by Denise-Marie Ordway, The Journalist’s Resource
January 28, 2026
A lawsuit filed against the U.S. Department of Education last summer challenges the constitutionality of three federal grants that, together, have provided hundreds of millions of dollars a year to colleges and universities formally designated as Hispanic-serving institutions.
The Education Department has since slashed funding for these schools, where at least 25% of full-time undergraduate students are Hispanic. Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana filed a bill last month that would eliminate all grants the federal government gives to higher education institutions based on their percentage of students who are racial or ethnic minorities.
To help journalists report on these issues, we asked experts in law, education and education journalism for advice. Below are four of the tips they shared during our recent webinar, “The Future of Federal Funding at Hispanic-Serving Institutions.”
But first, some important context:
For several decades, the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies have helped fund higher education institutions with a disproportionately high percentage of students who are racial or ethnic minorities. The goal of the Education Department’s Minority-Serving Institutions Program, which provides the bulk of that funding, is to broaden access to higher education and help more people from historically marginalized groups earn college degrees. Most minority-serving institutions are Hispanic-serving institutions, commonly referred to as HSIs.
Both public and private colleges and universities can compete for federal HSI grants. However, it’s unclear how many schools received HSI-related grants in 2025. A total of 602 had the qualifications to become HSIs during the 2023-24 academic year, according to Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit advocacy organization that collects data on HSIs.
The Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project, a collaboration among several academic researchers, reports that 219 colleges and universities received grants through the Department of Education’s program in 2021, the most recent year for which it has data. At the time, 462 institutions were eligible to compete for those dollars.
It’s also unclear the total amount of money that all federal agencies, combined, spent on HSIs in 2025. Several agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Defense, have provided funding through their own programs. The Congressional Research Service estimated in 2023 that annual appropriations made to all minority-serving institutions in accordance with the Higher Education Act of 1965 totaled $1.29 billion in fiscal year 2023.
Last June, the state of Tennessee and the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the Department of Education’s HSI program is discriminatory and violates the U.S. Constitution. Students for Fair Admissions is the national organization that sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over their student admissions processes in 2014. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately sided with Students for Fair Admissions, deciding in 2023 that it is unconstitutional to give racial and ethnic minorities an edge when deciding which students to admit.
Two other organizations have joined the HSI lawsuit as plaintiffs — the nonprofit National Association of Scholars and Faculty and the all-volunteer advocacy group Students Opposed to Racial Preferences. The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities has intervened as a defendant.
In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice notified Congress that it would not defend the Education Department’s HSI program in court. The agency determined that it violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection component.
The Education Department announced in September that it was slashing funding for most types of minority-serving institutions by a total of about $350 million. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the agency will no longer spend discretionary funds — the part of its budget it controls — on grant programs “that discriminate by restricting eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas.”
Two types of minority-serving institutions receive grant funding based on their historical missions, not the percentage of underrepresented minorities they serve: Tribal colleges and universities, often referred to as TCUs, and Historically Black colleges and universities, commonly known as HBCUs.
TCUs receive the bulk of their funding from the federal government as part of its trust and treaty responsibility to tribal nations. HBCUs were founded before 1964 with the primary mission of educating Black Americans at a time when they were generally barred from institutions that served white students.
Keep in mind that an HBCU is different from a school that has been designated as a predominantly Black institution, which qualifies for federal funding if at least 40% of its students are Black.
Tips for reporting on Hispanic-serving institutions
The three experts who spoke at our webinar focused on HSIs. They shared these tips to help journalists ask more probing questions and better understand how the federal lawsuit and proposed legislation could affect HSIs and higher education more broadly.
Our guest speakers were:
1. Be aware of myths about HSIs so you can avoid reporting them as facts.
Núñez described and debunked some of the most common myths about HSIs that she has encountered. For example, many people mistakenly assume all HSIs get grants when, actually, a lot of them do not, she said. She also pointed out that the money does not only benefit Hispanic students.
“In fact, HSI grants often serve as modest, targeted investments that are used for campus-wide improvements that benefit all students,” she said.
Núñez also noted that HSIs do not exist specifically to serve Hispanic students. They do not give preference to Hispanic students or limit students from other demographic groups.
“So, if we’re thinking about admissions, for example, I work at a large, four-year HSI, and my institution is open access,” she said. “So, students who meet college eligibility requirements can attend my institution. There are not admissions quotas. There’s no exclusion. The majority of HSIs are broad access institutions, and about half of them are community colleges.”
About 5% of HSIs are R1 institutions, a classification the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education gives to colleges and universities that produce the most academic research and confer the most doctoral degrees. These schools tend to be the most selective. During the webinar, Núñez miscalculated the percentage of HSIs that are R1 institutions but contacted The Journalist’s Resource afterward to provide a corrected estimate.
2. Interview Hispanic students, Hispanic faculty and political conservatives to demonstrate the range of views on the issue.
Many higher education stories are told from the perspective of college administrators, Burnette, a veteran education journalist, said. The views of individual students and faculty are frequently missing.
He urged reporters to interview Hispanic students and faculty from different backgrounds and school types when reporting on HSIs. He noted that people who are racial or ethnic minorities often hold differing views on programs created to promote racial equity.
“Some students think it’s the best thing ever,” he said. “Some students think it’s the worst thing ever. Some students think it’s humiliating. Some students think it’s affirming.”
Burnette also said journalists covering higher education need to engage with political conservatives.
“We ignore conservatives,” he said, adding that his news outlet started covering the debate around HSI funding after discovering a blog that cited Morenoff’s work. “One of the things that I was so fascinated by was how much, how many policy papers and research papers were out there about racialized policy within higher ed, and how little we had written about this. And this is the Chronicle of Higher Education.”
3. Examine proposals to use HSI grant money for other purposes.
Morenoff pointed out that the lawsuit that challenges the Education Department’s HSI program does not aim to eliminate that funding. It seeks changes to the program to allow all higher education institutions to participate, regardless of the racial or ethnic makeup of their student body.
“The plaintiffs asked to open the door to broader competition to allow all schools to compete for federal money on an even basis,” he said.
The bill that Banks introduced last month calls for funding to be redistributed. The Promoting Equal Learning and Liberty Act, or PELL Act, would eliminate funding for most types of minority-serving institutions and use that money to expand the Federal Pell Grant Program, which helps lower-income students pay for college and vocational training
That’s a change that Morenoff’s organization, The American Civil Rights Project, had urged Congress to make in early 2025.
“I think it’s worth mentioning that to whatever extent any group remains underprivileged, this approach would help them most,” he said during the webinar. “And that it at least appears that it would do so in a way that’s fair — at least race-neutral — [and] doesn’t appear to have any constitutional difficulties, and would maximize those students’ control over their own education.”
4. Explain the legal arguments being made against the Department of Education’s HSI program.
The federal lawsuit argues that the program is unconstitutional in two ways:
1. It is discriminatory because its three grants only go to institutions where at least 25% of full-time undergraduate students are Hispanic. This, the plaintiffs contend, denies students and faculty equal protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
2. Its funding violates a federal spending rule called the independent constitutional bar doctrine. Under the rule, federal spending cannot prompt a recipient of federal funds to do something unconstitutional. Morenoff said during the webinar that some colleges and universities have worked to increase their proportion of Hispanic students to qualify for HSI grants, which he said the 2023 Supreme Court ruling prohibits.
He suggested journalists read an article that attorney Alexander M. Heideman wrote on this topic in 2023, while working for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
In the article, published in a legal journal of the right-leaning Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, Heideman shares examples of institutions declaring their plans to boost Hispanic enrollment to 25%.
Other resources to help you cover HSIs
Read these journalism tip sheets and explainers:
Review these government reports and documents:
- A December 2025 legal opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which determined that it’s unconstitutional to give federal grants to colleges and universities based on the racial makeup of their student body.
- A 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that examines HSIs’ “extensive” facility needs, including building repairs, technology upgrades and maintenance backlogs.
- A 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service that offers a broad overview of federal laws and policies related to minority-serving institutions.
Also worth checking out:
Get to know the academic research centers and nonprofit groups that study, track and provide data on HSIs. The most prominent ones include:
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