For sophomore Braeden Miller, it’s clear he wouldn’t be at Wichita State pursuing his undergraduate degree with plans to obtain a doctorate without the help of TRIO Student Support Services.
“I first joined the TRIO programs in high school with TRIO Talent Search,” Miller said. “… I had a really great experience there. I didn’t even know I’d be able to afford to go to college until I joined TRIO Talent Search.”
Miller, who studies psychology and applied linguistics, is now part of another TRIO program: McNair Scholars, which helps students like him who want to pursue a graduate degree.
And Miller, a member of WSU’s Student Senate, wants to make sure that those programs never go away.
“The TRIO programs are essential to students on campus, namely low-income, first-generation students,” Miller said. “They support these students, increase persistence, help them get into college – they provide all sorts of services. And it’s important to remember that standing with the TRIO programs is standing with low-income, first-generation students.”
Delayed federal grants
TRIO Student Support Services is a group of federal grant-funded programs for underserved students seeking a college degree. The programs serve many public high schools and higher education institutions across the country and are targeted at assisting disabled, low-income and first-generation students.
Other TRIO programs at WSU include Disability Support Services and Veterans Upward Bound. WSU also houses a variety of precollegiate programs, like Talent Search.
Recently, TRIO Services staff at WSU and around the country were faced with the uncertainty around the yearly grants that keep TRIO programs going. While federal grants of all kinds were being cancelled and U.S. President Donald Trump spoke of dissolving the Federal Department of Education, TRIO programs did not receive notification at the usual time that their funding grants were being awarded.
“Every year, the grants end at a certain date, and then the GANs (Grant Anticipation Notes) typically come a couple days before that,” said Alicia Thompson, WSU’s Associate Vice Provost for PreK-12 Engagement, who oversees the TRIO programs. “Well, this year they didn’t come when they were supposed to come. They were delayed. And so no one at the federal level could really tell us whether or not we were going to get the GANs.”
This meant WSU had to reckon with the possibility of not receiving the funding. It would have meant the end of the TRIO programs, Thompson said.
Eventually, though, Wichita State’s GANs did come through, a few days past the usual deadline. According to the Council for Opportunity in Education, 120 TRIO programs in the U.S. had grants terminated over conflicts with the federal government about diversity, equity and inclusion policy, Inside Higher Ed reported.
As the deadlines loomed closer, Thompson said the decision was made to notify students utilizing some services of the possibility that those programs would go away. The plan was to find other programs offered by WSU where the students could receive the same kind of support.
“We don’t want you (students) to have lapses in your services, you know, because you guys need to have support, right? And we didn’t want you to have support today and then tomorrow you don’t have any,” Thompson said. “It’s why we communicated that the programs were going to be gone, that we had to turn around and say, ‘Okay, now we’re back,’ that kind of thing – because it was kind of an overlap of two days where students were going to have to go see someone else, and then all of a sudden they weren’t going to have to see someone else.
“And guess what? We were getting these notifications on Sunday after we had already told kids, students … that they were going to need to start seeing someone else.”
Miller, who’s also an employee with the McNair Scholars program, experienced the uncertainty on two fronts – as a student who would lose the program helping him reach his goals, and as an employee facing the possibility of furlough, or suspension from work, intended to be temporary. He said that GANs had been late in the past, but this time was different.
“TRIO programs at Wichita State University had never faced the possibility of furlough, so that’s why we were all really nervous, is because it had gotten a lot realer than it ever has in the past,” he said.
According to Thompson, she was assured that the funding for most of the programs was just late.
“We were told that, you know, we had strong advocacy for TRIO and Upward Bound and Gear Up programs – we had people on both sides of the aisle that were advocating for these programs to continue to receive their funding,” Thompson said. “So the only program that was kind of iffy was McNair.”
Advocation for TRIO programs
Miller began thinking about what he could do to help the students impacted.
“When I knew that the programs were about to go on furlough, there were a couple of things running through my mind,” he said. “The first was that I hadn’t heard anything from the university regarding the programs going on furlough. The programs serve a lot of students on campus, right? And these are low-income, first-generation students, so they’re vulnerable populations on campus … and I was thinking to myself, like, ‘What can I do as a representative in the Student Government?’”
While the grants came through, Miller still wanted to bring attention to the TRIO programs at WSU and encourage the university and individuals to advocate for their continued funding. He wrote a resolution, an act requesting that the university take certain actions, as his first piece of legislation in the Student Senate.
“One of the things that we’re requesting is making sure that the university is really opening up those channels of communication and being really clear in … the content of their communication and their conciseness and intentions with the programs,” Miller said.
In his discussions with program directors while writing the resolution, Miller said he heard repeatedly that they wanted increased visibility of TRIO programs on campus, something articulated in the resolution. It also encourages the university’s government relations team, and individual people affiliated with the university, to advocate for WSU’s TRIO programs in the event that grants are delayed again, or withheld.
“The easiest way to do it is when we’re facing these issues with the government — it’s as easy as calling your government representative and telling them, ‘These programs are important to me,’ because what that tells them is that when voting season comes around, they should be touching on those subjects. They should be supporting those programs,” Miller said.
What’s the future of TRIO?
Thompson said she feels optimistic that TRIO won’t face this level of uncertainty again.
“This was the year for concern,” she said. “Because, as you think about the federal government … they were shutting down the Department of Education, right? Remember when you heard that they were going to shut the whole program down?”
Trump signed an executive order in March directing the U.S. Secretary of Education to start the process of shuttering the Department of Education. However, according to the Clery Center, that order is not enough to completely eliminate the department. Doing so would require congressional approval.
Thompson said if the ED closes, TRIO will likely be moved to another division of the federal government.
“So once we find a home, I think we’re safe,” she said. “But when they were cutting the Department of Education and everything else that went with it — we were everything that went with it.
“Evidently they value the programs enough to where they’re not cutting them, and they did expand them and gave us new grants.”
“But,” she added, “you just never know what is going to happen. I can’t make any promises, but we’re hopeful.”
Thompson said she encourages students to look into the TRIO programs if they feel they need support, and see if they qualify.
The Student Senate meets every Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. A recording of the Oct. 22 meeting is available via the Student Government Association’s Youtube channel.
