A Quick Guide to Colleges and Universities how to Apply for U.S. Department of Education Title V and Title III grants.
By Dr. Pelham Mead
I had the good fortune to work on a Title V Hispanics Serving Institutions grant for five years and this is what I learned.
The Title V Grant is limited to Public and Catholic Universities and Colleges that have more than 25% of Hispanic Student enrolled. South Pacific students are allowed to be included. The grant I worked on was for. small Catholic College in the Bronx that had fallen behind the times technology-wise. They got 1.1 million dollars over five years. A Dean of Students wrote the grant but left on medical leave and never came back.
In order to apply for a Title V grant a College has to get together two or three head administrators and Professors to lay out the needs and goals of the College. The proposal has to start the year before with submission before Dec. of the year. The awards are announced June of the following year and go into existence on Oct. 1st the beginning of the Federal year.
It is a good idea to go on the Federal US Dept. of Education web online and read some of the past College and University submissions and copy some of the approaches.
The Title III Federal grant is for larger Universities of ten or twenty thousand or more and is highly competitive because large universities can hire top notch grant writers to target this grant. I began this job as The Senior Instructional Technologist of a Title III technology grant to upgrade the faculty in instructional technology and establish a new Faculty Training Lab in the Library building. St. Johns University where I was hired won 2.5 million dollars for five years. Actually, they were denied at first and went on a weekend seminar to study how they could improve their grant proposal. In the middle of the weekend they got a call that a University that had won had turned the grant down because it did not have the original grant people on board anymore. I tutored 55 professors in technology in the classroom, electronic whiteboards, pod casting and video taping lectures as well as MS Suite programs Powerpoint using animation and sound effects to bring the presentations alive. Blackboard was a big help in starting online courses which were rare in 2006. Obviously, the same application rules apply for Title III by applying the year before. Let me make that clearer. Getting the writers and source people together is the first difficult task. Putting down a list of College or University needs takes even longer and then committing to specific goals and hiring people that can do the job is also difficult.
When Two other professors and I wanted to write a Title V supplemental grant called a Cooperative grant we started in the spring of 2003 and submitted our Grant Proposal at the last minute because we had to make five copies and deliver them to Washington before the deadline. We were rejected but the reviewer told us where we needed to improve on the grant and we stated all over and re-submitted for $600,000 the next year and won. What a relief? Now we had to train Faculty from the Manhattan Community College a block from the World Trade Center. Their Nursing Faculty came to our campus for a one week seminar to train with our highly trained Nurse staff. It made for a good student feed from their two year college to our four year college.
