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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 58 / Monday, March 29, 2021 / Notices were subsequently designated as eligible for FY 2021.
Under Absolute Priority 2, the Department will provide funding to institutions that were eligible to receive funding under CRRSAA section 314a1 public and nonprofit IHEs participating in the title IV program but did not receive an award because they did not report student data in the 2018/
19 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System IPEDS data collection, which was the data used in calculating the formula awards for CRRSAA section 314a1.
Under Absolute Priority 3, the Department will provide funding to institutions that were eligible to receive funding under section 18004a1 of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act CARES Act, but did not receive an award because the applicant did not apply by the deadline, resulting from unsuccessful attempts to apply, or because the applicant failed to submit a complete application under the correct grants.gov funding opportunity number.
The Department will not accept applications from IHEs that we cannot verify have previously attempted to apply through grants.gov for a section 18004a1 grant.
Under Absolute Priority 4, the Department will fund branch campuses designated as eligible under titles III and V of the HEA according to the FY 2021
Eligibility Matrix but were not funded through CRRSAA section 314a2
either directly or through their parent institutions because the Department did not have the requisite data to calculate their allocations.
Under Absolute Priority 5, the Department seeks to fund institutions that can demonstrate that, because their institution merged after December 27, 2020 the date CRRSAA was enacted or had a recent change in HEA title IV
Program Participation Agreement PPA
effective date resulting in the institution being underfunded due to the formula methodology used to calculate allocations under CRRSAA section 314a1.
Under Absolute Priority 6, the Department invites applications from community colleges and institutions of higher education located in rural settings that serve a high percentage of low-income students and have experienced significant enrollment declines, indicating particularly acute institutional needs. According to the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity of Higher Education, the lowest income students in the United States face great obstacles paying for college and the impact of the COVID19
epidemic may compound the
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uncertainty such students face. . ..2
Under this priority, the Department has set two minimum thresholds for these institutions, both of which must be met:
1 Fifty percent or more of undergraduate students enrolled in Fall 2018 were Pell Grant recipients this will ensure that funds awarded under this priority are targeted to institutions that serve a high percent of low-income students; and 2 a 4.5 percent or more decline in student enrollment this will help to identify the IHEs that should be considered as having unmet need.
According to recent reports,3 several IHEs are experiencing significant declines in enrollment because of the pandemic; this is especially true at rural community colleges. According to a recently published report by the Association of Community College Trustees, Strengthening Rural Community College: Innovations and Opportunities, the coronavirus has exacerbated some of the social and economic challenges facing many rural communities, negatively impacting rural community colleges 4 and the students they serve. Therefore, the Department is also using this priority to target rural community colleges. Through this priority, the Department seeks to make awards to IHEs that meet the criteria set forth in absolute priority 6 to get additional financial aid to students to support their continued engagement and reengagement in postsecondary education.
Finally, the Department is establishing priority 7, to provide additional support to institutions with high percentages of graduate students.
Congress specified in CRRSAA section 314a3 that, in allocating funds to institutions with the greatest unmet need due to the coronavirus, the Department should consider institutions with large populations of graduate students. Accordingly, under this priority, the Department is awarding funds to eligible institutions for which graduate students are 90 percent or more of their student population. This threshold of 90 percent reflects the Departments goal of targeting funds to institutions with large graduate populations since the weighting of the 2 http pellinstitute.org/indicators/reports_
2020.shtml.
3 https nscresearchcenter.org/wp-content/
uploads/Covid19-TransferMobilityProgress-Final Fall2020.pdf.
4 Rush-Marlowe, R. 2021. Strengthening Rural Community Colleges: Innovations and Opportunities. Washington, DC Association of Community College Trustees. This paper may only be reproduced or disseminated, in whole or in part, with proper attribution and within terms of this Creative Commons license for noncommercial use:
https creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/.

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main CRRSSA formula toward Pell recipients meant that these institutions did not receive particularly large awards relative to the size of their student body.
However, because some standalone graduate schools may have small undergraduate offerings, we have chosen 90 percent as a threshold to ensure we do not exclude a college that is primarily a graduate institution with a limited amount of non-graduate programs.
Priorities: This notice contains seven absolute priorities. We are establishing these priorities for fiscal year FY 2021
grant competitions and any subsequent year in which we make awards from the list of unfunded applications from this competition, in accordance with section 437d1 of the General Education Provisions Act GEPA, 20 U.S.C.
1232d1.
Absolute Priorities: These priorities are absolute priorities. Under 34 CFR
75.105c3, we consider only applications that meet one of these priorities.
The Secretary intends to award grants under each of the absolute priorities.
Applicants must clearly identify the specific absolute priority that the proposed project addresses in the SAIHE Program Profile Information Form. Each applicant may submit only one application under this competition that addresses one absolute priority.
In selecting grantees across Absolute Priorities 17, the Department will fund each applicant according to the absolute priority for which it is applying. The allocation formula used for allocating funds will be specific to each priority.
Depending on the number of applications received for each of the priorities, the Department may prioritize one priority over another and may reduce funding across all priorities to fund the maximum number of applicants.
In calculating award amounts under each priority, the Department will apply the following:
For Absolute Priorities 1 and 4, the funds will be allocated based on the formula methodology that was used to calculate CRRSAA section 314a2
MSI/SIP allocations available at https
www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/
heerfiia2methodology.pdf.
For Absolute Priorities 2 and 5, the funds will be allocated based on the formula methodology that was used for CRRSAA section 314a1 available at https www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/
ope/314a1methodologyheerfii.pdf, while incorporating the data provided in the SAIHE Program Profile Information Form under these absolute priorities. In addition to the formula for
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