By Hollie Daniels, Tia Monahan, and Megan Anderson
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about unprecedented challenges for higher education, with community colleges and their students being profoundly impacted. In response, Congress passed a series of bills that injected recovery funds into various parts of the U.S. economy, including billions of dollars to postsecondary institutions through the Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) Fund. Of the $75 billion directed to institutions of higher education through the HEER Fund, over $24.7 billion was awarded to 976 community colleges or districts between 2020 and 2023. Of the $24.7 billion awarded, over 95% has been spent.
In 2022, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences funded the Accelerating Recovery in Community Colleges (ARCC) Network to conduct research on efforts to help community colleges and their students recover from the pandemic. A new interactive Tableau dashboard developed for the ARCC Network presents publicly available award and spending data on HEER Funds from the Education Stabilization Fund (ESF) Transparency Portal. Users are able to examine funding and spending trends at community colleges across the country by region, state, and other institutional characteristics.
Explore pandemic relief funding for community colleges in an interactive Tableau dashboard.
The dashboard’s four pages provide context on HEER awards and different ways to explore the data. The background page details information on the HEER funding program and summarizes overall funding and spending through the original spending deadline of June 30, 2023. The national overview page presents award and spending information and allows users to explore HEER data by state, Carnegie classification, region, and locale. The institutional exploration page allows users to explore award and spending amounts at one or more institutions, as well as student demographic information imported from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Users can also filter by city, state, Carnegie classification, region, locale, institutional designation, and enrollment. Finally, we include technical notes on our sample of community colleges, as well as specific designations and terms from the ESF Transparency Portal referenced in the dashboard.
A forthcoming report—expected in early 2024—will analyze amounts awarded and spent by community colleges across all student, institutional, and other categories and explore spending patterns by institutional characteristics. The report will also discuss implications for unspent funds and highlight critical questions that remain unanswered, including how funds were spent and their perceived efficacy. An accompanying project led by CCRC and the Public Policy Institute of California seeks to address many of these unanswered questions through an institutional survey sent to community colleges in six states. The survey explores HEER funding at community colleges, including how colleges chose to spend institutional dollars, how colleges distributed and targeted emergency aid to students, what supports colleges have planned to continue to provide and how they plan to fund them, and colleges’ concerns regarding the end of these emergency funds. Survey results will be published in a report expected in spring 2024.
