The uproar that has followed the Education Department’s refusal to consider dozens of Upward Bound grant applications that were submitted with formatting errors has brought fresh attention to a program that’s been around since the Johnson administration.
It’s hard not to want to support young people who are working hard to be successful.
The department’s move, which disqualified more than 70 applicants that failed to follow the agency’s strict rules on line spacing, font size, and page limits, drew outrage from colleges, condemnation from Congress, and calls for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to reconsider.
We're sorry. Something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site, and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one,
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com
The uproar that has followed the Education Department’s refusal to consider dozens of Upward Bound grant applications that were submitted with formatting errors has brought fresh attention to a program that’s been around since the Johnson administration.
It’s hard not to want to support young people who are working hard to be successful.
The department’s move, which disqualified more than 70 applicants that failed to follow the agency’s strict rules on line spacing, font size, and page limits, drew outrage from colleges, condemnation from Congress, and calls for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to reconsider.
But this is hardly the first time the college-prep program, which served more than 60,000 students in 2015, has been in the headlines. Over its 50-year history, Upward Bound has faced budget cuts, competition from new programs, and questions about its effectiveness.
ADVERTISEMENT
Still, Upward Bound has survived, thanks in large part to its vocal alumni and a basic rule of Washington: All politics is local. Every time there’s been a threat to the program, lawmakers have come to the defense of programs in their districts.
For readers who haven’t been working in higher education for five decades, here’s a guide to the funding fights, evaluation controversies, and scoring disputes the program has weathered. For the rest of you, here’s a refresher.
First, the basics.
Upward Bound is one of the three original TRIO programs that trace their roots to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. It provides academic, career, and financial counseling to low-income, first-generation, and at-risk students with the goal of increasing their enrollment in and graduation from college.
In the 2015 fiscal year, Upward Bound received $263 million in funding and served 61,361 students, at a cost of $4,293 per student. Roughly half of the money went to public four-year institutions, and a quarter went to community colleges. The remainder went to private four-year colleges and other organizations, such as state agencies and nonprofit groups.
ADVERTISEMENT
This year, President Trump has proposed slashing spending on the now eight TRIO programs by 10 percent.
That brings us to the program’s history of funding fights.
With grantees in nearly every state and many congressional districts, Upward Bound has long enjoyed bipartisan support. Liberals like it because it offers a hand up to the poor; conservatives like it because it helps students who want to help themselves. Students must choose to participate.
“It’s hard not to want to support young people who are working hard to be successful,” says Maureen Hoyler, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, the main lobbying group for TRIO program grantees.
ADVERTISEMENT
Even so, the program has come under attack from Republicans in recent years, most notably in 1995 and 2005. In the first case, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives sought to eliminate TRIO and more than 280 other programs. They backed down after advocates launched an aggressive counteroffensive.
Then, in 2003 and 2004, President George W. Bush proposed flat funds for TRIO, citing a controversial study that found that Upward Bound had virtually no effect on the college-going rates of participants (more on that much-disputed finding later). The following year, he proposed abolishing the program altogether, to finance an expansion of his signature No Child Left Behind Law to high schools. Congress rejected the plan, and preserved the program.
At the same time, Upward Bound and the other TRIO programs have faced competition from Gear Up, a newer college-prep program that serves entire grades, rather than select students.
Gear Up, which was created by Congress and the Clinton administration in 1998, aims to not just improve the lives of students, but to transform the schools they attend, too. Colleges and schools that get the grants work together to overhaul curricula and provide professional development for teachers.
TRIO advocates opposed the creation of Gear Up, fearing it would dilute funding for their programs, and relations between the programs were tense from the start.
ADVERTISEMENT
While relations are better today, the TRIO and Gear Up programs still compete for a limited pool of funds. Some researchers and lawmakers see the programs as duplicative, and have called for combining them.
That brings us to the evaluation controversies.
Supporters of cutting or consolidating Upward Bound often point to a controversial study by the Mathematica Policy Research organization that found that most students who participated in the program were no more likely to attend college than those who didn’t.
TRIO advocates have long argued that the study was flawed, partly because students in the control group benefited from other college-prep programs, and partly because one program accounted for 26 percent of the results.
David Goodwin, who oversaw the Education Department unit responsible for the study, said he and others made their concerns about Mathematica’s conclusions “well known” before they were published. But those concerns were brushed aside. “The administration wanted to abolish the TRIO program, and this report was consistent with their recommendation,” he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
According to Mathematica, the only students who really seemed to benefit from Upward Bound were “high risk” students who had low expectations of attending college when they started the program. So in 2006, the department launched a follow-up study that compared high-risk Upward Bound students with a control group and lower-risk participants.
The question is not should we take these resources away, but how do we make them more powerful?
The Council for Opportunity in Education fought back vigorously, arguing that it was unethical, if not immoral, for the department to recruit students and then deny them services. It launched an aggressive lobbying effort, dubbed “Operation Rolling Thunder,” that focused on members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Eventually, the department abandoned the evaluation.
More recent studies of Upward Bound have focused on finding best practices, rather than evaluating the program as a whole. Last November, the Institute of Education Sciences released a report that examined how programs provide core services; it’s currently testing ways to reduce “under matching” among program participants.
When President Obama proposed setting aside $20 million of the TRIO budget to study and put in place “evidence-based practices,” Congress refused.
ADVERTISEMENT
Ms. Hoyler says the more targeted approach is appropriate. “The question is not should we take these resources away,” she says, “but how do we make them more powerful?”
Still, the study has continued to haunt the program, fueling persistent doubts about its effectiveness. In 2013, researchers at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution used it to justify their proposal to roll TRIO and Gear Up into a competitive grant program, with no preference given to current recipients, as Upward Bound grantees receive.
Now back to those rejected programs you’ve heard about.
The department’s rejection of 77 grant applications in this year’s competition has prompted a flurry of letters and calls from lawmakers. But complaints about the department’s review process are nothing new for the TRIO program.
Frances Bergeron, who worked in the federal office that administers the TRIO programs for more than 30 years, says members of Congress would often call to complain when a constituent was denied a grant.
ADVERTISEMENT
“TRIO is extremely political,” she said. “It’s always been extremely political.”
Most of the time, she said, the department could defend its decision by pointing to technical problems with the application. Occasionally, though, when it seemed a reviewer misread the application, or made a mistake, the applicant would get a second hearing — and maybe a grant.
The TRIO programs got a budget boost in a recent spending bill. Lawmakers say that money could be used to fund some of the rejected grants.
There was no formal appeals process until 2008, when Congress added one during the last reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The process does not allow for reconsideration of grants that failed to meet “submission requirements,” however.
Earlier this month, Ms. DeVos issued a departmentwide order prohibiting officials from mandating any page or formatting rules in future grant competitions. So far, though, she has ignored appeals to reconsider the rejected grants.
ADVERTISEMENT
With an awards announcement due any day, lawmakers are pressing Ms. DeVos to use the additional $50 million that they provided for the TRIO programs in the recently approved omnibus budget to read the rejected grants and fund any applicants that score as high as the winners.
If she refuses, lawmakers could simply appropriate more money for the program. There’s some precedent for that: In 2007, after 21 historically black colleges lost their grants, Congress provided an additional $228-million over four years to the program.
But money is tight these days, and Ron Hammond, an aide to U.S. Rep. Warren Davidson, Republican of Ohio, says such a move would only “reward bad behavior” by the department. He wants to see the secretary’s order codified into law, to ensure such widespread rejections don’t happen again.
“This is bureaucracy at its worst,” said Mr. Hammond, who has helped lead a campaign to pressure the secretary. “Giving the program more money doesn’t fix it.”
Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.
Kelly Field joined The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2004 and covered federal higher-education policy. She continues to write for The Chronicle on a freelance basis.