WAR ON D.E.I.

Trump administration cuts grants for minority-serving colleges, declaring them unconstitutional

COLLIN BINKLEY
Wed, September 10, 2025 



FILE - Pedestrians cross University Ave on the campus of Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., July 25, 2018. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is ending several grant programs reserved for colleges that have large numbers of minority students, saying they amount to illegal discrimination by tying federal money to racial quotas.

In a shift upending decades of precedent, the Education Department said Wednesday it now believes it’s unconstitutional to award federal grants using eligibility requirements based on racial or ethnic enrollment levels. The agency said it’s holding back a total of $350 million in grants budgeted for this year and called on Congress to “reenvision” the programs for future years.

More than $250 million of that figure was budgeted for the government's Hispanic-Serving Institution program, which offers grants to colleges and universities where at least a quarter of undergraduates are Hispanic. Congress created the program in 1998 after finding that Latino students were going to college and graduating at far lower rates than white students.

Several smaller programs are also being cut, including $22 million for schools where at least 40% of students are Black, along with programs reserved for schools with certain enrollment levels of Asian American, Pacific Islander or Native American students. The programs have traditionally received bipartisan support in Congress and were created to address longstanding racial disparities in education.

Not included in the cuts is federal funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, which are open to all students regardless of race.

“Diversity is not merely the presence of a skin color,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement Wednesday. “Stereotyping an individual based on immutable characteristics diminishes the full picture of that person’s life and contributions, including their character, resiliency, and merit.”

McMahon added that she aims to work with Congress to repurpose the funding for institutions that serve “underprepared or under-resourced” students without using quotas. She did not elaborate on plans to repurpose the $350 million.

The government’s gnts for Hispanic-Serving Institutions are being challenged in a federal lawsuit brought by the state of Tennessee and the anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions. Tennessee argues that all of its public universities serve Hispanic students, but none meet the “arbitrary ethnic threshold” to be eligible for the grants.

The Justice Department declined to defend the grants in the lawsuit, saying in a July memo that the 25% enrollment requirement violates the Constitution.

In court filings, a national association of Hispanic-Serving Institutions said the grants are legal and help put its members on an even playing field.

More than 500 colleges and universities are designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions, making them eligible for the grants. It includes flagship campuses like the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arizona, along with many community colleges and smaller institutions.

The new cuts drew backlash from Democrats in Congress.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said Trump is “putting politics ahead of students simply looking to get ahead.” She drew attention to the government's current funding bill, a stopgap measure passed in March that gives the administration more flexibility to redirect federal funding.

“This is another important reminder of why Congress needs to pass funding bills, like the one the Senate marked up this summer, that ensure Congress — not Donald Trump or Linda McMahon — decides how limited taxpayer dollars are spent,” Murray said in a statement.

The Education Department said it will still release about $132 million for similar grant programs that are considered mandatory, meaning their levels are dictated by existing laws. Even so, the department said it “continues to consider the underlying legal issues associated with the mandatory funding mechanism in these programs.”

Former President Joe Biden made Hispanic universities a priority, signing an executive action last year that promised a new presidential advisory board and increased funding. President Donald Trump revoked the order on his first day back in office earlier this year.

___

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Exclusive: Trump Admin Ends $350M Grants for ‘Hispanic-Serving Institutions'

Philip Wegmann
Wed, September 10, 2025 

AP

The Trump administration will cut a federal program that provides funding to colleges and universities with large Hispanic student populations, as well as numerous other discretionary grants designed to support minority serving institutions of higher education, RealClearPolitics is first to report.

It is the result of recent legal wrangling and the latest in Trumps ongoing crusade to overhaul academia.

The Department of Justice previously declined to defend the Hispanic-Serving Institutions program against a legal challenge brought by Tennessee and Students for Fair Admissions. The longstanding federal initiative, HSI, has made additional grants available to colleges where more than 25% of the student body is Hispanic. But in a July letter to Congress, the DOJ deemed that effort a discriminatory and unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendments Due Process Clause.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon agrees with that assessment, and now the Department of Education intends to broaden the aperture by ending HSI funding, as well as at least half a dozen major education grants that determine eligibility by race.

"To further our commitment to ending discrimination in all forms across federally supported programs, the department will no longer award Minority-Serving Institution grants that illegally restrict eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas," McMahon said in a statement.

Added the education secretary: "The Department looks forward to working with Congress to reenvision these programs to support institutions that serve underprepared or under-resourced students without relying on race quotas and will continue fighting to ensure that students are judged as individuals, not prejudged by their membership of a racial group."

A senior administration official, who declined to speak on the record, clarified that the change would not affect historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which do not rely on racial quotas as part of admissions.

The Education Department has already singled out seven major federal grant programs intended to help minority students at Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Asian American, and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions.

The administration believes programs that restricted eligibility on racial lines violated the Constitution and served as a vehicle for advancing so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. The administration expects $350 million in annual savings from the cuts. The monies are expected to be reallocated toward other programs that align with "administration priorities."

But there is only so much that the administration can do on its own. Congress passed, and then President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, signed into law legislation that created the assistance program for HSIs. They simultaneously set aside other grants for other minority serving institutions. As a result, the Education Department can reprogram discretionary funds, but McMahons hands are tied with respect to certain mandatory spending.

All the same, this kind of budgetary overhaul would have been politically unthinkable to most Republicans pre-Trump. It would have been impossible prior to a landmark 2023 ruling by the Supreme Court that found race considerations in university admissions unconstitutional. A sea-change moment, the ruling bowled over affirmative action programs that had been a pillar of higher education.

The move by McMahon to end the minority students grants is a direct downstream result of the court case. The DOJ specifically cited the Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, in its letter to Speaker Johnson announcing its decision not to defend the Hispanic college program.

"For too long," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in that decision, universities "have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individuals identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice."

This has given the Trump administration a free hand in efforts to uproot affirmative action from the academy.

When Tennessee and Students for Fair Admissions filed suit to challenge the HSI program earlier this year, Francisca Fajana, Director of Racial Justice Strategy at LatinoJustice PRLDEF, condemned the lawsuit as "a direct attempt to erase programs that remedy racial and ethnic disparities and strip away essential resources from institutions that serve Latino students."

At the time, Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, countered that "no student or institution should be denied opportunity because they fall on the wrong side of an ethnic quota."