Grant opportunities in higher education are abundant and critical for supporting institutions and students alike. Funding for both parties is necessary to provide opportunities for enhancing the student experience and supporting their wellbeing.
Funding can be found in a variety of places. State grants, federal grants, foundation and corporate grants, and additional funding resources all offer grant opportunities in higher education. Exploring each of these grant funding resources will open the door to greater opportunities for impact by applying for necessary capital. It might also be helpful to narrow options for grants by topic. Categories include college readiness and completion, STEM, career readiness and employability, and student support services.
We wrote a previous article on the grant opportunities in higher education and are updating that list with this new article that includes some of the grant funding resources and categories mentioned above.
Grants for low income students
GrantWatch currently has over 1,000 grants listed on their site. Designed to connect low income students with available funding, GrantWatch keeps an up-to-date list of grant opportunities in higher education.
Support for educational sciences
The Institute of Education Sciences supports research that addresses important issues in education and develops solutions that improve school readiness and academic achievement, particularly for at-risk students. As part of the U.S. Department of Education, the IES offers a webinar to help connect institutions to the best grant opportunities in higher education.
Faculty development
Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Research grants
The Spencer Foundation programs provide funding for education-focused research projects, research training fellowships, and additional field-building initiatives. It is the only foundation that focuses exclusively on supporting educational research and offers a variety of grants of grant opportunities in both research and training.
Grants focused on diversity and inclusion
The Ford Foundation offers approximately 1,500 grants to institutions with transformative ideas and scalable solutions that they believe will lead to a more just and equitable future. These grant opportunities in higher education support colleges that believe that justice begins where inequality ends.
Digital humanities funding
The National Endowment for the Humanities offers The Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program (DHAG), which supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. The program also supports research that examines the history, criticism, ethics, and philosophy of digital culture or technology and its impact on society.
Federal student grants
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) offers a variety of federal grants to students attending four-year colleges or universities, community colleges, and career schools. Most grants generally do not have to be repaid, but take note of the ones that do require grant funds to be repaid at some point in the future.
Grant opportunities in higher education are numerous, so this is a short-list of some of the places to look if you’re in need of funding.
