I began college as a first-generation, low-income student in California’s community colleges. My parents never had the chance to attend college, and I wasn’t sure I would finish either. What made the difference wasn’t luck — it was the kind of institutional scaffolding HSIs create and sustain.
Dr. Joseph Morales
That capacity is now being targeted for dismantling.
The Department of Justice recently announced it would no longer defend the federal law that defines HSIs, declaring unconstitutional the requirement that 25 percent of a college’s undergraduates be Hispanic to qualify for federal funding. DOJ lawyers lean on the Supreme Court’s so-called “colorblind” logic, articulated most memorably by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2007: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
That line is a legal fiction. It erases how exclusion has operated in American higher education — and how federal policy has tried, however imperfectly, to address it.
The Roberts doctrine has already dismantled race-conscious admissions. Now it’s being used to strip institutions of the funding they need to serve the students they already educate.
The charge that HSIs are “reverse racism” misrepresents both their purpose and their impact. No student gains admission to a university because it is an HSI. To be eligible, a campus must enroll at least 25 percent Hispanic undergraduates and demonstrate that half its students are low-income.
