What’s New
More than 600 Hispanic-serving institutions are at risk of losing millions of dollars in annual support after the Justice Department late last month declined to defend a federal grant program against a lawsuit, calling it unconstitutional.
In a letter addressed to House Speaker Mike Johnson and made public last week, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that grant money the government awards to the institutions, known as HSIs, violates the Constitution by using racial quotas to determine which institutions are eligible to receive funding. To qualify, institutions must have at least 25 percent of their undergraduate student bodies identify as Latino.
Sauer cited the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which ruled that "[o]utright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.”
By declining to defend the case, the Justice Department effectively agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument to strike down the program.
The Background
Congress created the formal “Hispanic-serving institution” designation in 1992 and began targeted federal appropriations to HSIs in 1995 to respond to educational disparities between Latino and white students. Congress appropriated $350 million for the program last year.
The grant program was initially challenged in court in June. In a lawsuit brought against the Education Department, Tennessee’s attorney general and Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that successfully challenged race-conscious admissions, alleged the program discriminated by excluding institutions from receiving funding “because they don’t have the right mix of ethnicities on campus.”
All of Tennessee’s colleges and universities, the lawsuit argued, serve Hispanic students, yet they don’t receive any federal dollars reserved for HSIs because they don’t meet the government’s “arbitrary quota” of 25 percent Hispanic students. (Tennessee has only one institution designated as an HSI.)
“It is our hope that these financial benefits will be allocated to all under-resourced colleges regardless of the race or ethnicity of their students,” wrote Edward Blum, SFFA’s founder and president, in a statement to The Chronicle.
What’s Next
Though the Justice Department declined to defend the challenge to HSI grants, the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) filed a motion last month to intervene and become a defendant in the case, arguing that the case’s current defendants — the Education Department and its secretary, Linda McMahon — would not adequately represent the interests of HSIs. The organization represents hundreds of colleges and universities across the United States and abroad that educate Hispanic students.
A judge has not yet ruled on HACU’s motion, though the case’s defendants have not opposed the move.
Should HACU’s motion be rejected, the Justice Department’s decision is likely to affect the more than 600 institutions that are designated as HSIs, a number that’s grown steadily since the designation was created. HSIs educate two-thirds of all Hispanic undergraduates in the country. Money from HSI grants goes toward a myriad of uses, including student-support services, academic-success programs, and campus infrastructure.
“It’s been a hugely successful program,” said Marybeth Gasman, executive director of the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions. “HSIs educate a large number of Latinos, but they also educate large numbers of African Americans, Asian Americans, and a lot of white students. They are institutions that look like the country.”
David Mendez, HACU’s interim CEO, argued in a statement that “HACU does not advocate for preferential treatment but rather equitable funding.”
“This unjust effort to end the HSI grant program will disproportionately harm all students attending these colleges and universities and their communities,” Mendez wrote. “The HSI program constitutes only a fraction of the federal budget, yet delivers a return on investment that far exceeds its modest cost.”
