Why this matters
San Diego colleges use this funding to help students succeed in school.
Last Tuesday two San Diego community colleges received notice that their grants for serving Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander students were being discontinued and the remaining $1.1 million that they’d already been promised would not be paid out.
The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) told the schools – Mesa College and City College – that the grants violate federal civil rights law because they fund learning groups, staff trainings and other programs aimed at helping Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander students feel welcome and succeed.
A major problem with the decision, according to one local community college leader, is it guts a grant program that had already been promised to the school.
“The idea that they can come into the fifth year of a five-year grant and a program that’s been established for many years by Congress and say, this is no longer in the best interest of the federal government, seems like an overreach to me,” San Diego Community College District Chancellor Gregory Smith said.
Miramar College also lost a $1.1 million grant to help Hispanic students succeed in STEM fields, bringing total cuts to San Diego community colleges to $2.2 million. On October 1, they could lose $2 million more if scheduled payments don’t come through for other similar grants.
The cuts are part of the Trump administration’s wider effort to eliminate higher education funding opportunities that require a percentage of the institution’s students to identify with a particular racial group to qualify.
Earlier this month, the Department of Education announced it would cut $350 million that was expected to be paid out this year, saying it used unconstitutional eligibility criteria in deciding which schools would get the grants.
In a statement about the cuts, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the grants programs are “stereotyping” students in a way that “diminishes the full picture of that person’s life and contributions, including their character, resiliency, and merit.”
“Diversity is not merely the presence of a skin color,” she said.
McMahon continued: “The Department looks forward to working with Congress to reenvision these programs to support institutions that serve underprepared or under-resourced students without relying on race quotas and will continue fighting to ensure that students are judged as individuals, not prejudged by their membership of a racial group.”
A much larger pot of money is at stake if the grants are cut at agencies across the federal government. For example, from 2020 to 2024 the total funding flowing through just the Hispanic Serving Institution program, including from agencies besides the Department of Education, was estimated to be about $7 billion in California and $18 billion nationally, according to Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit that studies and advocates for Hispanic achievement in higher education.
The program funds a majority of California community colleges, 90% of which are designated as Hispanic Serving Institutions with 70% of students coming from groups historically underrepresented in higher education, including Hispanic, Black, Native American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Asian American and Pacific Islander students.
Most higher education institutions in San Diego County could lose federal funding tied to serving minority students.
Hispanic-Serving Institutions are the most commonly used grant programs for San Diego and Imperial County community colleges, which currently receive grants worth about $15 million, some of which has already been paid out.
San Diego State University also has HSI designation and received $3.8 million as part of a five-year grant in 2021. The university is in the process of requesting a one-year extension for eligible impacted grant programs, a spokesperson said, declining to provide additional details to “ensure this process is not compromised.”
Local business leaders have also criticized the cuts to the grant programs.
“Halting the Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) program would have serious and far-reaching consequences for our region, which is home to the fourth-largest Latino population in California,” said Chris Cate, president and CEO of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, speaking at a recent press conference held by the the San Diego & Imperial Counties Community College Association.
“With 73% of high-demand jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree, cutting this support undermines student success and threatens the future of our economy.”
Community colleges use the funds to keep students on track to finish their degrees and to encourage them to join STEM fields where they have historically been excluded.
For example, Southwestern College used the funds to run programs to offer group learning, mentoring and counseling. Students who participated were more likely to stay in school and finish their degrees, according to a statement provided to inewsource by the college. The San Diego Community College District also said they had data showing these programs helped students.
“We’ve had multiple series of five-year grants at some of those colleges. So there’s a pretty deep history and a lot of infrastructure has been built around these programs, and they’ve grown over time based on success outcomes,” Smith said.
He added that the idea that the use of percentages creates some kind of race based quota is “fundamentally false” when applied to San Diego’s community colleges, which have inclusive enrollment policies.
“We will enroll virtually anybody who applies, who wants to come in. And so there is no aspect of how do we try to engineer certain proportions of our students being certain race groups,” Smith said. “It’s a consequence of who’s in our community and chooses to come to our colleges, unlike a private college or university who may have those selective requirements.”
California will be hit harder than any other state due to its large number of universities and high minority student populations; the state receives a quarter of the total grants.
Days after cancelling HSI grants, the administration announced it would redirect $500 million to historically Black colleges or universities and tribal colleges, but it is unclear exactly how funds will be distributed. Though Los Angeles does have one historically Black graduate school, California has no officially recognized HBCUs or tribal colleges.
The practice of tying eligibility for grants to the percentage of students from a specific minority group has been used by the federal government since 1981 when the Minority Serving Science and Engineering program was created to improve minority participation in STEM. Congress then went on to pass additional legislation using the same strategy.
Some say the plan worked.
“The number of Hispanics going to college and graduating has really improved,” said Deborah Santiago, Excelencia’s founder who said she was the only Latina policy analyst at the Department of Education working on higher education when the first HSI funds were distributed in 1995. She has been tracking the program for decades.
“We’ve been tracking it every year and saying, ‘Wow, the numbers of institutions are growing. Hispanic enrollment is growing, degree completion gaps are closing some.’ All that’s good,” she said.
Santiago takes issue with the government’s characterization of HSI programs as discriminatory, saying they are nothing like the race-based admissions practices that were shot down by courts in 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a lawsuit that banned race-based admission practices nationally.
“It’s a way of identifying institutions that have some concentrated enrollment, but the money can go to improve the lab, your endowment, faculty development. Nothing is explicit to any student,” Santiago said. “One of my criticisms of the program had historically been, you’re getting this money for being an HSI, but you don’t have to do anything for Hispanics at all. The counter argument is that if the money goes to the institution and the institution improves, any student who’s enrolled can benefit.”
Type of Content
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.