30D Comment Response

Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP)

Summary of Public Comments on

Proposed Changes to the 2024 Final Performance Report (FPR)

Following 30 Day Review Period

On November 21, 2023, the Department of Education (Department) published a Notice of Proposed Information Collection Request (Notice) in the Federal Register inviting comments by December 21, 2023, on the proposed final performance report (FPR) for the Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) program. One respondent submitted comments and a summary of our responses is below.

RESPONSES TO COMMENTS

COMMENT: Commenter requested that we phase in questions 14 and 15.

RESPONSE: No changes are being made.

Question 14 is for all grantees to fill out regardless of waiver status and it allows for estimates where exact data may not have been tracked.

Question 15 is for any applicant that received a waiver. Given the commenters’ feedback, we have phased this question in so only applicants who received the waiver in 2019 or later will need to respond to this question. Beginning in 2019, the application package required waiver applicants to describe how eligible students would receive scholarships through other means and lets them know that they would have to report on the number of students who received scholarships and the average amount disbursed. The question also provides flexibility for estimates to be provided.

COMMENT: Commenter requested that we revisit the character count allocations and allow grantees a minimum of 3,000 characters (approximately one page of text) to respond to open-ended questions, and at least 5,000 characters to respond to questions #14a-c and #15c-d in Section III.

RESPONSE: These changes were made.

COMMENT: Commenter requested that question 18 be clarified to specify if the grantee is responding across all grant years or the final grant year.

RESPONSE: A sentence was added to clarify that they should report cumulative totals if available or, if they only have the final year data, that would be sufficient.

COMMENT: Commenter requested that questions 19 and 24 be optional in the first year of implementation.

RESPONSE: These changes were made, and these questions are optional for 2024.

COMMENT: Commenter asked that we ensure consistency between the on-line and paper versions.

RESPONSE: The paper version and the on-line version will be consistent, and respondents will be allowed to overwrite pre-populated data on the applicable questions.

COMMENT:  Commenter asked that we eliminate or limit the scope of questions 9, 10 and 17 because of burden and redundancy.

RESPONSE: No changes have been made. These questions are unchanged from the former FPR. The Department feels it is important to have some cumulative questions on the FPR looking back on the work of the entire performance period, instead of needing to compile the information together from various Annual Performance Reports.