The Justice Department last month declined to defend a federal-grant program for colleges that serve a disproportionate number of Hispanic students. A lawsuit from the State of Tennessee and Students For Fair Admissions, the organization that successfully challenged race-conscious admissions, alleged that the program is discriminatory and violates the Constitution.
The move could mean the end of the 27-year-old Hispanic-Serving Institutions program, affecting funding for more than 600 institutions across the country.
Last year the federal government sent $350 million through the program to colleges where at least 25 percent of the student population identify as Hispanic.
The idea that we would have less funding to make college available to the only growing demographic is such a double blow.
At Dominican University of California, a private institution with just over 1,100 students, nearly 30 percent of the student population identify as Hispanic or Latino. The university received its first HSI funding in 2022 — a five-year, $3-million grant to increase enrollment and improve graduation and retention rates for undergraduate Latino students. It received another $3-million grant the following year to provide services for its graduate students.
Its president, Nicola Pitchford, says several of the resources offered to students are at risk of going away. The Chronicle spoke with Pitchford about the role the program plays at her institution and what’s at stake if it disappears.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Classes at Dominican started last week. How has the campus been feeling?
It’s got the usual fall eagerness and excitement and joy. And our incoming class looks to be as diverse as ever, and full of hope and excitement.
I’ve met a few new graduate students so far, but I’ve met a bunch of new undergrads, including a group of students who came two weeks before the semester started for a summer bridge program, which is made possible by our HSI funding. Those are students, not all Latinx, but students who were coming from underresourced households or are the first generation in their family to be attending college, and who opted for having a funded opportunity to focus in on college skills and peer-group community-building in residence before the beginning of their first year of college.
It was lovely to see students from that same group last week, in the first week of the semester, already kind of acting big-shouldered, like, “We know our way around,” and also reaching out to one another. I literally heard one of the students who’d been in the summer bridge program say to another, “How are you doing? Do you have what you need?” Which was just exactly what’s supposed to happen.
What other programs did the HSI grant help support at Dominican over the last few years?
We have both an undergraduate- and a graduate-serving grant, and the undergraduate grant has really helped us both expand and go deeper in some of the best practices that were already baked into our educational model. Those specifically include peer-mentoring and what we call integrative coaching, which is a staff of mentors who are equipped to support students across their academic and nonacademic experience.
The integrative coaches also teach a one-unit college-skills course and another one-unit course for career readiness. They provide those supplementary student-support experiences that we know make an immense difference for students from every background, but disproportionately so for the least-served students, both socioeconomically and in terms of ethnic and racial background.
[The grant] allowed us to make sure that our financial-aid and recruiting materials were available in the first languages of our applicant pool, and to expand our vision of wraparound student mentoring and support to be really a six-year vision — that included the expansion of our precollege bridge programming. And also to deepen our career mentoring, career transition skills at the other end of the undergraduate experience.
We also use a portion of the grant to provide some expanded scholarships. The graduate-student grant came at a perfect time for us, when our graduate-student population has been expanding as a percentage of our overall student population, and when we were seeking to build more of a graduate-student infrastructure that wasn’t program specific but was institutionwide. For instance, a portion of the graduate-student HSI grant enabled us to establish, for the first time, a graduate-student lounge, a space that grad students can check out and use for group meetings, for study, for events, some grad-student-specific integrative coaching.
Regarding the possible termination of these grants, what are you preparing for? What’s the worst-case scenario?
We have been prepared since early this year for losing the funding at any time. One of the things we’ve done is make sure that we are drawing down very regularly from that grant so that we’re not left with expenses we’ve already incurred, to the extent we can manage that. But we will have expenses we’ve already committed to in terms of multiyear support for students.
We have also been upping our fund raising, our private philanthropy appeal to prepare donors for the potential that we may lose funding and need to turn to them if we hope to replace it. Because as a small, regional, nonselective, tuition-dependent institution without a large endowment, we don’t have other funding sources that we can turn to to carry the cost of these programs in our budget. We will have to raise additional funds. And in some places we will have to potentially suspend some portions of the program. We really don’t want to do that. The students love it. The faculty and staff who work in the program love it.
I would hope that, to the extent they can, both private donors and foundations might organize to step in to replace some of this designated minority-serving-institution funding.
But the thing that is perhaps the most frustrating is that we know that in California and across much of the country, the only demographic that’s growing in terms of the potential college population is students of color, particularly Hispanic or Latinx students. These grants have helped institutions be ready to serve those students, and it’s at a time when the demographic cliff is hitting higher education. The idea that we would have less funding to make college available to the only growing demographic is such a double blow.
Are there any resources that are likely to disappear more quickly at Dominican than others?
I’m afraid it’s the employee positions that always go first. We have such skilled and committed folks working as mentors and other forms of advising with the students in the program. When we have committed that we will provide scholarship support to students, we’re committed. That, we’re not going to take back. And we built the physical space and, you know, set up the physical space, so that’s not going to go away immediately or short term.
It’s the people. The people and their expertise that we’re going to have to work the hardest to keep and be able to continue supporting. If we lose any of that, it’s not like I can secure a $200,000 gift six months later and bring those people back. You have to start again.
Why should the HSI grant program continue to exist?
I think the statistics speak for themselves. There is a grotesque college-access and college-completion gap in this country that is racially specific. If higher education is truly going to be the powerful equity engine that we know the United States has long expected it to be and that we want it to be, we have to be better at attracting, enrolling, educating, and graduating the students who represent a cross-section of the United States. It seems to me that cutting funding for minority-serving institutions, minority-serving programs, undercuts that unique value of U.S. higher education.
The programs that this funding supports are not exclusively for students of color or Hispanic or Latinx students. They allow us to do more of what we know works for everybody. And the outcomes are strong — there really is great data across the country that these programs make a difference. That serves everybody, because we need qualified workers. We need nurses and teachers and entrepreneurs and artists, and all of the ways in which college graduates uplift whole communities.
