As students last month headed back to school at California’s more than 200 college and university campuses, some had more reason than usual to be nervous. That’s because a federal program that — for a change — is not currently threatened with defunding by President Trump appears to be in trouble from a completely different source.
That program is the Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) grants given annually since 1995 to community colleges, four-year colleges and universities with student bodies that are 25% Latino or more. These have totaled more than $600 million for California campuses alone since the program’s advent.
With its huge population of immigrants with varying legal statuses, California has gotten more than a fourth of the money available under this plan, which lets campuses improve their student support programs from faculty instruction on how best to boost Latino students to those students’ added counseling fand retention programs that keep them and others in school when they might otherwise drop out.
Like Project Head Start for much younger folks, this is one of the great successes inaugurated or expanded during the Clinton administration. The program is under fire now, though, and its survival is threatened in a time when the Trump administration has managed to eliminate many programs it labels as promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.
For sure, California’s Latino students need some kind of help. Only 35% of all students in the K-12 grades met or exceeded grade-level standards in math and reading, with huge performance gaps between Latinos and Blacks at one end and Whites and Asians at the other.
White and Asian students had gaps averaging about 25 percentage points in performance on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress during 2023-24, the last available full year for which figures are available. The obvious need for something to lift up Latino students, who might otherwise be doomed to second-class citizenship, does not matter to the folks opposed to the HSI funding.
The current opposition comes from the state of Tennessee and a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which previously sued successfully to force Harvard University to end affirmative action admissions. It argues that the rules for getting HSI funding are as unconstitutional as favoring some racial groups over others in admissions.
A current federal lawsuit from Tennessee and the Fair Admissions group uses essentially the same arguments employed against Harvard’s former affirmative action plan. The main contention is that all colleges serving low-income students of any ethnicity ought to be eligible for grants now available only to HSIs.
Of course, the efforts for which the HSI funds are used at the 167 California schools that get them are also supposed to benefit all students, not just Latinos. No one is screening Asians out of counseling programs, for example, even if they are designed specifically to meet Hispanic needs and not others.
Because the lawsuit is pretty much in line with Trump administration goals and initiatives and has now been taken up as a Trump cause and because it names the U.S. Education Department and its Secretary Linda McMahon as defendants, the action even being seriously contested is uncertain. The administration can simply accede and Tennessee and its companion citizen group would win.
Those who favor that outcome, according to the EdSource information service, consider the benchmark of more than 25% Latino illegal because it does not let other institutions with lower Hispanic enrollments participate. Right now, HSI funds go to five of the nine University of California undergraduate campuses, all but one of the California State University campuses and most of the state’s community colleges.
Since the lawsuit’s objective is not to eliminate the funds but rather make them more widely available, it’s possible most of those schools will still be able to participate in whatever new programs HSI grants may morph into.
Still, it’s unsettling for the faculty and counseling staff now using the money mostly to serve Latinos, especially since no one knows whether campuses would put up some of their other funds to keep these activities going if they are ruled illegal. It’s also doubtful the Trump administration would do anything to uplift any minority, considering how many of their campus actions now seem aimed to push them down.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com, and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.