Upward Bound Changes Called ‘Ethically Immoral’
Some students applying for assistance won’t get it under
Education Department experiment to test the program’s effectiveness.
By Charles Dervarics
New U.S. Department of Education plans for the federal Upward Bound program are facing strong opposition from grantees and advocates, who fear that the changes will undermine a 40-year-old initiative that promotes college awareness and preparation for low-income students.
The department is making major changes in enrollment requirements for the program, which provides grants for colleges and other nonprofit organizations to prepare low-income and first-generation students for college. The policies went into effect in late October, in time for the program’s latest grant competition this fall.
Among other changes, grantees would need to recruit twice the number of students they can serve so that youth can be randomly assigned either to Upward Bound or a control group that would not receive assistance. The Education Department says this move would allow it to better evaluate program services, but Upward Bound advocates strongly disagree.
“To me, that’s ethically immoral,” says Dr. Cynthia Park, executive director of the Pre-College Institute at San Diego State University. Grantees would recruit students with promises of assistance but then have to turn their backs on half of the group, she says.
“It is definitely a human subject research issue, and a serious one,” agrees Susan Trebach, vice president for communications at the Council for Opportunity in Education, a Washington group that works on behalf of Upward Bound and other TRIO programs.
But the Education Department says it has a responsibility to evaluate whether the program provides benefits “above and beyond” the benefits of other available services, says James F. Manning, the department’s acting assistant secretary for postsecondary education.
