The U.S. Department of Education has announced that it will set aside $2.5-million in the budget for the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, or Fipse, for a focused competition on student-learning assessment.

The money, which will finance at least one grant, will help in developing methods to “measure, assess, and report student achievement and institutional performance at the postsecondary level,” according to a notice that appeared today in the Federal Register.

Word of the set-aside came a little over a month after the department announced, in another Federal Register notice, that it would reserve $500,000 of the Fipse budget for an international competition supporting collaboration with Russia. The combined set-asides will consume almost half of Fipse’s 2007 budget, leaving the Comprehensive Program with only $3.4-million, enough to make 16 to 18 awards. Last year, it made three times as many awards.

In a letter sent to potential applicants this month, the department said the assessment competition was a response to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which wrote in its final report last year that a lack of “useful data and accountability” in higher education “hinders policy makers and the public from making informed decisions and prevents higher education from demonstrating its contribution to the public good.”

However, in that same report, the commission also recommended that that Fipse “be revitalized” and its “original mission of promoting improvement and innovation in higher education” be “re-energized.” —Kelly Field