The government shutdown that began last week is already taking a toll on higher education, despite assurances from policy makers that colleges and students would be largely spared in the short term. Research projects have been interrupted, academic meetings have been postponed or canceled, and some students are being urged to put off their educations until the federal-budget impasse ends.
Such disruptions will only multiply as the shutdown drags on. Grant competitions could be delayed, payments to programs serving disadvantaged students may lapse, and funds for veterans’ tuition and housing will be exhausted.
But the most severe consequences for higher education will come if Congress fails to increase the nation’s borrowing limit, and the government defaults on its debt. The deadline for raising the debt ceiling is Thursday, October 17.
So far, the shutdown has not affected Pell Grants or student loans, the cornerstones of the federal student-aid system. That’s because the programs are financed through June, the end of the academic year. But if the government runs out of money, it won’t be able to incur any new obligations, even revenue-producing ones (like student loans) or pre-financed ones (like Pell), said David A. Bergeron, a longtime Education Department official who stepped down this year.
Though the Treasury Department could spend money on any day that revenues exceeded debts, it would have to set spending priorities, and it probably would not put student aid ahead of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits, said Jonathan S. Fansmith, associate director of government relations at the American Council on Education.
“You’d see an immediate suspension of even those activities that have been preserved during the shutdown,” he said.
With only eight days remaining until the debt-ceiling deadline, the prospects for compromise are uncertain. On Tuesday lawmakers were working toward a deal to reopen the government and to raise the debt ceiling at the same time. But with Republicans intent on attaching conditions to the measure, and Democrats insisting on a “clean” bill, no breakthrough was in sight.
Military Tuition Aid on Hold
Meanwhile, the consequences of the fiscal stalemate continued to mount. The Department of Veterans Affairs has said it probably has enough money on hand to pay GI Bill benefits through late October. Once those funds are exhausted, payments will be suspended, according to a department guide to the shutdown.
Already, the department has shut off the main phone number to answer veterans’ questions about their benefits. Vocational rehabilitation and education counseling have also been limited, according to the guide.
The Defense Department suspended its tuition-assistance program for active-duty members of the military on October 1, and some branches of the armed forces are urging students to wait until after the shutdown to enroll. A handful of colleges have said they will cover students’ costs in the interim.
At most of the nation’s undergraduate service academies, life is returning to normal, following a Defense Department announcement that civilians providing “support” to members of the armed forces could return to work. But the Merchant Marine Academy, which is financed by the Department of Transportation, remains closed, and all classes and athletic events have been canceled.
Thousands of civilian faculty and staff members at the service academies were furloughed last week, leading to class cancellations and facility closures on a majority of the campuses.
At the Education Department, sexual-assault and other civil-rights investigations have been put on hold, and student complaints aren’t being processed. The Office for Civil Rights receives roughly 9,000 complaints a year, according to Cameron French, a department spokesman.
College Navigator, the department’s Web site that lets students compare colleges on costs and outcomes, has gone dark, as has a Web site aimed at student-aid professionals. More than 94 percent of the department’s 4,225 employees have been furloughed.
Those furloughs could lead to delays in the awarding of grants to colleges later in the year, the department warned in its plan. It also said that a shutdown of longer than a week could “severely curtail the cash flow” to colleges that rely on federal funds to pay staff members who run programs for disadvantaged students.
Job-training programs, many of them with ties to community colleges, have been hit by a “double whammy,” advocates say. Three months after their budgets took an across-the-board spending cut, a step known as sequestration, the programs are waiting on new funds they were supposed to receive on October 1. Some programs are cutting staff members at one-stop centers or closing the centers altogether. At least one program has rescinded “individual training accounts” that displaced workers can use to pay for college.
Meanwhile, the Department of Labor has stopped distributing benefits to people who lost their jobs because of foreign trade competition and who are going to college to learn new skills.
Antarctic Research on Ice
In a stark demonstration of the shutdown’s concrete effects on researchers, the National Science Foundation announced on Tuesday that it would close its three Antarctic research stations, which typically play host to hundreds of researchers each year during the austral summer, beginning in October.
While most academic researchers continue to draw financial support from their federal grants, some scientific meetings have been canceled, and others are taking place without their customary federal participants. Peer-review panels have stopped convening, resulting in delays in the reviews of new grant proposals. Applications for the next round of National Institutes of Health grants were due on October 5, with awards expected to be made in December or January.
Scientists say the shutdown has added one more demoralizing element to an already-bleak atmosphere for federally backed research. At a news conference held on Tuesday by the American Society for Cell Biology, biomedical researchers described the combined strain of shrinking budgets at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, the effects of sequestration, and the shutdown.
The closure of the federal government has set up a variety of roadblocks, the scientists said, including a lack of access to furloughed NIH program officers, who work with researchers to obtain grants. Such effects, combined with a weaker stream of federal dollars, represent “the latest insult to the basic research community,” said Kevin Wilson, the society’s director of public policy.
The threat of even less money for research hits young scientists particularly hard, said Carol Greider, a Nobel laureate who is director of the department of molecular biology and genetics at the Johns Hopkins University. A large portion of a federal grant to her lab pays the young scientists who work in it, Ms. Greider said.
Meanwhile, a delay in the grant-review process can be devastating to young scientists in the desperate competition for NIH grants. “This really is a sinking ship,” said Rebecca D. Burdine, an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. For younger researchers, she said, “it’s like you’ve thrown us a concrete brick and said, ‘Keep treading water. Eventually it’s going to get better.’”
The longer the shutdown persists, the worse it will be for researchers, said Barry Toiv, vice president for public affairs at the Association of American Universities. A more pressing issue, Mr. Toiv said, might be the effect on research of a possible legislative deal to end the stalemate. If policy makers cut research spending even more, he said, “things are going to be tougher and tougher for researchers.”
But the stakes would be higher in the event of a government default, Mr. Toiv said: “If economists are correct about the impact of a default, obviously this compounds the impact on our universities in all respects because you’re not talking only about funding for research—you’re talking about support for universities in general.”
Humanities Grants Left Hanging
For grant makers and researchers in the humanities and for libraries, the long-term consequences of the shutdown are hard to predict. Delays and disruptions are already beginning to be felt, though.
Grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services may not be dispensed, and with its staff largely on furlough, grant applicants and recipients have no one to advise them on their projects. And if the shutdown lasts long enough, the institute’s next round of grant applications, with a December deadline, could be put on ice.
Researchers also remain shut out of federal libraries and archives, including the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration’s facilities around the country. The Library of Congress did make its Web sites available again last week, but, like most federal agencies, it is not updating information on those sites.
“There are researchers who would be coming to use federal archives, and their research schedules are disrupted,” said Stephen Kidd, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, an advocacy group that represents about 120 universities, scholarly societies, and other groups that support work in the humanities.
Beyond the hardships inflicted on individual researchers, Mr. Kidd said, the shutdown has the potential to disrupt coming grant cycles. The National Endowment for the Humanities, for instance, was scheduled to convene peer-review committees this month to review grant applications. But those committees cannot meet to evaluate the applications until the agency reopens.
The humanities groups hardest hit by the budget stalemate, though, are the state humanities councils, according to Mr. Kidd. He called them “the local glue that holds all of the humanities organizations together and connects them to the public.” With state subsidies dwindling or nonexistent, they rely on NEH money to keep going. “They’re in an extraordinarily uncertain position right now,” he said. “They have to rely on their reserve funds” to pay their staffs and maintain operations.
While the shutdown may disrupt individual projects and the grant cycle, what worries Mr. Kidd most is the longer-term budget trends. “NEH funding is at its lowest level, in constant dollars, since 1971,” he said, and some members of Congress have proposed eliminating the agency altogether. Whatever budget finally does pass, it may reduce the NEH’s appropriation below its current level of $138-million.
Humanities research takes time, and “if there’s a month or six-week delay, it’s not the end of the world,” Mr. Kidd said. “The real story is the disinvestment in humanities funding over time.”
