RIPON — The Trump Administration has proposed cutting funding for TRIO programs, which staff at Ripon College say will negatively impact their students.
- President Trump’s recommends $163 billion in federal spending cuts.
- TRIO programming includes Student Support Services at Ripon College, which offers resources for students that are low-income, first generation or have disabilities.
- Dan Krhin, director of SSS at Ripon College, says cutting the program will be “tragic”.
Each year at Ripon College, 160 students use the Student Support Services. SSS is a branch of the federally funded TRIO program, which is meant to help first-generation and low-income students graduate college.
Logan Meyer graduated from Ripon in 2023. He’s a first-generation college student from a rural Wisconsin city. He says he used SSS throughout his college career.
“I don’t know where I’d be without SSS,” he says.
Meyer says because he’s the first person in his immediate family to graduate college, he didn’t have anyone to offer insight into secondary education.
“You don’t know what you know until you get there,” he says.
Meyer used SSS to apply to Ripon, participate in a peer contact program, find tutors and attend a research program in Virginia.
Meyer is still using SSS to apply to medical school.
“They’re here for you the whole time,” he says. “Having somebody there who can guide you through the whole process, it really brings down my anxiety, just knowing there was always someone in my corner that I could turn to.”
In a letter released from the Executive Office of the President earlier this month, President Trump proposed a complete cut to TRIO program funding.
“TRIO and GEAR UP are a relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) to engage with low-income students and increase access,” the letter says. “A renewed focus on academics and scholastic accomplishment by IHEs, rather than engaging in woke ideology with Federal taxpayer subsidies, would be a welcome change for students and the future of the Nation.”
Meyer says cutting the program will negatively impact students like himself.
“I think that’s such a mistake,” he says. “It’s so influential to have more people go to college.”
Dan Krhin has been the director of Ripon SSS for 40 years. He says getting into college is not any easier for first-generation or low-income students.
“We work with these students everyday,” he says. “Just because it’s a different year, does not mean their needs are different from 20, 25 years ago.”
Krhin says they serve 160 students at Ripon each year and that the program is much more than applying and getting accepted into college.
“We actually continue to serve students by helping them get into graduate school… I mean there’s so many things that we do here that are high impact for students,” he says. “These programs are very very comprehensive in a student's life.”
Krhin says he’s hopeful the proposed cuts won’t be upheld.
“These proposals to cut this funding would be tragic, really, for some of our students,” he says. “These students are good students, but they didn't know how the system operates to get to that point in their career. They needed this kind of information, guidance and support to get through college.”
Ripon College SSS was granted a five-year grant of $1.4 million in 2020.
The letter from the Trump administration also reads:
“The recommended funding levels result from a rigorous, line-by-line review of FY 2025 spending, which was found to be laden with spending contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life.”
