On September 10, 2025, the U.S. Department of Education released a statement announcing that “it will end discretionary funding to several Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI) grant programs that discriminate by conferring government benefits exclusively to institutions that meet racial or ethnic quotas,” claiming the programs were unconstitutional.
But Mike Hoa Nguyen, an associate professor at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies and principal investigator on the Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI) Data Project, says MSIs are “the backbone of American higher education” and told a virtual audience assembled for New York University’s Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy that the Trump Administration is splitting hairs in an effort to divide institutions and pit them against each other.
During a March 12 event, Nguyen discussed the changing landscape of funding and other support for these institutions, which are classified based on their federal designations for serving marginalized student populations.
“Really the goal [of MSIs] is to benefit and support and validate students of color, while at the same time addressing ongoing racism,” he said.
In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education directed $400 million per year to support minority-serving institutions, which Nguyen jokingly referred to as “a rounding error when it comes to the total federal budget.” But despite how little the institutions receive, they continue to do very impactful work.
Nguyen also pointed out that because the 1965 Higher Education Act only allows institutions to select one MSI classification for funding purposes — meaning an institution cannot be both a historically Black college or university (HBCU) and a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), even if it meets the criteria for both. The current structure “really doesn't recognize how diverse and how complex and how multicultural some of these institutions are today," said Nguyen.
“I don't envy those college presidents who have to make some really tough decisions, the about which which designation that they're going to pick, he continued. I had the opportunity to talk to several who had to make that choice, and they they often say it's one of the hardest and most difficult ones they've had to make in their in their presidency.”
But Nguyen said the upside is that since MSI funding is institutional funding, and not specific to one program, there’s an opportunity for colleges and universities to develop programs that will benefit students from varied backgrounds.
“When these institutions get this funding, they usually set up and design some type of program on campus that really is trying to build out an ecosystem of support for students across all of these different [programs] that may already exist, or they'll build new [programs] that don't exist on campus, depending on the sort of conditions on campus,” he said, citing as an example tutoring programs to support students from vulnerable populations.
Nguyen pointed out that, despite the divisive rhetoric against supporting MSIs and diversity on campus, there remains bipartisan support for funding these institutions. President Donald Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 includes an increase in funding for MSIs. And in the most recent round of congressional appropriations, MSIs received more funding than the previous year and the year before that.
“We are actually at the highest levels of MSI funding, appropriated requested by the administration and appropriated by Congress than ever before,” he continued. “And this is Department of Education Funding, so … that’s a good thing if you are a proponent of MSIS.”
But at the same time, the Trump administration recently released an opinion from the U.S. Department of Justice that links a recent decision against affirmative action to MSIs in a move Nguyen said was meant to challenge the institutions’ overall existence.
“I think a lot of folks would say that link is not very strong legally, because the court the affirmative action decision really is only focused on using race and college admissions, nothing else. It's very narrow emphasizes a whole different ball game and focuses on enrollment, not on admissions,” he said. :But yet, the Administration released this DOJ opinion, sort of making that link, and in that and in that opinion … essentially they're arguing because these are race conscious initiative and race affirmative initiatives, they’re unconstitutional because we need to be not to not have any racial classifications.”
