The Education Department published an eligibility application usually used to help determine if colleges qualify for minority-serving institution grants, but it doesn’t mention MSIs.
After months of delay, the U.S. Department of Education came out with its eligibility application for certain grant programs serving low-resourced institutions under the Higher Education Act on Monday. The document typically allows colleges to prove they serve high numbers of low-income students and have low per-student expenditure in order to compete for Title III and Title V grants, including programs supporting Hispanic-serving institutions and other types of minority-serving institutions.
But this year’s application conspicuously makes no mention of MSIs. The only program directly referenced in the application is the Strengthening Institutions Program (SIP), a capacity-building grant for low-resourced colleges that doesn’t include enrollment thresholds for particular racial or ethnic groups.
MSI proponents and higher ed experts take this as an ominous sign that MSI funding is—yet again—on the chopping block, despite allocations to these institutions from Congress. But the application also gives weight to the circulating theory that the Trump administration plans to move discretionary funds from MSI programs over to SIP. Despite Congress assigning those funds to MSI grants, it left room for such a move in the language of its appropriations bill.
If the Trump administration moves forward with a “supersized SIP,” the funding pot for the program could exceed $430 million, said David Baime, senior vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges. The program’s current budget is $102 million.
Ellen Keast, a spokesperson for the Education Department, didn’t confirm or deny plans to reprogram the funds in response to questions. But she referred Inside Higher Ed to a December press release in which ED sided with a Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion that minority-serving institutions are unconstitutional. The release came several months after ED nixed discretionary funds to enrollment-based MSIs for fiscal year 2025 and reprogrammed the funds to historically Black colleges and tribal colleges.
“I agree with the Office of Legal Counsel opinion, which confirms that using race quotas and preferences to determine eligibility for federal education funding programs is unconstitutional,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in the release. “We cannot, and must not, attach race-based conditions when allocating taxpayer funding.”
The Implications
Deborah Santiago, CEO of Excelencia in Education, an organization focused on Latino student success, said the application is a “clear signal” that competitive funding for MSIs is going to be reprogrammed to SIP—but how to feel about that potential shift and its implications is less clear.
“It’s fortuitous that there are some resources that are potentially there” that MSIs can still apply for, Santiago said. But her concern is “Can they actively compete when there are so many institutions and there’s so much need out there?”
She predicts upward of 1,000 institutions could be vying for SIP funding if competitive grant programs for MSIs aren’t an option. The point of distinct programs for different types of minority-serving institutions, she argued, was to set aside funding for them so they wouldn’t have to compete in such a large pool. As it is, only about a third of Hispanic-serving institutions have won discretionary HSI grants, and that’s when they were just competing among themselves, she said.
“Most [HSIs] don’t have endowments. Most of them don’t have sophisticated government affairs and development teams and need capacity-building to increase the quality of education they offer,” Santiago said.
Baime is more optimistic that the same institutions could still get support through SIP grants. Even though his association advocated for MSI funding to remain in place, he’s grateful the department is moving forward with the process to at least compete for some funds for underresourced institutions. He’s also hopeful colleges that would’ve previously competed for MSI grants could still benefit because, by definition, they meet SIP’s criteria as underresourced institutions serving at least half low-income students.
If SIP is enlarged, the “funds that are awarded to campuses will ultimately support many of the same institutions and many of the same students in many of the same ways as under the MSI programs,” he said.
Amanda Fuchs Miller, former deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs in the Biden administration and now president of the higher ed consultancy Seventh Street Strategies, agreed minority-serving institutions should prepare to apply to SIP “because it’s still institutional aid money. They would be eligible for it. You can use it for the same purposes.”
But she worries ED’s new eligibility application has implications not just for MSIs’ discretionary money but their mandatory funds, as well.
She pointed out that the eligibility application is also part of the process used to determine which institutions qualify for about $132 million in mandatory funds to MSIs, appropriated by Congress through the FUTURE Act. But if ED isn’t keeping track of which institutions qualify for MSI funding over all, that signals to her that the department doesn’t plan to dole out those funds, either.
“To me, this shows that they’re not going to give out that money, because they wouldn’t know who to give it to,” Miller said.
When ED axed MSI funding for fiscal year 2025, the department left the mandatory funds untouched, acknowledging that it couldn’t legally reprogram those dollars. But the DOJ memo referenced by the Education Department has since argued that both mandatory and competitive grants to MSIs are unconstitutional, and Trump may not be required to give them out. Because of that rhetoric, the possible broader threat to all MSI funding comes as “no big surprise” to Miller.
SIP money could prove useful to MSIs in the absence of their own competitive grant programs, but if ED drags its feet on handing out mandatory funding, “I think [institutions] need to be prepared to litigate,” Miller said.
“It’s not unconstitutional until the court says it’s unconstitutional,” she said. The administration is “required to give out that money as Congress directed them to.”
