As I predicted last January, the Department of Education has issued the FY ’14 Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR-UP) RFP. While it took longer than I thought, the RFP butterfly has finally emerged from the hidden DOE cocoon. My previous post asked: Why do federal agencies usually keep prospective RFP issuance dates for programs like GEAR UP a secret?
I don’t have any idea why DOE behaves this way, but it’s detrimental to applicants.
The GEAR UP RFP was not issued unit June 4 and the proposals are due July 7—conveniently just after the 4th of July holiday. This means that applicants only have about 30 days to complete a very complex proposal. If they (or, let’s be honest: you) actually want to enjoy the 4th of July weekend, applicants really only have about three weeks to get the job done. If you’re a faithful GWC reader, however, you’d have known the GEAR-UP RFP was coming and could have been working on your proposal well in advance of the RFP being issued.
By the way, GEAR-UP is similar to the many TRIO Programs.* While the various TRIO programs have differing approaches, they all share the same basic goal: to increase the number of low-income students, minority students and/or students with disabilities completing high school, as well as earn a college degree. GEAR-UP is intended to help the same target groups “gear up” for postsecondary education through after school academic enrichment activities during middle and high school.
Continuing the self-congratulatory theme of this post, ACF just issued a huge RFP for the Early Head Start program. This bad boy has $650M up for grabs and 300 grants will be awarded for early childhood education providers. At least the deadline for EHS, August 20, is reasonable—unlike the psychotic GEAR UP deadline.
Last October, Jake predicted that the then-government shutdown and budget deal would lead to a Grantnado of RFPs, as the feds untangled the RFP logjam. The late issuance of the EHS RFP illustrates that the feds have to move money out of the door in any given fiscal year; FY ’14 is unusual because lots of big RFPs are still being issued relatively late in the fiscal year.
* When Jake taught upper division Technical Writing at the University of Arizona, he assigned writing a mock program plan for the Educational Opportunity Centers (EOCs) program—which is part of TRIO—primarily because the EOC RFP was on the street at the time and he’d just finished one, so he was very familiar with the RFP and program. As Jake wrote in this post, his students—all of whom were college juniors and seniors—were mostly unable to write coherent EOC program plans. Perhaps they would have done better if they’d been GEAR UP participants in high school.