\n<\/p>\n
The White House is on a mission to defund minority-serving institutions, places that have provided economic mobility and workforce training for millions of students\u2014low-income, minoritized or both\u2014for decades. <\/p>\n
The president\u2019s budget request, released Friday, proposes cutting $354\u00a0million in MSI funding from the Education Department. MSIs were nowhere to be found in the department\u2019s latest application for grant programs serving low-resourced institutions.<\/p>\n
To dispel any doubt about the president\u2019s intentions, MSIs were among nearly a dozen programs on Trump\u2019s \u201cCuts to Woke Programs Fact Sheet\u201d that were zeroed out in the name of \u201celiminating radical gender and racial ideologies that poison the minds of Americans.\u201d <\/p>\n
Now, we know that the president\u2019s budget serves mostly as a messaging tool (coming through loud and clear) and very few of these cuts will end up in the final budget bill passed by Congress. But despite MSIs\u2019 history of bipartisan support, Congress isn\u2019t doing enough to protect them. In the 2025\u201326 budget, lawmakers appropriated close to $400\u00a0million for discretionary grants to support certain MSI programs, a small increase on the previous budget. But they didn\u2019t take the opportunity to reassert their power of the purse and put protections around how these appropriations should be used. There\u2019s nothing stopping the Trump administration from redirecting that $400\u00a0million to other institutions, like it did with last year\u2019s funds. The administration has even gone as far as trying to eliminate the $132\u00a0million in mandatory funding for MSIs.<\/p>\n
With the midterms approaching, and a likely shift in power, will Congress act to safeguard MSIs? <\/p>\n
MSIs reflect the growing diversity in the American population. It\u2019s no surprise the number of MSI designations increased nearly 20\u00a0percent from 2017 to 2022 (1,332 to 1,591). The greatest increase was in institutions meeting the threshold to be designated Hispanic-serving institutions: 615 colleges and universities are now HSIs. <\/p>\n
Despite having limited resources and lower endowments, MSIs have an outsize impact on income mobility for all students on campus. More than half of all students enrolled at MSIs receive Pell Grants, compared with only 31\u00a0percent of all college students, and federal funding accounts for 18 to 25\u00a0percent of total revenue at MSIs.<\/p>\n
When compared to non-MSI institutions of similar resource profiles, MSIs catapult more students from the bottom income quintiles to the top quintiles. HSIs are the most successful at this, propelling three times more students into the top income brackets than non-MSIs. If MSIs aren\u2019t funded, what\u2019s at risk are engines of economic mobility for all students who attend them, not just racially or ethnically minoritized students.<\/p>\n
Last fall gave us a glimpse of what a future without this funding could look like. California State University, Fresno, relies on more than $5\u00a0million annually in federal grants. That money was abruptly canceled by the Trump administration, putting at risk, among other initiatives, the institution\u2019s Finish in Five program, which allows students to earn both a bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degree within five years. \u201cIn the grander scheme of things, most of the innovative programs that we have at Fresno State that further student success and graduation rates started with an HSI grant or with an MSI grant,\u201d President Sa\u00fal Jim\u00e9nez-Sandoval said last year.<\/p>\n
Cal State Fullerton lost $4.2\u00a0million in the same redirection of funds. More than half of CSUF\u2019s more than 45,000 students are Hispanic, but President Ronald S. Rochon noted that lost funding doesn\u2019t just harm students who identify as Hispanic. \u201cThis impacts our entire campus community,\u201d he said, adding that some of these losses risk bringing \u201cgreat devastation to our student body.\u201d<\/p>\n
Institutional leaders aren\u2019t idly waiting for Congress to realize its power. They\u2019re lobbying state lawmakers in California and Colorado to develop their own MSI categorizations or to free up state funds to support them. Other states may follow, but any funding flowing to MSIs from their states\u2019 coffers won\u2019t compare with what the federal government can provide. <\/p>\n
What was once seen as a success story of higher ed making good on its promise to help students achieve the American dream is now being systematically dismantled. Defunding MSIs isn\u2019t eliminating radical racial ideologies, it\u2019s pulling the ladder up and leaving behind the students who need it most. Killing these economic and opportunity engines hurts us all. Minority-serving institutions and their advocates might be finding their own ways the future-proof their institutions, but they shouldn\u2019t have to. <\/p>\n
Sara Custer is editor in chief at<\/em> Inside Higher Ed.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The White House is on a mission to defund minority-serving institutions, places that have provided economic mobility and workforce training for millions of students\u2014low-income, minoritized or both\u2014for decades. The president\u2019s budget request, released Friday, proposes cutting $354\u00a0million in MSI funding from the Education Department. MSIs were nowhere to be found in the department\u2019s latest application<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[4604,3037,5595,2046,21154,678],"class_list":{"0":"post-48131","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-defunding","9":"tag-doesnt","10":"tag-hurt","11":"tag-minority","12":"tag-msis","13":"tag-students"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/48132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}