CCRC Loses $12M in Federal Grants

The Community College Research Center has lost access to funding from four federal grants collectively worth more than $12 million, the center’s director, Thomas Brock, said in a letter Tuesday. The cut was part of the Trump administration’s broader freeze on $400 million in federal funding at Columbia University over accusations that the institution didn’t do enough to response to antisemitism.

But Brock argued in the letter that “the terminations did nothing to address perceived problems at Columbia, nor did they challenge ‘woke’ ideology, as our projects were nonideological to begin with.”

CCRC is based at Teachers College, an education graduate school that became affiliated with the nearby Columbia University in 1898 but was founded independently in 1887 and remains “legally, administratively, and financially separate” from the Ivy League institution, Brock explained.

Still, when the federal antisemitism task force announced the funding cut, Teachers College, and therefore the CCRC, were affected. All four grants that were cut came from the Institute of Education Sciences. The now-terminated grants supported: 

• A study on whether work-study programs improve retention, degree completion and employment postgraduation.
• An analysis of how effective Virginia’s Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead program has been in helping low-income students access short-term training programs.
• An apprenticeship program that helps develop the next generation of state-level higher ed policy researchers.
• A network of six research groups studying ways to reverse post-pandemic enrollment declines.

It added to the blow CCRC had already experienced in February when the Department of Education canceled 10 contracts with Regional Educational Laboratories, which are also overseen by the IES, saying they were examples of “woke” government spending. The REL Northwest had signed a contract with CCRC to pilot a professional development program for community college faculty members.

“It is hard to overstate the importance of IES grants and contracts to a research center like CCRC,” said Brock, who was commissioner of the National Center for Education Research at IES from 2013 to 2018.

CCRC has appealed the decision to terminate the grants.

“We do not know how long the process will take,” Brock wrote, “but are hopeful that fair minds will rule in our favor.”