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This week should have been one of celebration as colleges and universities across the country observe Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) Week. Yet, yesterday, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will pull $350 million in grant funding for Fiscal Year 2025 alone that supports several Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), including HSIs, Asian American- and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs), Predominantly Black Institutions (PBIs), Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions (ANNHSIs), Native American-Serving Nontribal Institutions (NASNTIs), and more. This is the administration’s latest attack on students, coming just weeks after the Department of Justice deemed HSIs unconstitutional.
The Campaign for College Opportunity will unapologetically continue our over 20-year legacy of empowering students to achieve a higher education for economic transformation in California and beyond. MSIs are core to this mission. For more than a century, America’s MSIs have served Latinx, Black, Asian American, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native students and have created a model of cultural competence, tailored supports, and welcoming campus environments that support historically minoritized students to harness the power of a college degree. To date, there are over 700 MSIs nationwide that educate more than 5 million students. California alone far exceeds every state in the nation, with 161 MSIs as of 2021.
In this moment, I am reminded of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s response to the Court’s decision to end race-conscious college admissions practices. “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” The current administration may pretend to combat discrimination through colorblindness, but instead creates barriers to true opportunity for the students that our country is counting on to thrive. In fact, we have seen how this administration ignores its own colorblind policy when stereotyping and targeting our most vulnerable neighbors, as in the Supreme Court’s latest endorsement of racial profiling against immigrants.
Diversity will always be California’s strength in the face of these regressive actions. That is why the Campaign calls on state policymakers and higher education leaders to stand with students: protect the progress we have made in making higher education a pathway that uplifts everyone rather than repeat a history of exclusion.
In Solidarity,
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