Starting this summer, the Montana University System is expanding eligibility criteria for its Native American tuition waiver, extending the benefit to not only official tribe members with financial need in the state but also tribal descendants.
The move reflects long-standing debates about how to define Native American identity—and some anxiety among the state public university system’s leaders about how to frame the program as the federal government targets supports and services perceived as perpetuating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
The decades-old waiver covers tuition costs—but not fees or self-service courses, including some online and continuing education classes—for Native American residents of the state who need help paying for college. But system officials are changing how they decide who qualifies, which they expect to lead to more students taking advantage of the program.
Previously, students could qualify by showing they’re enrolled members of tribes or by providing proof of “blood quantum,” having at least “a quarter [Native American] blood.” The system’s Board of Regents decided last July to nix the waiver’s “blood quantum” requirement, Montana Free Press initially reported. The controversial measure of tribal belonging, imposed by the federal government in the 1800s, is still used by many federally recognized tribes to determine tribal citizenship. Students who already benefit from the waiver under the blood quantum requirement will continue to receive it.
Applicants for the waiver under the new guidelines must now show proof of enrollment in a Montana tribe or “descendancy,” but each tribe defines for itself what it means to be a descendant, said Angela McLean, director of American Indian and minority achievement at the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education, the administrative branch of the Montana University System and Board of Regents. Students can reach out to tribes for “official recognition,” like a signed letter affirming their descendant status, she told Inside Higher Ed in an email.
“The Regents and the system’s American Indian and Minority Achievement Council have long evaluated changes to the waiver aimed at growing access and simplifying administration,” McLean said.
Goals and Fears
For some officials, the Trump administration’s crusade against DEI raised alarm bells about the waiver’s long-term future, spurring them to make the tweaks.
“That brought about some concern … looking at the blood quantum requirement within the waiver,” Galen Hollenbaugh, OCHE’s deputy commissioner for government relations and communications, said at a December meeting of the Montana Legislature’s State Tribal Relations Committee. “We were very concerned about that being the racially discriminatory possibility that might put the waiver in jeopardy. We want to make sure it’s secure now and into the future.”
But McLean emphasized that Trump’s January 2025 anti-DEI executive order “was not the origin or a primary driver of the Regents’ action,” and changes to the waiver came out of a “long-running internal discussion” at the university system and among state lawmakers.
“Our consideration of these changes long predated that order,” she said. “The changes emphasize, as has always been the intent, that waiver eligibility is centered in tribes’ political identity, not a racial class.”
She pointed out that the Montana American Indian Caucus has twice proposed legislation to make these same changes.
But multiple Native committee members pushed back at the December meeting that tribes should have been consulted more throughout the process. Montana Representative Tyson Running Wolf, chair of the State-Tribal Relations Committee, also noted that he withdrew the bill he drafted last year, which would have made similar changes to the waiver, because he recognized that the legislation could be “real controversial” among Native Americans in the state.
The Controversy
The controversy over blood quantum stems from its fraught history, said Jill Doerfler, professor and department head of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota at Duluth.
Measuring Native American blood “is not a real thing,” she said. “It’s something that was made up, that came out of ideas related to eugenics” and was pushed onto tribes by the federal government. The concept also shrank tribes, because as more people married outside their tribal nations and had children, the number of people who qualified as tribal citizens dwindled.
Some tribes have made moves to get rid of it, but blood quantum still holds power for many Native Americans who have grown used to thinking of themselves in these terms over decades, Doerfler added. Some tribe members also see blood quantum requirements as a way to prevent people without ties to tribes from seeking tribal enrollment.
The idea “gets internalized the same way beauty standards get internalized,” she said. “These things in culture, they just become embedded in a way that is very deep.”
Joe Thiel, OCHE’s deputy commissioner of academic research and student affairs, said at the December meeting that, in practice, the blood quantum criteria for the waiver has been hard to apply. He argued it risks barring students from the benefit, despite possible strong ties to their tribes.
“There have been inconsistent readings of this policy and inconsistent applications of it at the institutional level for some time,” Thiel said, noting financial aid officers lack training in assessing blood quantum. The goal is to make the policy “predictable, consistently applied, easy for students to understand if they’re going to be eligible for this benefit.”
He also acknowledged the system had “work to do” in terms of consulting with tribes about the policy shift, and system leaders plan to be in close communication with tribes about the changes going forward. He stressed that the Board of Regents moved quickly to make the modifications because of what felt like a “pressing risk” to the waiver in the current political landscape.
Doerfler applauded the Montana University System for doing away with the blood quantum concept and said she understands why system leaders worried such a requirement “could be vulnerable to critiques” that it’s “racialized criteria.” But the university system also should have “done some deeper consultation with the tribal nations that are located within Montana to find out what they wanted.”
What’s Next
There are significant variations in how tribes define descendancy, so who qualifies for the waiver could differ significantly from tribe to tribe, Doerfler said. For example, some tribes only count first-degree descendants, meaning the children of enrolled tribe members, while others include second-degree descendants, the grandchildren of enrolled tribe members. Some allow descendants to benefit from tribal scholarships, while others don’t.
But that variation “would be appropriate,” she said. “That’s up to them within their nation to think about … the big, hard question: Who belongs? Why? How is that regulated? What does it mean?”
However tribes define their descendants, who qualifies for the waiver is bound to grow as a result. The benefit currently goes to roughly 800 Native American students per year, costing the state about $3.8 million. But an additional almost 1,400 students could be eligible under the changed requirements, upping the expected costs to more than $5 million in 2026 and almost $6 million by 2029, according to a fiscal analysis of Running Wolf’s bill presented to the State Legislature last year.
No new state funds will be going to the waiver, McLean said, but OCHE is “working closely with campus financial aid officers to support them in the rollout.” While it’s early in the application process under the new guidelines, “anecdotally, our financial aid officers are reporting an increase.”
James Broscheit, director of financial aid services at Montana State University, said he’s received a handful of inquiries about the new waiver guidelines so far. He trusts the state’s projection that there could be an influx of applications, but he doesn’t expect it to strain his office’s workflow.
He said financial aid officials will determine “case by case” if incoming students have sufficient proof of descendancy, but ideally, they’ll have worked with their tribes to secure some kind of formal recognition they can hand over to the university.
“I think it’s really an assessment down the road to see the value of how this works,” he said. “We’re just too early to say.”
