Trump proposes cutting national program to help low income and disadvantaged students

A federal education program known as TRIO is effectively zeroed out in President Trump’s proposed budget. It began as part of Lyndon Johnson’s so-called War on Poverty in the 1960s. Today, close to a million low-income and disadvantaged students in the U.S. get help from these grants. Earlier this year, the Trump administration excluded students without legal status from being eligible for these programs. We’ll hear what TRIO means for Oregonians from the executive director of Oregon TRIO Association, Matt Bisek, and Oregon State University student Bri Eck.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. A federal education program known as TRIO is completely eliminated in President Trump’s proposed budget. TRIO began as part of Lyndon Johnson’s so-called War on Poverty in the 1960s. Today, close to a million low income and underserved students get help from these grants around the country, including more than 12,000 in Oregon.

For more on what these cuts could mean, I’m joined by Matt Bisek, the executive director of the Oregon TRIO Association, and Bri Eck, who is a senior at Oregon State University and a student representative on the Oregon TRIO Board. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Matt Bisek: Hello, Dave.

Bri Eck: Hi, Dave, thank you.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. Matt, first – TRIO encompasses a number of different programs for a pretty broad set of students. Can you just give us a sense for what falls under the umbrella of TRIO, this 60-year-old initiative?

Bisek: Absolutely. Like you said, this kind of dates back to the ‘60s. There were all these individualized programs that originally were focused on rural isolation, culturally-specific programs, disadvantaged students. And eventually all the initial three got combined into TRIO. It’s not an acronym, it just started because there used to be three, there’s more now.

But what was the centralizing thing was that [with] the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in 1980, the TRIO community actually introduced the concept of first generation college student and kind of made that the central hub of the students we serve. So across all the different TRIO programs that exist, the commonality with all of them is low income, first-generation. That is kind of the calling card of all TRIO programs and who we serve to date across the country. So obviously, individual grants can only serve the areas that they’ve been targeted in the applications they’ve submitted, the U.S. Department of Education. But within those communities, low income, first-gen.

Miller: What’s one example of a program that you think is really valuable in Oregon right now?

Bisek: Oh my goodness.

Miller: Am I asking you to choose your favorite of your children?

Bisek: You really are. I’ll start with Bri, who’s with us – her initial trio experience started at Chemeketa Community College, so she’s gonna tell a little bit more about her story. They work with high school students and middle school, but in a college environment too. Just because you managed to get into a higher education institution, doesn’t necessarily mean you have the tools and experience around you, and your family or community to navigate those systems. So the Chemeketa Community College TRIO staff there, they are just extraordinary at creating a place of belonging and helping students feel like they have advocates to help them navigate the entire system. So they work with a broad spectrum of high school students, transitioning them in, obviously with students in community college, and then those who are looking to transfer and continue their education.

That’s just one example. It’s sometimes a challenge, explaining TRIO, because it’s a large federal grants, federal funding that does work in the communities. It kind of does it so [seamlessly], you don’t always realize they’re there, that it even has a TRIO brand. They just kind of fit in with whatever ecosystem that community requires to help these students.

Miller: Bri, when did you first become aware of TRIO?

Eck: So I actually got really lucky and I came across an email for TRIO before I started my first term at Chemeketa. And I was like, “this is super great, I have no idea what I’m doing and I could really use some help navigating these processes.” So I applied for the program and TRIO has been with me every step of the way since.

Miller: What an example of how that first TRIO program helped you when you were in community college?

Eck: So I am a proud Ford Family Foundation Opportunity scholar. They have so graciously helped to pay for my education at Oregon State. This is a scholarship that I would not have known about without the people at Chemeketa TRIO. And honestly, even if I had known about it, I don’t think that I would have applied for it because I just didn’t believe in myself in that kind of way. So the people at the TRIO really pushed me, they coached me and helped me every step of the way through that process. Now, here I am. And that’s just one small thing that they have done for me.

Miller: As we heard from Matt, one of the unifying themes from the beginning for these programs was to help first generation college students. Do you fall in that category?

Bisek: Yeah, I’m considered first-generation because neither of my parents had a bachelor’s degree when I was growing up or when I entered college when I was 29. My mom actually earned her degree the same year that I started, but by that point I had been independent for over a decade and I didn’t have any guidance navigating higher education. My dad actually never graduated high school. I’m actually a high school dropout myself as well – I got my GED when I was 28. So I come from a background where college just wasn’t really modeled or expected. Like most first-gen students, I had to kind of figure things out on my own.

Miller: Matt, in explaining its proposed elimination of TRIO, the Trump administration wrote that it is “a relic of the past, when financial incentives were needed to motivate institutions of higher education to engage with low income students and increase access.” Today, they wrote, “the pendulum has swung and access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means.” Essentially, this made sense before, we don’t need it now. What’s your response?

Bisek: I disagree. I think, in a perfect higher education environment, you wouldn’t need TRIO. We are here to fill gaps that our public systems are unequipped, particularly when it comes to underserved students, underrepresented students, first-gen, low income students. I think that there is a growing need, because when you don’t come from environments that understand and have never navigated these worlds … And I spent six years in high schools on the Oregon Coast out of Seaside and Warrenton in Astoria working with students, and you realize that when you come from these family backgrounds, like you don’t even know what is possible. There’s nothing to attain for when you only think there’s 12 jobs in the world. They are not even aware of what is possible for them.

If you believe in the higher education system and Pell grants, we are a safety net on those investments. We’re ensuring that the students who use all of those grant programs actually finish and complete the program. You can’t just write a check to students. And let’s not pretend like there’s enough Pell grant to go around and actually fund your education. So we’re here to help find extra funding as well. But support systems go way beyond just financial.

And it is frustrating because we have pretty robust data reporting requirements required by the federal government. And if the programs are not effective, if we don’t put a substantial percent of our students graduating high school, enrolling in college, graduating college, you lose your program. It’s actually a really efficiently run federal program, in that if you’re not doing a good enough job or not meeting the goals you set, you lose the grants and that funding finds different communities for them to try. So by the nature of us having 55 funding grants in Oregon, they exist because they’re effective at what they do. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t exist.

Miller: Another point that the administration has made is that if these programs are important and worthwhile, then states can do them and states can fund them. My understanding is that Oregon gets about $17 million a year now from this set of federal programs. Do you think that Oregon lawmakers would put state money to make up the difference?

Bisek: I don’t think they would. And I can say that as my whole job exists because the state of Oregon has provided about $5 million in funding to community-based organizations that do this work. We’ve got funded in the 2021 biennium, ‘23, there’s a bill now we’re trying to get community supports. They acknowledge if there was enough funds to go around, there would be more school counselors, there would be more advising staff at colleges and community colleges. There’s not capacity to do that internally. And they see the TRIO programs as a great way to leverage extra federal funds to help support the most vulnerable populations. So I can speak with direct experience that if that were the case, then they wouldn’t have funded our organization in the first place back in 2021.

Miller: Bri, how do you think your college experience would be different if it weren’t for TRIO?

Eck: I don’t think that I would be where I’m at at all without TRIO. I know that a big thing for TRIO is that they help students graduate. But TRIO goes way beyond that. I truly believe that it prepares us to be leaders in our community. It’s because of the support from TRIO that I’ve been able to tutor and mentor other students. I created community through a campus club, I’ve helped facilitate programs and events as a peer educator on my campus, I’ve been awarded scholarships for both undergraduate and graduate school. And I’ve also been engaged in research and advocacy efforts to continue to support and improve TRIO. I’m a leader because I’ve been supported by TRIO. And I also want to make it super clear that I am not an exception. I’m what happens when students are resourced.

Miller: Matt, we’re talking here about the proposed elimination of TRIO. But there was already a change at the federal level that has affected Oregon and California: the revocation of a waiver. What was this waiver and what will its revocation mean going forward?

Bisek: During the Biden administration, California had started this first, one of the regulatory rules around students who are eligible for TRIO programs is that you’re required to be a U.S. citizen. California approached the Biden administration and Department of Education and asked through this pilot program if they could waive that regulation, and got it approved. So following in their example, Oregon and all the TRIO programs in Oregon submitted an application and was approved through the Biden administration.

It was not extra funding, it didn’t change any elements of how we operated our program. We still have restrictions where we cannot provide any kind of direct grant aid, stipends or funds to undocumented students. But it waived that regulation, so when serving students, based on recommendations from the Department of Education, we no longer had to ask for a Social Security number or for citizenship during the application process for students.

So when that waiver was revoked, basically immediately we had to take all our programs who had been serving students and kind of had shifted based on the prior recommendations, we just had to kind of revert it back and function as it were previously. They’re within their rights to revoke that and though it’s unfortunate, in Oregon here we’ve all been really strong supporters and have always worked side by side with these students, even prior to being able to actually enroll them in the program. So that was definitely initiated by our staff and our programs and we were more than happy to participate. And it is unfortunate that they wanted to revoke that.

Miller: Matt and Bri, thanks very much.

Bisek: Thank you.

Eck: Thank you so much.

Miller: Matt Bisek is the executive director of the Oregon TRIO Association. Bri Eck is a student representative on the Oregon TRIO Board, now a senior at Oregon State University.

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