The Upward Bound program, which helps high school students from low-income families prepare for a college career, is resisting changes issued by the Department of Education. The department’s new proposal, the “final priority,” issued in June 2006, is a set of guidelines that will dictate who Upward Bound is permitted to accept into the program.
The Upward Bound program has been fighting similar adjustments for the past few years.
“They may be telling us that we can only take freshmen into the program and we’re fighting that now,” said Assistant Director of ETSU Upward Bound Susan Graves.
Since its inception in 1965, Upward Bound has been accepting high school freshmen and sophomores into the program.
Past and present students of ETSU Upward Bound are also concerned about the Department of Education’s new approach to recruiting. “I was accepted into Upward Bound as a sophomore in high school,” said Jessie Miller, an ETSU sophomore and alumna of Upward Bound. “If they hadn’t allowed me to join my sophomore year, I wouldn’t have had the great experience of being in the program.”
Students still actively involved in the program have concerns as well. “I appreciate what Upward Bound has done for me,” said Leya Martinez, an Elizabethton High School senior and four-year member of ETSU Upward Bound. “It would be a great disadvantage to students if they were only allowed to enter the program once. By giving them a second chance their sophomore year, they may have a better chance of making the cut.”
Not only will these new restrictions limit the ages of those accepted, but it will also require that Upward Bound staff recruit well over the number of students they plan to accept.
An evaluator will then decide, Graves said, which students can move on to the program and which will be placed in a control group and watched carefully by the evaluators.
Upward Bound personnel will use these new recruitment methods to enlist students for an experiment instead of the program. “That is not what they signed up for,” Martinez said. “I do not see a problem with the way Upward Bound selects their students.”
However, this is not the first time Upward Bound and its sister program, Talent Search, have been in danger of change or elimination. For the past few years the combination of the two programs, known as TRIO, has been subject to drastic budget cuts. These cuts have led to the elimination of several educational trips for the students.
“We’re still battling it, day to day,” said program specialist for ETSU Upward Bound Stephen Hendrix. “We’re getting ready to see next year’s budget and we’re waiting once again to see what the legislature says about the TRIO programs.”
Two out of 75 college programs reviewed by Congress actually receive funding once legislation has been passed, Hendrix said. “Every year we continue to present to Congress success records to prove that we are beneficial to the United States,” he said.
With funding being awarded elsewhere, Graves said the fight for money is a “constant struggle.” The decreases in financial support have brought the TRIO programs, which were created in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty, close to elimination nearly every fiscal year. “It seems like over the last few years, education has been taking cuts in funding,” he said.
Although representatives for the Department of Education say that their aim is to improve the program, the Council for Opportunity in Education reports that the Bush administration has tried for the past two years to eliminate Upward Bound.
These experiments and budget cuts compel those involved with Upward Bound to question how long their program will exist. “My guess is that we’re going to have to do what we’ve been doing for the past few years,” Hendrix said, “initially cut and then work our way back up to budget.

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