Sneak Preview: ED Aims To Better Verify TRIO Recipient Data
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants 360 article.) The Department of Education (ED) may begin requiring recipients of TRIO awards to better explain their methodologies for collecting student-level information to better ensure that the performance data they submit to the department under the TRIO programs are reliable, in response to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendation.
Congress has provided more than $1 billion annually in recent years under eight college access grant programs known as the federal TRIO programs, which assist about 800,000 disadvantaged students with preparing for, enrolling in and graduating from college. Under these programs, ED provides some 3,000 competitive grants primarily to colleges, but also to some school districts and community organizations.
In a report to the House Committee on Education and Labor, GAO found that ED has implemented TRIO performance measures to assess whether the programs are meeting established metrics and goals. The agency annually collects self-reported data from each TRIO grantee on the extent to which it has met its targeted performance metrics. For example, a goal of the Student Support Services program, which had the most TRIO grantees in federal fiscal year 2018, is to increase the college retention and completion rates of its participants. Recipients under this program measure progress toward this goal by reporting the number of students who received services, along with the percentage of first-time college students who participated in the program and graduated from their college on time, among other metrics.
However, GAO determined that ED has taken few steps to verify the grantee-submitted data to ensure that it is reliable or assess the effectiveness of some of the programs, noting that some grantees may report certain data in order to increase the likelihood of receiving a future award. While grantees are required to sign a statement attesting that the information they provide is true under penalty of law, there are few quality checks on this information. Although ED does conduct some data checks when conducting site visits, the agency has had limited staff and resources to conduct these visits, and averaged only 12 site visits for about 3,000 TRIO grantees from 2015 to 2019.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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