This tip sheet will help journalists cover the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to slash funding for hundreds of colleges and universities designated as minority-serving institutions.
Photo credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture/Lance Cheung
This article was republished from The Journalist’s Resource. (Note: The author serves on the EWA board of directors.)
This tip sheet, originally published March 12, was updated on Sept. 11 to reflect the Education Department’s recent decision to cut funding for most minority-serving institutions.
The U.S. Department of Education announced Wednesday that it has stopped funding several grant programs that, together this year, provided about $350 million to colleges and universities the agency designated as minority-serving institutions.
For decades, the federal government has given additional funding to colleges and universities where a significant proportion of students are racial or ethnic minorities. In late July, however, the U.S. Solicitor General determined it is unconstitutional to award federal grants based on the percentage of Hispanic students a school serves. The Education Department responded by ending all funding it controls that had been earmarked for institutions with a certain percentage of students who identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Native American, Alaska Native or Native Hawaiian.
The department will continue to give these schools the grant money that federal law mandates they receive — a total of about $132 million this fiscal year. But the agency “continues to consider the underlying legal issues associated with the mandatory funding mechanism in these programs,” it notes in a press release.
Nationwide, there are more than 800 minority-serving institutions, commonly referred to as MSIs. They offer programming and support designed to help students of color — lower-income students of color in particular — succeed in college.
Most MSIs qualify for federal funding based on what the federal government now calls “racial quotas.” Two types of MSI — historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and universities — receive funding based on their historical missions. For example, tribal colleges and universities were specifically created to serve citizens of federally-recognized tribal nations.
Over the past decade, the number of MSIs has risen steadily, a reflection of the growing diversity of U.S. college students. Last year, 831 public and private institutions were either formally designated as MSIs or met the qualifications to be one, according to Rutgers University’s Center for Minority Serving Institutions.
That’s up from 669 institutions five years earlier, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association notes in a recent analysis.
These schools include South Texas College, where 96% of students are Hispanic, and North Carolina A&T University, founded more than a century ago to educate Black students when they could not attend schools with white students. Also included are Oglala Lakota College, chartered by the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council to serve tribal members in South Dakota, and the University of Hawai‘i-West O‘ahu, where most students identify as Asian, Native Hawaiian or “part Hawaiian.”
As journalists report on the Education Department’s decision, it is important to look at the role MSIs play in their communities and how the loss of funding will affect higher education broadly. As a group, MSIs generally do not receive much media attention.
We created this tip sheet to spotlight key facts about MSIs. While we encourage journalists to read academic research to learn more about these institutions, knowing these eight things will also help journalists provide more probing news coverage.
The Higher Education Act of 1965, one of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs, drastically expanded the federal government’s role in higher education by establishing financial aid programs for college students and increasing federal funding for colleges and universities with large percentages of lower-income students. Over the decades, Congress has amended the law several times to extend aid specifically to institutions serving large percentages of underrepresented minorities. The law refers to these schools as minority-serving institutions.
In 1986, historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, became the first group of MSIs to receive its own federal funding stream. HBCUs were founded to educate Black students at a time when Black students were generally barred from other institutions. Although HBCU student bodies today are racially diverse, most students at most HBCUs are Black.
Institutions with high percentages of Hispanic students were given their own funding stream under the Higher Education Act in 1992, followed by colleges and universities controlled by tribal governments in 1998, according to the Congressional Research Service. Congress added several other groups of institutions in 2007.
The Higher Education Act outlines the qualifications for a college or university to be designated as a minority-serving institution. The MSI designation is open to public colleges and universities and private, nonprofit colleges and universities accredited by a nationally recognized accrediting organization.
These are seven categories of MSI, each of which has its own eligibility requirements. Five MSI categories have a race- or ethnicity-based requirement. These schools must demonstrate their school serves a certain percentage of students from a particular racial and ethnic group. The other two categories — historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and universities — are designated as minority-serving institutions because of their historic mission to educate Black or Native American students.
These are the seven types of MSIs:
As the nation’s Hispanic population has grown, so has the number of Hispanic students who have graduated high school and entered college. According to a 2023 report from the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of Hispanic people aged 25 to 29 who had completed high school rose from 58% in 1996 to 89% in 2021. During that period, the number of Hispanics enrolled in college doubled to 2.4 million.
About 70% of MSIs are Hispanic-serving institutions, according to Rutgers’ Center for Minority Serving Institutions, which studies MSIs and helps them develop strategies to improve. It has compiled a list of schools that have been designated as MSIs or qualify for the designation.
While Hispanic-serving institutions operate in most parts of the U.S., more than half of these 569 schools are in California, Texas, New York and Puerto Rico.
The second-largest group of MSIs are Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions. There are 207, more than half of which are in California, Hawaii and New York.
Tribal colleges and universities are the smallest MSI category. Most of these 35 institutions are located in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico and South Dakota.
The federal government provides a significant chunk of funding for minority-serving institutions. For example, HBCUs, NASNTIs and ANNHSIs relied on the U.S. government for one-fourth of their revenue in fiscal year 2022, according to a December 2024 analysis from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. HSIs got 18% of their income from federal agencies.
Much of MSIs’ federal funding comes from the U.S. Department of Education. But these institutions receive funds from other federal agencies, too, including the National Science Foundation, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Agriculture and Department of Defense. Annual appropriations under the Higher Education Act totaled about $1.29 billion in fiscal year 2023, according to the Congressional Research Service.
During the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, MSIs also received a combined $6 billion through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act and American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
In addition to receiving money directly from the federal government, MSIs receive billions of dollars a year indirectly through the grants and loans the U.S. Department of Education gives students to pay for tuition, fees, campus housing, and other college-related costs. Because of that, any changes legislators make to federal financial aid policies are sure to impact these schools.
For a broad overview of MSI funding, read the 2024 report “Federal and State Funding for Minority-Serving Institutions,” by Jessica Colorado, a senior policy analyst for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Also, check out our primer on higher education funding in the U.S.
Conservative groups such the Manhattan Institute and American Civil Rights Project want the federal government to stop making funding decisions based on college students’ race and ethnicity. They contend the practice violates the U.S. Constitution and liken it to race-based college admissions policies, which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down in June 2023.
Earlier this year, the American Civil Rights Project, a public-interest law firm, sent letters to Congress urging legislators to “defund and repeal” MSI programs.
Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, asserts that Congress should fund colleges based on student needs. In an issue brief released last year, he outlines four proposals for using federal money to meet needs that are common among marginalized students. He suggests, for example, expanding the federal Pell grant program, which provides grants to lower-income college students. He also suggests providing funding for linguistic programs that aid Hispanic college students who have not mastered English.
HBCUs and TCUs generally are not included in proposals to eliminate MSI funding. That is because they receive funding based on their historical missions, not whether they reach or maintain a certain percentage of students from a racial or ethnic group.
During the 2022-23 academic year, 32% of all undergraduate students in the U.S. received a Pell grant, a type of federal financial aid provided to lower-income college students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
There is no set income threshold for determining who is eligible for a Pell grant, because a wide range of factors determine how much an individual student can afford to pay toward a college education. However, about 92% of students awarded Pell grants during the 2021-22 academic year had annual household incomes at or below $60,000, a recent report from the Congressional Research Service notes.
Rutgers University’s Center for Minority Serving Institutions estimates that more than half of all MSI students qualify for Pell grants.
About 55% of HBCU students received Pell grants in 2022-23, the most recent year for which nationwide data is available from the National Center for Education Statistics. At North Carolina A&T University, one of the largest HBCUs, 86% of first-time college students who are enrolled full-time used Pell grants to pay for school.
At the University of Texas at El Paso, one of the country’s largest HSIs, 70% of first-time students enrolled full-time received Pell grants.
In speeches and political debates, Trump has touted his support for HBCUs. After he signed the FUTURE Act — formally known as the Fostering Undergraduate Talent by Unlocking Resources for Education Act — in 2019, he boasted that HBCUs “have never had better champions in the White House.” Since then, he has repeatedly claimed or insinuated, incorrectly, that he “saved” HBCUs.
The FUTURE Act permanently extended $85 million in annual federal funding for HBCUs. The legislation, sponsored by Democratic Congresswomen Alma S. Adams of North Carolina, also made permanent a combined $170 million in funding for other minority-serving institutions.
In 2020, Trump signed the HBCU PARTNERS Act, formally known as the HBCU Propelling Agency Relationships Towards a New Era of Results for Students Act. That law, introduced by Republican Congressman Tim Scott of South Carolina, requires various federal agencies, on an annual basis, to develop plans for strengthening their relationships with HBCUs.
Theodore R. Johnson and Leah Wright Rigueur, scholars of Black politics, note that while HBCUs have made some gains under Republican presidents in recent decades, that relationship has been “tricky.”
“As long as White Houses can spot political advantages in supporting black colleges, they will continue to do so, at least to an extent,” Johnson, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, and Rigueur, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, write in a 2017 essay in POLITICO Magazine.
Paris Dennard, a former communication director at the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a national association of HBCUs and predominantly Black institutions, has pointed out that Trump helped raise awareness about HBCUs.
“President Trump literally told the world HBCUs matter,” Dennard, now a conservative political consultant, writes in a 2020 essay in the news outlet Diverse: Issues In Higher Education.
“Being the first sitting President to speak at the HBCU Week Conference made headlines,” he adds. “Talking about HBCUs at rallies, in speeches, in meetings, and even historically [at the World Economic Forum] in Davos, Switzerland, all made headlines and made HBCUs a priority.”
Journalists covering MSIs should know the various academic research centers and nonprofit organizations that study, track and provide data on them. These are some of the most prominent:
This article first appeared on The Journalist’s Resource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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