Recommendation: The Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) should establish an ongoing process to proactively share information and best practices with states about programs it administers that are available to serve kin caregivers, especially in states with a relatively large share of grandparent caregivers. This could be achieved, for example, by leveraging regional office staff to provide additional assistance and information sharing, particularly related to kinship navigator programs. (Recommendation 1)

Agency: Department of Health and Human Services: Administration for Children and Families
Status: Open

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Recommendation: The Administrator for the Administration for Community Living (ACL) should establish an ongoing process to proactively share information and best practices with states about using National Family Caregiver Support Program (NFCSP) funds to serve older relative caregivers of children, especially in states with a relatively large share of grandparent caregivers. This could be achieved, for example, by leveraging regional office staff to share information from states and area agencies on aging that have successfully used this program to serve older relative caregivers. (Recommendation 2)

Agency: Department of Health and Human Services: Administration for Community Living
Status: Open

Comments: When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Recommendation: The Secretary of HHS, in consultation with the Council on Economic Mobility, should make information that would assist state and local entities in developing and implementing two-generation poverty reduction approaches readily available across federal programs and offices. (Recommendation 1)

Agency: Department of Health and Human Services
Status: Open

Comments: HHS agreed with this recommendation. The agency stated that through its coordination of the Council on Economic Mobility it will promote poverty reduction approaches that aim to provide more integrated, person-centered service delivery. It will also work to identify opportunities for collaboration, promising practices, and successful models that promote economic mobility and will develop strategies for promoting them, such as through technical assistance. We will monitor the progress of these efforts.

Recommendation: The Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education should correctly calculate its CCAMPIS program persistence rate and cost per persisting student measures. (Recommendation 1)

Agency: Department of Education
Status: Open

Comments: Education disagreed with this recommendation as it believes the currently reported persistence data are sufficiently accurate to support effective program management and oversight. In February 2020, Education noted that it was reviewing the concerns raised by GAO and taking action to address confirmed errors in its persistence calculations. Specifically, Education said it would correct a formula error in its spreadsheet and include students who transferred to another school as persisting and planned to publish corrected data. Further, it said that it was exploring the feasibility of developing a cohort model for its persistence rate measure. We appreciate the steps Education is taking to ensure that it is correctly calculating its program persistence measures. To close this recommendation, Education should provide its corrected calculations, as well as any publication with corrected persistence measures, to GAO to review and confirm that Education has corrected all of the errors we identified.

Recommendation: The Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education should either collect the CCAMPIS participant enrollment data needed to calculate a standard 3-year graduation rate or accurately define and calculate a different college completion measure. (Recommendation 2)

Agency: Department of Education
Status: Open

Comments: As of February 2020, Education stated that it continues to disagree with this recommendation, noting that more analysis is needed to determine whether it is appropriate to develop a more rigorous graduation rate measure for the CCAMPIS program. As we stated in our report, we recognize that collecting the enrollment data needed to calculate the standard graduation rate could place a burden on grantee schools. Our recommendation included the option to define a different college completion measure and calculate it correctly. Education reported that it will redefine its current graduation rate to be a different college completion measure and the agency will clarify the description of this metric in its information on CCAMPIS graduation rates. While the new graduation rate definition proposed by Education responds to this recommendation, Education's formula does not accurately calculate this redefined graduation rate measure. To close this recommendation, Education should correct the formula for its revised graduation rate measure and provide the updated formula and data to confirm that its calculations are accurate.

Recommendation: The Chief Operating Officer of Federal Student Aid should encourage schools—through appropriate means, such as the Federal Student Aid Handbook—to inform students via school websites about the availability of the dependent care allowance and how to request the allowance. (Recommendation 3)

Agency: Department of Education
Status: Open

Comments: While Education agreed with the spirit of this recommendation, it disagreed with the recommendation itself due to concerns that an increased emphasis on the availability of the dependent care allowance could lead to additional borrowing that might not be appropriate for all students based on their financial circumstances. To respond to the recommendation, Education told us in February 2020 that it has added a note to the 2019-2020 FSA Handbook that, when counseling students, schools should make clear the availability of the allowance and how to request it. Adding this language to the handbook is certainly helpful, but does not fully implement GAO's recommendation. Encouraging schools to provide this information to students who proactively contact a school's financial aid office to discuss their finances will likely make this information available to a relatively small number of students; however, it does nothing to make this information more broadly available to all students who may benefit from it. We are not recommending that schools should encourage all student parents to borrow more to pay for child care. Instead, we recommend that Education encourage schools to make students aware of this potential option-which federal law makes available to students-via school websites to allow them to make informed financial decisions based on their personal circumstances. We will close this recommendation when Education takes additional actions to encourage schools to make this information more broadly available to students on their websites.