FY26 Postsecondary Student Success Grant opens at $45M with a 32-day window

Community colleges, HBCUs, and other access-focused institutions have until June 29, 2026 to compete for a share of $45 million through the FY 2026 Postsecondary Student Success Grant (PSSG, CFDA 84.116M, opportunity ED-GRANT-26-038), per the grants.gov listing posted May 28. The Department of Education plans to make roughly nine awards, each between $2 million and $8 million, on a four-year project period.

A 32-day sprint after a year of program uncertainty

The Education Department's posting of ED-GRANT-26-038 on May 28 ends a long stretch of doubt about whether PSSG would run at all this fiscal year. The administration's FY 2026 budget request had proposed eliminating the program; a Senate appropriations draft, by contrast, proposed adding $5 million to it. The notice now on grants.gov tracks neither extreme — it holds total available funding flat at $45 million, the same Congressional appropriation that funded the FY 2024 cycle, when the agency made seven awards across five states.

That settles the existential question and creates a new one. Applicants have 32 days from publication to assemble a competitive multi-year proposal. The compressed window is part of a pattern. The Department's other Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education competitions — Basic Needs for Postsecondary Students, Centers of Excellence for Veteran Student Success, the Rural Postsecondary and Economic Development Grant, and the Open Textbook Pilot — all posted on May 28 or May 29 with a June 23 deadline. PSSG sits in the same release wave but pushed its closing date back six days, a small concession to the program's heavier evaluation and data requirements.

Proposals designed and submitted in a month tend to look like proposals designed and submitted in a month. The institutions most likely to clear the bar this cycle are those that were already running, scaling, or refining the kind of evidence-based persistence and completion work PSSG asks grantees to test — and that already have an institutional research office, a third-party evaluator, and a fiscal sponsor able to move at the speed of a federal portal.

What ED-GRANT-26-038 actually requires

The notice keeps the PSSG mission language intact: improve postsecondary student outcomes — retention, transfer, credit accumulation, and completion — by leveraging data and implementing, scaling, and rigorously evaluating evidence-based activities. That phrasing matters because it sets the structure of every section reviewers will score.

Three operational details warrant attention before any narrative drafting begins.

Award ceiling and floor. Maximum award is $8 million; floor is $2 million. The actual award size will track project scope and evidence tier. Historically, the largest PSSG awards — the FY 2024 cycle topped out at $8 million across four years — went to scaling proposals built on at least moderate evidence.

Project period. Four years, consistent with prior cycles. Budgets should not flatten across years; reviewers expect ramp-up in Year 1, full operations in Years 2 and 3, and sustainability planning in Year 4.

Cost share required. Yes — and this is the line item that has historically eliminated small institutions before reviewers ever opened the project narrative. Document the source, the timing, and the allowability of the match before the first paragraph of narrative gets written.

Application questions go to Robyn Wood (robyn.wood@ed.gov) or Nemeka Mason-Clercin (nemeka.mason@ed.gov) at the Office of Postsecondary Education. Both are listed as program contacts on the grants.gov detail page.

Where community colleges have the strongest hand

PSSG eligibility under ED-GRANT-26-038 includes public and private institutions of higher education and 501(c)(3) nonprofits partnered with eligible IHEs. The program's design — student-outcome metrics, evidence-based intervention scaling, equity-of-completion framing — has consistently favored institutions serving large populations of first-generation, adult, and Pell-eligible students. Community colleges fit that profile better than any other sector.

Looking at the FY 2024 portfolio is the cleanest way to predict what reviewers reward. The agency funded seven projects across five states, with median award size near $6 million. Successful applicants leaned on the same handful of intervention archetypes:

• Proactive advising at scale, often coupled with predictive analytics on persistence-risk indicators.
• Co-requisite remediation in math and English, replacing developmental sequences that historically depressed transfer rates.
• Guided pathways and meta-major redesign, tied to specific labor-market completions rather than open-ended associate degrees.
• Targeted financial supports — emergency aid, microgrants, FAFSA completion infrastructure — embedded inside academic interventions rather than offered as standalone services.

Community colleges that have run any version of these models for two or more years now have something most four-year applicants cannot produce on a 32-day timeline: their own outcomes data, not borrowed evidence from someone else's evaluation.

The evidence question that will decide most applications

PSSG is, structurally, an evidence program. The notice asks applicants to identify the tier of evidence supporting their proposed activities and to design an evaluation rigorous enough to add to that base. ED-GRANT-26-038 does not redefine those tiers — the Department's standard hierarchy (strong, moderate, promising, demonstrates a rationale) still applies, and it still gets scored.

A few practical implications. Citing a What Works Clearinghouse intervention is not the same as having moderate evidence for your program. Reviewers look for a defensible chain from the cited study population to the population the applicant intends to serve. Adult learners at an urban community college are not the same study population as residential undergraduates at a flagship.

Promising evidence is enough to win. It is not enough to win on its own — but a promising-evidence proposal paired with a strong independent evaluator and a clean logic model has outscored moderate-evidence proposals with sloppy designs in past cycles.

The evaluation budget should be visible. Independent evaluators typically run 10 to 15 percent of total project cost on PSSG-scale awards. A proposal that buries the evaluator in indirect or assigns the work to internal institutional research staff signals to reviewers that the applicant is not serious about generating the next tier of evidence.

For institutions without an in-house evaluation partner, the next two weeks are the window. Established firms — MDRC, Abt Associates, RAND, regional REL contractors, university research centers — fill their PSSG slots fast once a notice drops.

The cost-share line that quietly disqualifies applicants

The notice requires cost sharing. The summary on grants.gov does not specify the percentage, but historical PSSG competitions have asked for non-federal contributions in the 10 to 25 percent range, and the full FY 2026 FIPSE PSSG Notice and Instructions document on grants.gov is the authoritative source for the FY26 figure. Two pieces of advice that reviewers in past cycles have flagged publicly are worth restating.

First, letters of commitment, not letters of support. A foundation, state agency, or system office that supports the work without naming a dollar figure and a year does not count as cost share. Documented, dated, dollar-specific commitments do.

Second, in-kind has to be allowable. Staff time on the project — including faculty release time and existing advisor capacity — counts only if it can be valued at a federally allowable rate and is not already being charged to another federal source. This is where Title III–funded staff frequently get applicants in trouble.

Smaller community colleges without development offices or system-level fundraising support often look to their state higher-ed agency or foundation partners to anchor the cost share. The closer to June 29 those conversations start, the more likely they are to fall apart.

What to do this week

If an institution is serious about a PSSG application under ED-GRANT-26-038, the next seven days matter more than the seven days before the deadline. The applicants who win competitions of this size have, by the end of week one, named a project director, confirmed an external evaluator, secured a written cost-share commitment, and identified the two or three interventions they will scale. Everything after that is drafting and budget refinement.

Granted tracks every active federal opportunity for community colleges and access-focused institutions, including the FIPSE family of grants posting alongside PSSG this month. Search active higher-education opportunities on Granted to pull the full FIPSE wave — Basic Needs, Veteran Student Success, Open Textbook, and Rural Postsecondary — into one shortlist with the PSSG entry, then filter by award ceiling, deadline, or eligibility. Coverage of each notice's evaluation criteria and absolute priorities continues on the Granted news desk as the supporting documents are published.

The Department posted ED-GRANT-26-038 on May 28. There is no extension language in the notice and no indication another cycle will run in FY 2027. For institutions that have been waiting to see whether PSSG would return, the answer is yes — and the answer expires June 29.