Conservative activists are urging Congress to slash the more than $1 billion it sends each year to colleges for serving students of color, and to spend that money instead on programs that help all disadvantaged students, regardless of race.
The federal grants set aside for minority-serving institutions are unconstitutional, discriminate against white students, and serve as a perverse incentive for colleges to recruit and admit students based on their race, several conservative scholars argue.
The American Civil Rights Project, a conservative think tank, has drafted legislation to eliminate the minority-serving institution (MSI) designation that about 830 colleges have.
In 2023, these colleges enrolled more than a third of all full-time undergraduate students and 52 percent of students of color, according to an analysis prepared by the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions.
At least two other influential groups — the Manhattan Institute and the Federalist Society — have challenged the legality of giving minority-serving institutions access to designated federal funds.
“MSIs are engaged in intentional racial discrimination to change the racial demographic of their school in order to gain access to more money,” said Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project.
With President Donald J. Trump beginning his second term and Republicans in control of both congressional bodies, Morenoff hopes to find a lawmaker to carry a bill in Congress to repeal the program. He has also threatened to file a lawsuit, claiming that funding for minority-serving institutions is a violation of the 14th Amendment.
Taking away funding or grant opportunities from colleges that support a large swath of the nation’s minority students would be “incredibly short-sighted,” said Marybeth Gasman, a professor of education who heads the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions.
“These are institutions that are doing the lion’s share of the work when it comes to educating first-generation and low-income students,” Gasman said. “Do I think it will happen?” Given the events of the past week, “I don’t put anything past President Trump and the Trump administration,” she said.
The Trump administration’s decision on Monday to freeze billions of dollars of federal grants and loans to colleges that don’t align with his vision heightened fears that money for minority-serving institutions could be cut. The memo announcing the freeze order was rescinded on Wednesday after the order was temporarily blocked by a federal judge. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education said the administration “strongly supports HBCUs and MSIs,” and that “funds flowing under those grant programs will not be paused.” The spokesman added, however, that “we will work to ensure the programs are in line with the president’s priorities.”
A Changing Demographic
Minority-serving institutions were created in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Higher Education Act with the explicit goal to increase the abysmal rate of minority students in colleges. Generally speaking, colleges that meet certain demographic-enrollment goals can apply to become, say, Hispanic-serving or Asian American and Native American-Pacific Islander-serving institutions. That allows them to apply for a special pool of competitive grants.
Each identity category has its own enrollment threshold for accessing additional funds. Black students must make up forty percent of students at a predominantly Black institution. At Asian American and Native American-Pacific Islander institutions, at least 10 percent of the student population must identify as members of one of those groups.
(Historically Black colleges and tribal colleges are designations given based on their charter rather than the racial composition of the students they serve.)
At least one-quarter of the students need to identify as Hispanic for a college to be eligible to become a Hispanic-serving institution, a threshold that’s becoming increasingly easy to reach given the nation’s demographic trends. Today, the nation’s approximately 600 Hispanic-serving institutions represent one in five colleges but enroll nearly two thirds of Hispanic undergraduates, said Deborah A. Santiago, co-founder and chief executive of Excelencia in Education, a group that supports efforts to help Hispanic students enroll and succeed in college. She said her group has been fielding calls from educators worried about potential cuts to their programs.
“These institutions are historically underresourced while enrolling a large percentage of students with great need,” said Gina Ann Garcia, a professor of education at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the nation’s foremost experts on Hispanic-serving institutions. “In other words, they are asked to do more for students of color with less institutional funding.” Being able to apply for competitive grants has allowed them to try out creative approaches to serving underrepresented students, she said.
Losing access to such funds could be particularly damaging, Garcia said, to small colleges like Berkeley City College, which enrolls 2,700 full-time equivalent students, 30 percent of whom are Hispanic.
The number of HSIs has skyrocketed in recent years. But some question whether colleges that have been eager to tap into a new funding source have focused enough of their efforts on that demographic, which today still has a significantly lower enrollment and graduation rate than white students.
Some colleges, including the University of Texas at Austin, have made no secret of the fact that one reason for pursuing HSI designation was to become eligible to apply for a new pool of federal funds to support their students and faculty. Some have set up committees to work on passing the 25-percent enrollment threshold.
A Florida Gulf Coast University official told a local TV station that “achieving an HSI status allows us to become eligible for a lot of funding” to support students, faculty, and staff. The university, which has an undergraduate student population now at 26 percent Hispanic, is committed to better serving Hispanic students, not just enrolling them, university officials say.
Meanwhile, across the country, white enrollment has precipitously dropped in the last decade, according to a Chronicle analysis.
A Violation of the 14th Amendment?
Morenoff believes MSI funding violates the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, designed to ensure that everyone, regardless of race, religion, or other characteristics, is treated equally under the law. He points to Bolling v. Sharpe, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that bans school segregation and public funding of schools based on race.
These institutions are historically underresourced while enrolling a large percentage of students with great need. In other words, they are asked to do more for students of color with less institutional funding.
“It seems clear to me that these programs have such constitutional problems that these programs could be litigated,” Morenoff said.
He has proposed increasing Pell Grant funds by more than $1 billion to counter what he calls the main obstacle to college attendance — cost. A second option he supports would be to assign federal block grants to states where MSIs operate. That money would in turn be used to help defray the cost of attending college regardless of students’ race.
Morenoff, a lawyer, has also expressed interest in seeking litigation to challenge the legality of the MSI program. In the wake of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, the 2023 decision in which the Supreme Court banned the use of racial preferences in college-admissions decisions, Morenoff believes the legal environment might be ripe for a federal lawsuit targeting a college that has either attained or is seeking MSI status.
“If someone wanted to argue against MSIs,” Morenoff said, “I would be interested in litigating it for them.”
Other conservative groups are also encouraging lawsuits challenging MSIs. Morenoff is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, which is promoting his proposals. A spokeswoman for the institute said it is also questioning the legality of basing funding on the racial compositions of the student body. The institute supports the goal, outlined by Morenoff, of “shifting those funds into need-based financial-aid programs, such as Pell Grants, which would benefit economically disadvantaged students regardless of race.”
The Federalist Society, in a 2023 post, argued that the federal government’s HSI program discriminates based on the racial and ethnic balances of their student bodies. “Indirectly, through the HSI program” the group contends, “the federal government allocates or denies funds to the schools of students based on their races.”
The 14th Amendment carves out certain conditions that would allow an institution to consider race, one being to redress the harm caused by the institution’s own history of discrimination. The Federalist Society argues that colleges would be hard pressed to prove that “when so many of these universities documented that they were motivated to seek, obtain, and maintain that status for access to funding.”
Supporters of minority-serving institutions say the additional funding is justified. Gasman, the professor at Rutgers, said it’s needed “to make up for past injustices and inequities” in education access, but she added that “this administration doesn’t care about that, so that argument doesn’t work.” Supporting MSIs, Gasman said, is also “good for the economy, good for society and for helping more people become prosperous citizens.”
In a written statement, Antonio R. Flores, president of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), echoed the economic argument for continuing to support HSIs, which he said have been growing by 20 to 25 colleges a year.
“The fast-growing reliance on underserved populations to fill new jobs in our increasingly high-tech-driven economy calls for even greater investments in HSIs in the years ahead to strengthen their capacity to effectively educate and train their burgeoning student population,” he said.
Despite the outsized role they play in educating underserved students, HSIs receive, on average, 74 cents for every federal dollar going to other colleges annually, HACU reports.
Roberto Montoya, associate vice president for partner success at InsideTrack, a student-success nonprofit, objects to the use of the 14th Amendment to dismantle the program.
“When I hear someone say it doesn’t fit under the 14th Amendment, there is a part of me that is saddened by the logic,” Montoya said, pointing out that Latinos were forced under Jim Crow laws to attend separate and underfunded schools and colleges based on their race. “It perverts the intentionality of the 14th Amendment, which recognizes the barriers that have existed for students of color for decades.”
The federal funding for MSIs allows colleges to expand faculty and curriculum, and in Montoya’s estimates, doing so can address the ways in which Latinos, for instance, have experienced discrimination. Colleges haven’t sufficiently included the contributions of Latinos in their curriculum, haven’t hired enough Latino educators and administrators, and haven’t effectively dealt with some Latino students’ language barriers, according to Montoya.
“That serves as a form of discrimination,” he said.
Walking a Fine Line
The University of Arizona achieved HSI status in 2018. Even as the enrollment of Latino students surged past 25 percent, the university believed it was not doing enough, according to Marla Franco, the university’s vice president for Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) initiatives.
“A few years ago, we had a bit of reckoning about the severe underenrollment of students from our local K-12 school districts in and around Tucson,” Franco said. “Those districts are predominantly Latino, and the students are predominantly first generation and Pell eligible. It raised the question: Are they just not coming?”
Franco said the university’s failure to effectively recruit these students was in itself a form of discrimination. They were being overlooked.
“There is intentional discrimination, and then there is unintentional discrimination,” she said.
In 2021, the university used its HSI funding to recruit students from local public schools. Applications from the Tucson metro area increased.
The university has to walk a fine line. It couldn’t openly recruit minorities, but it wants to both maintain its HSI status and continue to attract students Franco sees as entitled to access to the publicly funded institution.
“We are not admitting them or recruiting them on the basis of race. The University of Arizona is just honoring our commitment as a land-grant university and a four-year college nestled in a city where the two largest school districts are majority Latino,” she said.
Montoya considers the opposition a knee-jerk reaction to a broader demographic shift in the country and in higher education.
“This type of rationale is that somehow, if we see an increase in the number of a certain population, there has to be some type of watering down of the applicant pool, not an increase in the number of Latino applicants,” Montoya said,
Franco sees this attack on MSIs as part of a larger salvo against equity work and education at large.
“There are people committed to dismantling the Department of Education and closing DEI offices,” she said. “Threatening the status of minority-serving institutions, and the grants that fund these institutions, are all a part of the same political attacks.”