In thirty days — then in seventy more — an institution lost years of work with no transition plan and no off-ramp, only dates on a calendar marking when people would no longer have jobs.
That is not a policy adjustment; it is a betrayal.
That’s the story told in The Cost of Disinvestment, a powerful new report from the Center for Minority Serving Institutions at Rutgers University, written by Drs. Rebecca Perdomo, Melissa Salazar, and Stephanie Aguilar-Smith. They surveyed 73 program directors, faculty, staff, and students at HSIs nationwide in the wake of the $507.9 million cut. The findings are not abstractions; they are real people. Seventy percent said the cancellations took a major toll on their mental health. Nearly six in 10 said the damage landed hardest on students and frontline workers, the ones with the least power to absorb it.
Salazar told me this was different from anything HSIs had absorbed before not in degree, but in kind.
“The Department's decision was not driven by budgetary constraints but by the unfounded opinion that HSI grants constituted unlawful preferential treatment,” she said. Staff doing the direct work of keeping students enrolled became “collateral consequences of this broader political effort to defund DEI-related work.”
Announced three weeks before the new fiscal year, it left institutions no runway to plan. Perdomo, a co-author of the report, put the arc in context. Congress first appropriated $12 million for HSIs in 1995, growing past $400 million by 2023. What changed in September was not the size of the check, but Washington's willingness to write one at all.
