New U.S. Department of Education plans to recruit students to Upward Bound but only serve half of them as part of a test of the program’s effectiveness is generating 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 seeking to make 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.

Under changes to take effect next Monday, Oct. 23, 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 program 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.

Also, given Upward Bound’s limited budget, the program cannot serve many eligible youth regardless of the evaluation approach, the department argues.

In another change, students wouldn’t just be low-income. At least 30 percent of students enrolled in the program must qualify as “academically at risk,” meaning they have not scored at a proficient rate on state math and language arts assessments in eighth grade. Students can also qualify if they have a GPA below 2.5 or have not taken certain rigorous math courses by eighth or ninth grades.