Defund “Minority Serving Institutions”

Established by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 and two Obama-era executive orders, the Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) program is a federally funded initiative that awards higher-education institutions grants and other perks for enrolling certain percentages of minority students. Specifically, a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) must be accredited and have at least a 25-percent full-time enrollment of Hispanic undergraduate students, while an Asian American and Pacific Islander Serving Institution (AANAPISI) must achieve a 10-percent Asian American or Pacific Islander undergraduate population. Currently, there are 274 HSIs and 38 grant-receiving AANAPISIs across the country, numbers that do not include Historically Black Colleges and Universities or Tribal Colleges and Universities.

Given the presence of the word “serving” in their name, MSIs should be using their federally bestowed advantages to improve the performance, access, and experiences of minority students. But is that a feasible and measurable goal? If so, have MSIs endeavored to actually accomplish it?

MSIs should be using their federally bestowed advantages to improve the performance of minority students. MSIs’ Ideological Pursuits 

In 2024, the federal government appropriated $228.89 million for HSIs alone, of which $28 million went to fund “49 highly ranked applicants,” including schools in the Riverside Community College District, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, and the University of California. Cerritos College in California received $595,991 to develop a program called “Mentoring, Access, Data, and Equity.” In a press release, the college boasted about using the grant to “enhance Hispanic/Latinx student enrollment and success” by “providing critical resources to reach the college’s equity goals.”

In fact, most if not all of the grant-application abstracts for MSIs are littered with politicized buzzwords. For the $560,148 it received, the University of Connecticut-Stamford promised a scholarship and support program entitled “Sueño Scholars: Supporting Latiné Teacher Dreams.” In addition to hiring and training “diverse” faculty and staff, the Sueño Scholars program will meet HSIs’ competitive-preference priorities by “sustaining antiracist orientations towards teaching and learning,” “building the university’s sense of belonging and inclusion,” “including a speaker of color series,” and so on.

Bergen Community College in New Jersey was awarded $598,269 to establish a program entitled “Bergen Rebounds: Assist, Advance, and Achieve,” which will include “Faculty Professional Development focused on DEI [and] Trauma Informed Pedagogy.”

The University of California at Santa Cruz proposed spending its $599,996 on “eliminat(ing) equity gaps” and “strengthen(ing) a Latinx Student Servingness [sic] Campus Hub.” The school even pledged numeric goals:

[I]ncrease Latinx students’ first-year retention rates by 5% (freshmen and transfer); increase number of degrees awarded to Latinx students each year by 10% (freshmen) and 5% (transfer); improve campus climate and Latinx students’ sense of belonging by 5%; increase Latinx and transfer students’ enrollment in health professions pathways by 421%, and increase integration among campus units by 10%.

Aside from the unconstitutionality and illegality of applying race-based goals and racial quotas to the competition for government funding, how is a school supposed to measure with any accuracy students’ sense of belonging and campus units’ level of integration? In fact, most if not all of the grant-application abstracts for MSIs are invariably littered with politicized and controversial buzzwords, such as “Latinx,” “equity,” “belonging,” “diverse hiring,” “social emotional learning,” “DEI,” et cetera. The program is so ideologically loaded that one may treat it as the government’s visible-hand blessing of the ballooning diversity industry, which boasted $8 billion in annual expenditures at its peak with little to nothing to show in the way of results. One may further inquire what kind of evidence exists for “equity-minded decision-making practices resulting in higher levels of servingness” [sic, again], as proposed by Mohave Community College in its bid for a $600,000 HSI grant.

The Flip Side of Preference Is Discrimination

In the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Chief Justice Roberts concluded for the majority that “the Government must treat citizens as individuals, not as simply components of a racial, religious, sexual or national class.” Roberts further explained that “the Constitution deals with substance, not shadows.” In this regard, continuing the MSI program at the federal level lacks the backing of our highest court and thereby lacks legal legitimacy.

Plainly speaking, racial preferences and racial discrimination go hand in hand. Plainly speaking, racial preferences and racial discrimination go hand in hand. Anyone who claims you can have one without the other simply wishes to challenge gravity. The nearly decade-long legal fight against race-based college admissions, which eventually yielded the end of the practice (at least legally), has sufficiently exposed the undue harms done by granting certain groups admissions privileges and excluding others.

An insistence on applying race considerations is increasingly becoming risky in both legal and financial terms. The MSI program operates on the same plane. Take the University of California (UC) as a case in point. Five of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses are HSI-designated. UC Berkeley and UCLA have made plans to become HSI certified, with the former formulating a 10-year strategic plan and the latter boasting efforts concerning “Latinx access,” campus culture, admissions, financial aid, curriculum, and resources. Ironically, UC has also been embroiled in a growing number of lawsuits involving racial discrimination in admissions.

In February 2025, Students Against Racial Discrimination took UC to court, alleging that the institution unfairly favors black and Latino students over more academically qualified white and Asian American students. In May, a father-and-son duo filed suit against UC on a similar claim of racial discrimination, after the son was rejected by all UC schools he applied to in spite of his sterling credentials and academics, which subsequently landed him a high-level research position at Google. In the same month, Do No Harm sued UCLA’s medical school in a federal class-action case, arguing that the school routinely and openly makes race a factor in admissions decisions.

Instead of Funding Racial Percentages, Target Individual Needs

With a new federal administration in office that abhors race-based policymaking and treats higher-education institutions with unprecedented scrutiny, an insistence on applying race considerations is increasingly becoming risky in both legal and financial terms. The MSI program falls into this category of risky operations. Not only does the race or ethnicity requirement (i.e., having a student body that is at least 25-percent Hispanic) fail the longstanding constitutional doctrine of strict scrutiny, but MSI requirements are not narrowly tailored to correct historical wrongs. Furthermore, many institutions’ politically fashionable bundling of minority, low-income, and first-generation students in their quest for MSI status is preposterous. Nor is MSI status a justifiable “supplement to help schools whose students are struggling with English as a second language.”

The promise of extra federal funding and contracts has nurtured an unhealthy obsession with racial “balancing” at the expense of excellence and competitiveness. It is time to defund the MSI program.

The American Civil Rights (ACR) Project is championing a legislative proposal entitled “Enforcing the Law on Colorblind Admissions.” Arguing that the federal government must strictly observe the Supreme Court’s ruling on race-based college admissions, the ACR Project’s model law is aimed at amending the Higher Education Act to fund higher-education programs based on either economic/linguistic or state/local needs, not racial scorekeeping. Specifically, the proposal presents four constitutionally sound alternatives to the MSI program:

1) Abolish MSI Programs and Enhance the Pell Grant Program.

2) Abolish MSI Programs and Replace Them with Grants for Higher-Education Students Learning English.

3) Replace MSI Programs with Block Grants to the States.

4) Replace MSI Programs with Sunset Block Grants to the States.

Founders of the ACR Project—Gail Heriot, Peter Kirsanow, and Daniel Morenoff—explain the “Defund MSI” proposal in a letter to Congress, offering facts and statistics on how the MSI experiment has morphed into “racially and ethnically discriminatory programs [that] shovel about a billion dollars annually” to colleges, of which HSIs are “the largest and best funded.”

The interest of our intellectual priesthood is to first and foremost promote their ideology. We need legislative reforms to cement these changes. Thus is the ACR Project asking Congress to repeal unconstitutional race-based programs and “replace [them] with increased funding for a program that subsidizes colleges and universities that serve low-income students, or with programming to support the needs of actual English-language learners.”

If the schools vying for MSI designations are sincere in their resolve to help the needy, they should welcome the “Defund MSI” proposal with open arms. Yet, judging by American higher education’s collective overreaction to (and mass hysteria about) policy redress purporting to protect equal opportunity, advance free speech, and spur competitiveness, it is highly unlikely that the proposal will be received kindly by the established interests. After all, the interest of our intellectual priesthood is to first and foremost promote their ideology, one hyper-focused on race, victimhood, divisions, and struggles. All the more reason why we should support the legislative proposal to defund them.

Wenyuan Wu holds a Ph.D. in international studies from the University of Miami and is the executive director of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. She chairs the Georgia State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.