MOREHEAD, Ky. — The summer after ninth grade, Zoey Griffith found herself in an unfamiliar setting: a dorm on the Morehead State University campus.

There, she’d spend the months before her sophomore year taking classes in core subjects including math and biology and electives like oil painting. 

For Griffith, it was an opportunity, but a scary one. “It was a big deal for me to live on campus at the age of 14,” she said. Morehead State is about an hour from her hometown of Maysville. “I was nervous, and I remember that I cried the first time that my dad left me on move-in day.”

Her mother became a parent as a teenager and urged her daughter to avoid the same experience. Griffith’s father works as a mechanic, and he frowns upon the idea of higher education, she said. 

And so college back then seemed a distant and unlikely idea.

But Griffith’s stepsister had introduced her to a federal program called Upward Bound. It places high school students in college dorms during the summer, where they can take classes and participate in workshops on preparing for the SAT and financial literacy. During the school year, students get tutoring and work on what are called individual success plans.

It’s part of a group of federal programs, known as TRIO, aimed at helping low-income and first-generation students earn a college degree, often becoming the first in their families to do so. 

So, thanks to that advice from her stepsister, Kirsty Beckett, who’s now 27 and pursuing a doctorate in psychology, Griffith signed up and found herself in that summer program at Morehead State. Now, Griffith is enrolled at Maysville Community and Technical College, with plans to become an ultrasound technician.

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TRIO, once a group of three programs — giving it a name that stuck — is now the umbrella over eight, some dating back to 1965. Together, they serve roughly 870,000 students nationwide a year.

It has worked with millions of students and has bipartisan support in Congress. Some in this part of the Appalachian region of Kentucky, and across the country, worry about students who won’t get the same assistance if President Donald Trump ends federal spending on the program. 

A White House budget proposal would eliminate spending on TRIO. The document says “access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means” and puts the onus on colleges to recruit and support students.

Advocates note that the programs, which cost roughly $1.2 billion each year, have a proven track record. Students in Upward Bound, for example, are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than other students from some of the nation’s poorest households, according to the Council for Opportunity in Education. COE is a nonprofit that represents TRIO programs nationwide and advocates for expanded opportunities for first-generation, low-income students.

For the high school class of 2022, 74 percent of Upward Bound students enrolled immediately in college — compared with only 56 percent of high school graduates in the bottom income quartile. 

Upward Bound is for high school students, like Griffith. Another TRIO program, Talent Search, helps middle and high school students, without the residential component. One called Student Support Services (SSS) provides tutoring, advising and other assistance to at-risk college students. Another program prepares students for graduate school and doctoral degrees, and yet another trains TRIO staff.

A 2019 study found that after four years of college, students in SSS were 48 percent more likely to complete an associate’s degree or certificate, or transfer to a four-year institution, than a comparable group of students with similar backgrounds and similar levels of high school achievement who were not in the program. 

“TRIO has been around for 60 years,” said Kimberly Jones, the president of COE. “We’ve produced millions of college graduates. We know it works.”

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Yet Education Secretary Linda McMahon and the White House refer to the programs as a “relic of the past.” 

Jones countered that census data shows that “students from the poorest families still earn college degrees at rates far below that of students from the highest-income families,” demonstrating continued need for TRIO.

McMahon is challenging that and pushing for further study of those TRIO success rates. In 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that even though the Education Department collects data on TRIO participants, “the agency has gaps in its evidence on program effectiveness.” The GAO criticized the Education Department for having “outdated” studies on some TRIO programs, and no studies at all for others. Since then, the department has expanded its evaluations of TRIO. 

During a Senate subcommittee hearing in June, McMahon acknowledged “there is some effectiveness of the programs, in many circumstances.”

Still, she said there is not enough research to justify TRIO’s total cost. “That’s a real drawback in these programs,” McMahon said. 

Now, she is asking lawmakers to eliminate TRIO spending after this year and has already canceled some previously approved TRIO grants. 

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“What are we supposed to do, especially here in eastern Kentucky?” asked David Green, a former Upward Bound participant who is now marketing director for a pair of Kentucky hospitals.

Green lives in a region that has some of the nation’s highest rates of unemployment, cancer and opioid addiction. “I mean, these people have big hearts, they want to grow,” he added. Cutting these programs amounts to “stifling us even more than we’re already stifled.”

Green described his experience with TRIO at Morehead State in the mid-1980s as “one of the best things that ever happened to me.” 

He grew up in a home without running water in Maysville, a city of about 8,000 people. It was on a TRIO trip to Washington, D.C., he recalled, that he stayed in a hotel for the first time. Green remembers bringing two suitcases so he could pack a pillow, sheets and comforter — unaware the hotel room would have its own.

He met students from other towns and with different backgrounds. Some became lifelong friends. Green learned table manners, the kind of thing often required in business settings. After college, he was so grateful for TRIO that he became one of its tutors, working with the next generation of students. 

TRIO’s all-encompassing nature makes it unique among college access programs, said Tom Stritikus, the president of Occidental College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles. He was previously president of Fort Lewis College, a public liberal arts school in Colorado with a large Native American student population. At both institutions, Stritikus said, he witnessed the effectiveness of TRIO’s methods, which he described as a “soup to nuts” menu of services for at-risk students trying to be the first in their families to earn degrees.

Jones, of the Council for Opportunity in Education, said she is cautiously optimistic that Congress will continue funding TRIO, despite the Trump administration’s request. The programs serve students in all 50 states. According to the COE, about 34 percent are white, 32 percent are Black, 23 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3 percent are Native American. TRIO’s guidelines require that a majority of participants come from families making less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four living in the contiguous United States, that’s a max of $48,225 a year.

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In May, Rep. Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, called TRIO “one of the most effective programs in the federal government,” which, he said, is supported by “many, many members of Congress.” 

In June, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia and a former TRIO employee, spoke about its importance to her state. TRIO helps “a student that really needs the extra push, the camaraderie, the community,” she said. “I’ve gone to their graduations, and been their speaker, and it’s really quite delightful to see how far they’ve come, in a short period of time.”

TRIO survived, with its funding intact, when the Senate appropriations committee approved its budget last month. The House is expected to take up its version of the annual appropriations bill for education in early September. Both chambers ultimately have to agree on federal spending, a process that could drag on until December, leaving TRIO’s fate in Congress uncertain. 

While lawmakers debate its future, the Trump administration could also delay or halt TRIO funding on its own. Earlier this year, the administration took the unprecedented step of unilaterally canceling about 20 previously approved new and continuing TRIO grants.

At Morehead State, leaders say the university — and the region it serves — need the boost it receives from TRIO: While roughly 38 percent of American adults have earned at least a bachelor’s degree, in Kentucky, that figure is only 16 percent. And, locally, it’s 7 percent, according to Summer Fawn Bryant, the director of TRIO’s Talent Search programs at the university. 

TRIO works to counter the stigma of attending college that still exists in parts of eastern Kentucky, Bryant said. A student from a humble background who is considering college, she said, might be scolded with the phrase: Don’t get above your raisin’.

“A parent may say it,” Bryant said. “A teacher may say it.” 

She added that she’s seen time and again how these programs can turn around the lives of young students facing adversity. 

Students like Beth Cockrell, an Upward Bound alum from Pineville, Ky., who said her mom struggled with parenting. “Upward Bound stepped in as that kind of co-parent and helped me decide what my major was going to be.” 

Cockrell went on to earn three degrees at Morehead State and has worked as a teacher for the past 19 years. She now works with students at her alma mater and teaches third grade at Conkwright Elementary School, about an hour away.

In a few years, 17-year-old Upward Bound student Isaac Bocook plans to join the teaching ranks too — as a middle school social studies teacher. Bocook said he was indecisive about what to study after high school, but he finally figured it out after attending a career fair at Morehead State’s historic Button Auditorium. 

Bocook lives in Lewis County, with just under 13,000 residents and a single public high school. At Morehead State’s TRIO program, Bocook met teenagers from across the entire region, which he said improved his social skills. TRIO also helped him with all kinds of paperwork on the pathway to adulthood. Filling out financial aid forms. Writing scholarship applications. Crafting a resume.

“I’m just truly grateful to have TRIO, as sort of like a hand to hold,” Bocook said.

His need for guidance is similar to what students at Morgan County High School in West Liberty, Kentucky, experience, said Lori Keeton, the school guidance counselor. The challenge facing these first-generation students, she said, is that “you just simply don’t know what you don’t know.”

As the sole counselor for 550 students, Keeton doesn’t have time to help each student navigate the complex college-application process and said she worries that some of her students will apply to fewer colleges, or no colleges at all, if TRIO disappears. 

TRIO’s Talent Search program serves about 100 students at her high school, and roughly another dozen are part of Upward Bound. Each program has a dedicated counselor who visits regularly to guide and assist students.

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Sherry Adkins, an eastern Kentucky native who attended TRIO more than 50 years ago and went on to become a registered nurse, said efforts to cut TRIO spending ignore the long-term benefits. “Do you want all of these people that are disadvantaged to continue like that? Where they’re taking money from society? Or do you want to help prepare us to become successful people who pay lots of taxes?”

As Washington considers TRIO’s future, program directors like Bryant, at Morehead State, press forward. She has preserved a text message a former student sent her two years ago to remind her of what’s at stake.

After finishing college, the student was attending a conference on child abuse when a presenter showed a slide that included the quote: “Every child who winds up doing well has had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.”

“Forever thankful,” the student texted Bryant, “that you were that supportive adult for me.”

Contact editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, securely on Signal at NirviShah.14 or via email at shah@hechingerreport.org. 

This story about TRIO was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.