By MARTY LEVINE
A federally funded program that has provided community, advising, academic tutoring and more to 250 first-generation and low-income students at Pitt annually for 53 years is in danger of ending due to Department of Education cuts.
But Michele Lagnese, head of Student Support Services (SSS) — one of the programs that make up TRIO –– says parts of TRIO have been threatened before, yet survived, thanks to support from members of Congress of all stripes. The budget proposed by the Trump administration in early May calls for total elimination of these programs.
The many student success stories from the program have created some of its best advocates, Lagnese says.
Her office works to attract students who may not even know they qualify, or realize that the program exists. Students eligible for Pell grants meet the family income threshold, while those whose parents do not have four-year degrees also qualify for SSS.
The program also can serve those with disabilities — as long as a third of those students are designated low-income too.
“We always receive more applications for the program than we can accommodate,” Lagnese notes, necessitating a wait list.
Still, among Pitt’s thousands of students, the SSS-eligible group is “relatively small, so when they are in the program like this it builds community for them. Everybody faces the same challenges: ‘I’m not the only one here who is working all these jobs.’”
SSS offers peer mentoring and help with career exploration and planning, alongside tutoring and advising, and assistance locating and applying for financial aid and graduate schools. Its latest five-year report, for students from 2020 to 2025, noted that 90 percent of participants stayed in good academic standing, and 90 percent either moved on to the next academic year or graduated. SSS serves students from all schools at Pitt.
TRIO was originally made up of three programs (hence the name) but today there are eight; Student Support Services; the McNair Scholars Program; Talent Search (teaching middle- and high-school students about college admissions and financial aid); Educational Opportunity Centers for adult learners; and three Upward Bound programs with separate focuses, including STEM education and veterans. There are more than 900 TRIO SSS programs at universities and colleges in the U.S.
“There are so many stories,” Lagnese says. “We’ve had students before who will make it all the way to their senior year — they will get within six credits of graduating,” and then a family emergency will force them back home, with no chance of returning.
James Scott, an academic advisor for SSS, noticed one such student’s absence and reached out to her, Lagnese says. He worked with the dean’s office at the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, home of this student’s major, to help locate courses from universities near the student’s home that could fulfill her Pitt degree program.
“She had given up,” Lagnese says of the student. “She hadn’t even thought of notifying the University or making her situation known. But because of James reaching out, she finished her degree program and graduated.”
She recalls another student who was inspired to pursue a neuroscience science degree by a relative with a disability. “She was very shy when she came in here,” Lagnese says. “It was very difficult for her to connect with other people. She was determined to be a neuroscience major but she had to work hard in that major to succeed.”
After working with the SSS team, she became a tutor of other SSS students. “Because she had the empathy of knowing what it was like to struggle, she was able to help many other students succeed in these science classes,” Lagnese says, “letting them know, ‘I know this seems impossible now. You failed your first exam. You think it is done. This happened to me.’”
This same student also earned an undergraduate research post and became a peer mentor, working with a fellow SSS student to devise a presentation about research opportunities as an undergrad.
“There are students who we work with here who say there is no way they could have finished their degree without knowing they could come here and get connected to services,” Lagnese says.
At Pitt, says James Scott, “all students may go through similar types of things” — doubts and stressors — but for first-generation and low-income students, “it exacerbates the issues, because the networks they have to talk through this, they aren’t there.”
He recalls one SSS student who had a chronic illness “on top of not having enough money each semester. … Like many of our students, the parents couldn’t offer to do anything for him.” Then he experienced a death in the family while at Pitt.
SSS advisors helped him stay in school, providing financial aid advice, help with handling missed classes due to illness, and even showing him “how to make himself a marketable person” as a pre-med student. He recently got into medical school.
Another SSS student came from a larger city where she had recently lost several members of her family, one to illness, but others to violence, Scott says. “She was smart enough to get through anywhere but she had a very difficult time just getting through without people able to talk her through,” due to this history.
And she was entering Pitt’s philosophy program — a top-ranked national department. SSS resources “let her get to where she wanted to go” — on to graduate school. The SSS program, Scott says, is ultimately about “getting them to feel like they belong and there are other people like them.”
“The thought of losing the program or not having the program funded anymore is a tough thing to think about,” Lagnese says. “When you have a program that is so strong, even to take it away for a year or two and try to reestablish it, it is a tough task.”
Each grant reapplication, every five years, includes Pitt’s own goals for success, which the program staff itself sets. “These grants are so accountable — we submit reports each year to the Department of Education. We always achieve our objectives.”
The SSS program ends Aug. 31 unless it is gets new funding. Pitt had already submitted its newest proposal last summer and is waiting to hear a response.
Lobbying Congress has always been part of maintaining these federal grants, Lagnese says — she does it, her staff does it, and program alumni do it, as well as the national Council for Opportunity in Education, of which Pitt is a member.
“We advocate for the program all the time,” she says. “These programs have bipartisan support in Congress. ... regardless of what side of the aisle you are on, they can see the benefit to their districts and state.
“Some people, when they saw that TRIO programs were not included in the president’s budget proposal for 2026, they thought that we are ending. ... That’s not true. It’s going to take a long road for the Congress” to finish and pass the budget.
And in any case, she adds, “This has happened many times before in history, with a federally funded program.” She recalls, in the 2005-06 fiscal year, then-president George W. Bush proposing to eliminate Upward Bound and Talent Search, but Congress put them back in “because of the advocacy of the TRIO community and the bipartisan support that we have.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
Have a story idea or news to share? Share it with the University Times.