An Obligation to Give Back
The 40th anniversary TRIO celebration that almost wasn’t

By Kendra Hamilton

Advocates for college access are celebrating a big anniversary this month: the 40th anniversary of the Higher Education Act, the landmark legislation that paved the way for the TRIO suite of programs for low-income and disabled students.

But the toasts at the anniversary gala may be a bit more heartfelt than usual, says Dr. Arnold Mitchem, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education (COE), the nonprofit organization that provides support and advocacy for the TRIO community. This anniversary comes on the heels of Upward Bound, Talent Search, Student Support Services and all the other TRIO programs’ narrow escape from elimination in the 2006-2007 federal budget.

Mitchem, long a voice for expanding college access to the disadvantaged and disabled, does not attempt to play down the

seriousness of the threat. The Bush administration, in effect, proposed eliminating Upward Bound in order to pay for the expansion of No Child Left Behind to high school, he explains.

Had advocates not prevailed, the loss for the college access community would have been devastating. Two-thirds of TRIO students are mandated to come from families with incomes less than $28,000, in which neither parent graduated from college. Elimination would have decimated 2,700 TRIO programs serving nearly 866,000 low-income Americans.

Thirty-seven percent of those low-income students are White, 35 percent are African-American, 19 percent Hispanic, 4 percent American Indian, 4 percent Asian American, and 1 percent “Other,” a category that includes students claiming more than one race. There are also 22,000 students with disabilities and more than 25,000 military veterans served by TRIO programs.

Those statistics lent passion to the battle to save the program, says Susan Trebach, COE’s vice president for communications. COE and the TRIO programs marshaled a group of advocates whom Congress found it difficult to ignore: a parade of current students and TRIO alumni.