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—low-income, minoritized or both—for decades.
The president’s budget request, released Friday, proposes cutting $354 million in MSI funding from the Education Department. MSIs were nowhere to be found in the department’s latest application for grant programs serving low-resourced institutions.
To dispel any doubt about the president’s intentions, MSIs were among nearly a dozen programs on Trump’s “Cuts to Woke Programs Fact Sheet” that were zeroed out in the name of “eliminating radical gender and racial ideologies that poison the minds of Americans.”
Now, we know that the president’s 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’ history of bipartisan support, Congress isn’t doing enough to protect them. In the 2025–26 budget, lawmakers appropriated close to $400 million for discretionary grants to support certain MSI programs, a small increase on the previous budget. But they didn’t take the opportunity to reassert their power of the purse and put protections around how these appropriations should be used. There’s nothing stopping the Trump administration from redirecting that $400 million to other institutions, like it did with last year’s funds. The administration has even gone as far as trying to eliminate the $132 million in mandatory funding for MSIs.
With the midterms approaching, and a likely shift in power, will Congress act to safeguard MSIs?
MSIs reflect the growing diversity in the American population. It’s no surprise the number of MSI designations increased nearly 20 percent 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.
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 percent of all college students, and federal funding accounts for 18 to 25 percent of total revenue at MSIs.
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’t funded, what’s at risk are engines of economic mobility for all students who attend them, not just racially or ethnically minoritized students.
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 million annually in federal grants. That money was abruptly canceled by the Trump administration, putting at risk, among other initiatives, the institution’s Finish in Five program, which allows students to earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree within five years. “In 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,” President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval said last year.
Cal State Fullerton lost $4.2 million in the same redirection of funds. More than half of CSUF’s more than 45,000 students are Hispanic, but President Ronald S. Rochon noted that lost funding doesn’t just harm students who identify as Hispanic. “This impacts our entire campus community,” he said, adding that some of these losses risk bringing “great devastation to our student body.”
Institutional leaders aren’t idly waiting for Congress to realize its power. They’re 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’ coffers won’t compare with what the federal government can provide.
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’t eliminating radical racial ideologies, it’s 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’t have to.
Sara Custer is editor in chief at Inside Higher Ed.
