Great Grants Need Far Away Deadlines

As many readers were, I was struck by the IHE story about roughly half of the recent Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grants earmarked for Workforce Pell programs going to four-year colleges, despite community colleges’ longstanding history of workforce programs.

I had been even more struck by the revelation a few weeks ago that none—zero—of the FIPSE grants around civil discourse went to a community college.

Having been involved in putting together our own application, though, I can attest that one contributing factor may have been the incredibly tight timeline for applications. They often force less-than-optimal decisions.

Applying for grants like these requires ensuring that you can align your promises and goals with the measurable outcomes the funder wants, within a short timeframe, without overtaxing your resources, within confines of federal and state law (“supplement, not supplant”) and collective bargaining agreements, and hiring highly qualified people who don’t mind that the clock is ticking on their jobs.

In other words, they take time. That’s a lot of boxes to check. It’s easier when you have a bevy of full-time, well-practiced grant writers on staff, which most community colleges don’t.

When grant timelines are unreasonably tight, colleges are left with two unappealing options: either slap something together quickly and hope for the best, or skip it. The former doesn’t really lend itself to shared governance, which requires time, and the latter isn’t helpful.

In a more perfect world, of course, public colleges would be sufficiently well-funded, with sufficient autonomy, that they could be more thoughtful about which grants to pursue and which to skip. But when health insurance costs increase by double-digit percentages annually and public funding is flat at best, grants become crucial to enable projects that otherwise wouldn’t happen.

Daniel Greene’s book The Promise of Access is particularly good on this. It came out a few years ago, and it focuses on public libraries, but the dynamics it captures translate easily. When leaders of an institution devoted to a sort of humanist striving are subjected to sustained austerity, they often resort to what he calls “bootstrapping.” That often involves finding grants and other external funders and trying to bridge their interests and ambitions with your institution’s mission. Over time, funders exert a sort of gravitational pull, simply because the organization doesn’t have the resources to function without them.

Increasingly, grants with short deadlines come with “sustainability” requirements. In effect, these are guarantees by the recipient that they’ll keep doing what the grant enabled them to do even after the grant runs out. The theory behind sustainability requirements is understandable, but it’s hard to build long-term sustainability plans in thoughtful ways when you only have a few weeks. Sustainability requirements also assume a universe in which grants aren’t necessary, which I agree would be lovely, but often isn’t the case.

Grants can be great. One way to make it easier for them to be great is to build in deadlines far enough in the future that applicants can actually plan. More thorough planning would increase the chances of finding good fits and avoiding awkward surprises. It seems like that should be easy enough, but somehow …