Government Questions Effectiveness Of STEM Expenditures
About $2.8 billion from nearly every federal cabinet department went into 207 education programs designed to increase and improve the teaching of science, technology, engineering and math. But one equation no one has solved is what we get for our investment, the Government Accountability Office reported in “Higher Education: Federal STEM Programs and Related Trends.”
Community colleges benefit from 58 of the programs, but only one is exclusively targeted toward them, the new $250 million Community College/Community Based Job Training Grant Initiative from the Department of Labor. The Department of Energy also paid $605,000 in fiscal year 2004 to the Community College Institute of Science and Technology.
But the agencies overseeing the programs “reported little about their effectiveness,” GAO wrote.
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