Programs for Land-Grant Schools

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the amount and source of funding for land-grant schools. GAO noted that: (1) most of the Department of Agriculture's funding for land grant schools is administered by the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES); (2) 74 percent of CSREES funding for post secondary schools comes from programs catering to land-grant schools or affiliated state agricultural experiment stations; (3) most CSREES funding is allocated by formula, but 26 percent of it is available to both land-grant and non-land-grant schools on a competitive basis; (4) the largest source of revenue for tribal colleges comes from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which requested $29.7 million for the program for fiscal year (FY) 1996; and (5) for FY 1996, four Department of Education programs with budgets totalling $326.6 million are being targeted for historically black colleges and universities regardless of their land-grant status and two other programs with budgets totalling $14.1 million are being targeted for tribal colleges.