts to promote evidence-based innovation and evaluation in higher education through the program have gone largely dormant.
College Access Across the Nation
TRIO
TRIO, included in the original Higher Education Act in 1965, represents the federal government’s oldest investment in ensuring disadvantaged students are prepared for, and have access to, higher education. As the name suggests, the TRIO umbrella originally covered three separate programs: Upward Bound (which was formed the year before the HEA was signed into law, in 1964), Talent Search, and Student Support Services (added in 1968). Today, it includes seven programs, each with different but overlapping purposes, audiences, and funding levels.
Talent Search: Primarily serves disadvantaged students in high school and provides tutoring and financial counseling to help them enroll in college after graduating. It serves over 300,000 students each year through more than 470 grantees, close to 20 percent of which are in nonprofit or other non-college organizations. A relatively low-touch program, the federal government spends only about $511 per student receiving services through the program.
Upward Bound: Works in high schools to provide many of the same services as Talent Search, but also may offer on-campus residential programs over the summer or work-study jobs. It serves about 70,000 students each year, and the federal cost per student is almost 10 times that of Talent Search, at $5,014 per student receiving services.
Veterans Upward Bound: Although this program offers many of the same services as Upward Bound (like tutoring, academic counseling, and financial advising), it does so for the narrower population of veterans seeking to enroll in higher education. Annually, grantees provide services to about 8,150 veterans, at a price to the federal government of about $2,254 per veteran served.
Upward Bound Math and Science: Establishes centers around math and science to encourage high school students to pursue higher education in STEM programs. It is much smaller than the Upward Bound program, serving about 13,000 students per year, but provides services at a comparable price, $5,134 per student served.
Educational Opportunity Centers: This is perhaps the lowest-touch TRIO program, designed to provide college counseling and other information about enrolling in higher education to those in a community rather than serving a particular cohort of students. While its reach is large, serving nearly 200,000 students each year, its intensity is low and costs the federal government only about $267 per student.
Student Support Services: Serves students already enrolled in college to increase their chances of returning to school and graduating, through tutoring, counseling, financial assistance (provided the college ensures a one-third match of any federal dollars spent on grants to students), and other services and programs. While most grants across all TRIO programs go to colleges, all Student Support Services grants do. The program serves more than 200,000 students per year at an average federal price of $1,590 per student.
McNair: Provides undergraduate students with research opportunities, counseling, and tutoring to help them prepare for doctoral programs, as the only TRIO program focused exclusively on preparing students for graduate studies. It is the smallest TRIO program, serving only around 5,200 students each year, but in part due to expensive services and travel costs, it is also the most expensive per student, at $9,133 per participant, on average.
GEAR UP
Whereas TRIO programs typically serve students for only a year before identifying a new round of students, GEAR UP grantees typically identify a cohort of students in middle school and continue to serve them for six years, sometimes also offering a seventh year of grant services during their first year of college. Grantees provide college preparation services like tutoring and counseling, and financial aid assistance including, in some cases, college scholarships. The Department awards GEAR UP dollars to two types of grantees: partnerships of colleges, school districts, and other stakeholders, which must provide college preparation services to whole cohorts students while they are in school; and states, which unlike partnership grantees, are required to provide scholarships unless they receive waivers (as more than half of state grantees had in 2005).1 GEAR UP state grantees also have authority to use their funds to provide technical assistance to partnership grantees, offer professional development, and disseminate research and best practices to grantees and schools, among other things.
In short, the federal government has a number of avenues that policymakers can use to test practices to see if they improve students’ chances of success and encourage colleges and their partners to engage with research-driven reform. In fact, the Obama administration took steps to incorporate evidence as small, optional components of each of these programs.2 Despite a mixed response from some grantees, it succeeded in persuading the vast majority of them to adopt evidence-based protocols. According to a Pell Institute report that cited Department of Education data, in the 2015 Student Support Services competition, 95 percent of applicants addressed the evidence priorities the Department included (which asked grantees to propose interventions backed by research at varying levels of rigor), and 77 percent won the full six points possible under those priorities.3
TRIO Programs
With more than 50 years under the belts of several of the TRIO programs, the federal government still does not have a firm grasp of how well its grantees are performing. A study of Talent Search published in 2006 found that participating students across three states were more likely to enroll in college;4 but there is only a thin body of research, and evidence is mixed for the effectiveness of the grants, making it difficult to contextualize what we do know about grantees’ performance. A study of Upward Bound programs conducted over the course of nearly 20 years found that the average participant was no more likely to enroll in college than those in a control group.5 And a 20-year study of Student Support Services released in 2010 found no statistically significant differences in persistence rates, transfer rates to four-year colleges, or completion rates between participating students and non-participating students.6
Despite these disappointing outcomes, lobbyists for the TRIO programs have been particularly vehement in opposing efforts by policymakers to try to steer grant dollars toward the best proposals rather than simply to incumbent grantees. These lobbyists have been particularly adamant in their defense of prior experience points, statutorily mandated bonus points given to existing grantees that make it difficult for new participants to obtain grants. Even minimal efforts by policymakers to introduce evidence-based priorities (i.e., bonus points for applications that cite interventions backed by rigorous research) in the TRIO competitions are portrayed by some in the community as attempts to purge the program of long-time participants.
For instance, COE officials accused the Department of violating the Higher Education Act when it proposed in 2014 to introduce competitive preference points that they said would reduce “grantees’ prior experience points from 13 percent of their score…to just 11.7 percent.”7 The Department moved ahead with its proposal, and the end results showed only modest differences. When evidence-based priorities were in effect from 2015 to 2017, more than nine in 10 prior grantees that applied for new funding won a grant, while fewer than 30 percent of new applicants did, according to the Department.8
By many accounts, the TRIO lobby, as a part of the powerful higher education industry that wields influence with many lawmakers, is a significant obstacle to improving and expanding the use of evidence-based policies in higher education. But the fact that the program, which costs taxpayers nearly $1 billion every year, has shown lackluster results should raise eyebrows and give voice to the need for change. Without the adoption of practices that have been proven successful, college access and success rates will continue to stagnate.
The TRIO lobby, as a part of the powerful higher education industry that wields influence with many lawmakers, is a significant obstacle to improving and expanding the use of evidence-based policies in higher education.
GEAR UP
The lawmakers who created the GEAR UP program in 1998 based it on the “I Have a Dream” Foundation, led by Eugene Lang, a businessman in New York who promised full college tuition to a class of sixth-graders at his former elementary school in East Harlem. Ninety percent of the students in that program completed high school, and 60 percent enrolled in college.9 Congress developed the program largely in an effort to respond to some of the challenges faced by TRIO Talent Search grantees. For instance, GEAR UP serves entire grades of students, rather than only the students a grantee manages to recruit, as in Talent Search; and it allows for school-level activities.10 And unlike Talent Search, the GEAR UP program does not include prior experience points to boost the scores of existing grantees.
While few evaluations have been conducted in recent years,11 some older research suggests a positive impact for students while they were participating in the programs, albeit few results that persist to the college level. A 2001 Education Department study found that GEAR UP students, particularly Black students, took more rigorous courses in GEAR UP middle schools than in non-GEAR UP schools, and had a better understanding of opportunities to pursue a higher education. Another study found that GEAR UP participants in California boosted their math and reading scores on state standardized tests considerably.12 A third study, by the testing company ACT, found slightly higher test scores and improvement among GEAR UP participants.13
Still, while the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships, the lobbying association representing GEAR UP grantees, is open to engaging in rigorous evaluation of its effectiveness, and helping to evaluate grantees across about a dozen states,14 the Education Department has found it difficult to conduct a thorough, quantitative analysis nationally, particularly for state grantees, which engage in a wide range of activities and which may look very different from one another. Nor is the GEAR UP program centered around directing grantees to implement practices already proven to improve students’ access to a high-quality higher education. Like the TRIO program, it has been retrofitted to some extent with Department priorities related to incorporating evidence, but only minimally so.
Minority-Serving Institution Programs
Congress has also created discretionary grant competitions, alongside some formula grants, to provide funds to minority-serving and other institutions that primarily enroll students who have been traditionally underserved. The grants, which are provided through Titles III and V of the Higher Education Act, offer funds to historically Black colleges and universities; each of the categories of minority-serving institutions (MSI) recognized in law; and, through the federal Strengthening Institutions Program, institutions that serve large shares of low-income students. These programs are designed similarly and allow institutions to use the funds for a very broad set of purposes. Those purposes include everything from the construction and maintenance of buildings, to the acquisition of technology and equipment, to tutoring and student support services, to including the dollars in endowment funds.15 All told, Congress spent more than $687 million this year on the MSI programs, funding a diverse set of institutional support projects.16
Beginning in fiscal year 2012, the Education Department experimented with a new approach to encourage institutions to use some of their resources on evidence-based interventions designed to support student success. That competition invited applicants to submit proposals based on rigorous research in exchange for additional points for their applications, and ultimately funded a handful of research-backed projects proposed by institutions serving low-income students and students of color; 137 of 151 applicants addressed the priority.17 The Department has continued to conduct competitions that offer priority points for evidence-supported interventions, and institutions have continued to apply for those grants.
First in the World Competition
The First in the World program, an Obama administration proposal, was funded through the appropriations process for fiscal years 2014 and 2015. Structured as a tiered evidence competition, it offered the smallest (“development”) grants to institutions with the least rigorous evidence behind their proposals; medium-sized (“validation”) grants to proposals backed by some rigorous evidence that were in need of more testing, or of testing in different settings; and the largest (“expansion”) grants to proposals that used practices proven through extensive, rigorous research to be ready to be scaled up to more campuses and students.18 In its first year, Congress appropriated $75 million to the program, and the Department made development awards to 24 institutions. In its second year, the Department awarded $60 million through 16 development grants and two validation grants.19 However, Congress did not provide any additional funding for the program, and never codified it in the Higher Education Act beyond those two appropriations cycles. No scale-up (expansion) grants were ever awarded. The grants that were awarded are nearing the end of their activities, and evaluations should be finalized in the coming years.
Citations
- Cheryl Blanco, Early Commitment Financial Aid Programs: Promises, Practices and Policies (Boulder, CO: Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, August 2005), source.
- The author served in the Obama administration at the Education Department from 2015-2017.
- Margaret Cahalan, TRIO, The What Works Clearinghouse, and the Competitive Preference Priorities (CPPs): An Imposed Structured Practitioner-Research Collaboration (Washington, DC: The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, 2018), source.
- Jill M. Constantine, Neil S. Seftor, Emily Sama Martin, Tim Silva, and David Myers, A Study of the Effect of the Talent Search Program on Secondary and Postsecondary outcomes in Florida, Indiana and Texas: Final Report from Phase II of the National Evaluation (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2006), source.
- David Myers, Robert Olsen, Neil Seftor, Julie Young, and Christina Tuttle, The Impacts of Regular Upward Bound: Results from the Third Follow-Up Data Collection (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2004), source. The first iteration of the same study did, however, find that students who entered Upward Bound with low expectations for their postsecondary educations were substantially more likely to complete high school. David Myers and Allen Schirm, The Impacts of Upward Bound: Final Report for Phase I of the National Evaluation (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1999), source.
- Bradford W. Chaney, National Evaluation of Student Support Services: Examination of Student Outcomes After Six Years, Final Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2010), source.
- Maureen Hoyler (Council for Opportunity in Education), public comment re: Docket ID: ED-2014-ICCD-0137-0001, November 19, 2014, source.
- U.S. Department of Education, “Fiscal Year 2019 Budget Request Congressional Justifications,” February 2018, R-109, source.
- Celeste Tarricone, “Bill Would Promise Pell Grants to Needy Sixth Graders,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 1997, source.
- Stephen Burd, “White House Plan for Low-Income Students Sparks Debate Helping Disadvantaged Students,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 23, 1999, source.
- This is true at least of the effectiveness of the program itself; there is a near-complete evaluation of the effectiveness of sending text reminders to students in GEAR UP about deadlines for financial aid and college applications. Institute of Education Sciences (website), “Effectiveness of Promising Strategies in Federal College Access Programs: Study of College Transition Text Messaging in GEAR UP,” final report expected Spring 2020, source.
- Alberto Cabrera, Regina Deil-Amen, Radhika Prabhu, Patrick Terenzini, Chul Lee, and Robert E. Franklin, Jr., “Increasing the College Preparedness of At-Risk Students,” Journal of Latinos and Education 5, no. 2 (2006): 79–97, source.
- Using EXPLORE and PLAN Data to Evaluate GEAR UP Programs (Iowa City, IA: ACT, March 2007), source. The report was sponsored in part by the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships, a group that lobbies on behalf of GEAR UP.
- National Council for Community and Education Partnerships (website), “Evaluation Consortium,” source.
- Higher Education Act, §311.
- U.S. Department of Education (website), “Budget Tables,” 2019, source.
- Higher Education Fiscal Year 2015 Budget Request (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, February 2014), T-34, source.
- U.S. Department of Education (website), “First in the World,” source. For more on tiered evidence competitions, see Andrew Feldman and Ron Haskins, “Tiered-Evidence Grantmaking,” Evidence-Based Policymaking Collaborative (website), September 9, 2016, source.
- U.S. Department of Education (website), “First in the World,” source.