In his August 7th posting, Why is Northern Kentucky University Trying to Steal Your Money?, Kevin Carey raised an important concern about earmarks that rob the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) -- and more sadly, the innovative institutions of higher education that try to play by the rules - of funding that should be awarded competitively to projects that will yield postsecondary education improvements.
When Congress passed the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, they added an impossibly long list of new activities that the Department was authorized to support through the FIPSE program, including everything from to designing more cost-effective methods of instruction and institutional operation, to creating new programs for awarding credentials to individuals, reforming remedial education, creating interdisciplinary programs that focus on poverty and human capability, supporting efforts that promote cultural diversity in the entertainment industry, supporting students who were in the foster care system, improving medical education (isn’t that supposed to be the job of the HHS?), and supporting a new center for best practices to support single parent students, among others.
While there are real benefits of the broad authority Congress assigned to the FIPSE program, the problem is that almost any earmark can justified as a legitimate program expenditure, including those that are little more than equipment procurement projects (often times of questionable pedagogical value). But the real challenge in administering a program with such broad authority is that it lacks the sort of focus necessary to develop and sustain a long-term research focus that will yield observable improvements in higher education outcomes. For better or worse, the Department of Education has tried to bring some focus to the program by creating sub-programs and initiatives under the FIPSE umbrella to bring resources and attention to particular problems or priorities of the higher education community, but this, too, creates challenges for institutions that wish to pursue activities outside of the particular set of funding initiatives. And, like Congress, the Department tends to create initiatives that serve the political agendas of each Administration rather than respond to the needs of the external community.
The real problem that the FIPSE program faces is the lack of adequate funding to accomplish anything. In 2009, Congress appropriated only $42.4 million to the FIPSE program, which meant that the Department could not even hold a competition for the Comprehensive Program this year (keep in mind that much of the authorized funding is used to satisfy out-year obligations on multi-year grants awarded in previous years). Meanwhile, Congress assigned $91.2 million in earmarks to the program in 2009 to ensure that FIPSE funds would flow to a small group of institutions in the states and districts of influential Members of Congress. While it is true that some earmarks support stellar projects that probably would have been successful in winning a grant through peer review (if there had been any money to hold such a competition), many projects do nothing more than improve the marketing “wow factor” that an institution hopes to capture in next year’s admissions brochures.
In many ways, the FIPSE program functions like a fibrillating heart, quivering about and twitching all over (with earmarks being sent here and there across the country to accomplish an uncoordinated--and sometimes self-serving--set of goals), but unable to pump a single drop of blood. It is time for us to bring out the paddles and shock the program back into function by working to increase funding for the peer-review program, and working with the FIPSE Board and others to bring some real research focus back to the program.