Hispanic-serving institutions: A primer with story ideas for journalists

We updated this explainer April 18 with new data on the percentage of non-Hispanic Black, Asian and white undergraduate students who attend Hispanic-serving institutions.

As America’s Hispanic population has grown, so has competition for funding among colleges and universities with large numbers of Hispanic students. More than 600 higher education institutions are Hispanic-serving institutions — a formal designation from the U.S. Department of Education that allows them to vie for hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal grants.

The U.S. government has, for decades, provided funding specifically for colleges and universities where a substantial proportion of students are racial or ethnic minorities. Many education researchers say these schools, known collectively as minority-serving institutions, play an important role in helping students of color get into and succeed in college.

“They account for some of the largest enrollments, degree completion, and positive labor market outcomes for students of color by serving as vehicles that enhance economic mobility for their graduates,” researchers at New York University and the American Council on Education write in a report released March 27.

Journalists should give attention to these schools as higher education institutions nationwide face increased scrutiny from the Trump administration, which is leveraging federal funding to try to force changes at both public and private colleges and universities. President Trump and his top aides aim to “shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism,” The New York Times reports.

The first institutions to be recognized and funded as minority-serving institutions were historically Black colleges and universities, often referred to as HBCUs. In 1986, the U.S. government created a dedicated funding stream for HBCUs, originally created to serve Black Americans before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial segregation in public parks, schools and colleges.

The U.S. Department of Education began offering grants to Hispanic-serving institutions in 1995, three years after that designation became part of federal higher education law.

Colleges and universities qualify to become Hispanic-serving institutions if at least 25% of their full-time undergraduate students are Hispanic. Because more Hispanics are going to college, many schools have experienced demographic shifts in enrollment over time.

Between 2005 and 2021, the number of Hispanics aged 18 to 24 attending college doubled to 2.4 million, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show. Researchers’ projections indicate the number of Hispanic kids graduating high school each year will continue to grow even as the total number of kids graduating high school in the U.S. is projected to fall in 2026, thanks largely to the nation’s declining birth rate.

“The total number of high school graduates is expected to peak in 2025, then decline through 2041,” researchers with the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education write in the newest edition of their report “Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates,” released in December.

Growth among Hispanic-serving institutions

Hispanic-serving institutions, commonly referred to as HSIs, are now the most common type of minority-serving institution. In fact, about 70% of minority-serving institutions are HSIs, according to Rutgers University’s Center for Minority Serving Institutions, which studies the various types of minority-serving institutions.

Over the past three decades, HSIs have more than tripled in number. There were 602 during the 2023-24 academic year, up from 189 in 1994-95, Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit organization that collects data on HSIs and advocates for Hispanic students nationally, reports.

Another 418 colleges and universities have Hispanic undergraduate enrollment rates between 15% and 24% and expect to become HSIs in the coming years, Excelencia in Education finds. The Department of Education calls these schools “emerging HSIs” or “eHSIs,” which can also compete for federal grants, although smaller amounts.

During the 2023-24 academic year, 4.6 million students across 28 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico attended HSIs, which vary considerably in both size and mission.

They range from the California Jazz Conservatory, a private college with about 20 students, and the St. John Vianney College Seminary, a religious school in Florida with fewer than 100 students, to the University of Illinois Chicago, a public university with about 34,000 students, and Houston Community College, which serves 85,000-plus students across more than a dozen campuses.

Some of the country’s largest public universities, including Arizona State University and the University of Central Florida, are Hispanic-serving institutions.

Most HSIs are public universities and community colleges. About 29% are private, nonprofit colleges and universities.

Journalists looking for details on HSIs in their area should check out Excelencia in Education’s interactive dashboard. The Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project, housed at New York University, has also created an interactive dashboard featuring current and historical data on HSIs.

Hispanic-serving institutions in 2025

HSIs may face increased scrutiny under President Trump, who is working to reshape the U.S. government by slashing spending, programs and the federal workforce. One of his key priorities is eliminating initiatives that promote DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — to benefit marginalized people such as racial and ethnic minorities and transgender individuals.

His administration wants to root out DEI in K-12 schools and in higher education. After taking office in January, he immediately revoked several executive orders that former President Joe Biden signed in 2021 with the goal of improving educational opportunities for Hispanic, Black and Native American students.

Soon afterward, the Department of Agriculture suspended a fellowship program the agency had offered since 1998 to strengthen “educational partnerships with faculty, staff and administrators from Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) to collaborate with USDA to gain insight and understanding of the federal government.” The agency did reinstate the E. Kika De La Garza Fellowship Program in March, however, amid an outcry from HSI leaders and Democratic members of Congress.

In February, the National Institutes of Health announced a massive cut in federal funding for health and medical research, much of which is conducted by researchers at colleges and universities. Last month, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced it is investigating 52 universities for what it now considers civil rights violations — awarding race-based scholarships, for example, and partnering with a nonprofit group that helps students of color obtain doctoral degrees in business.

Some HSI advocates worry the Trump administration might try to alter the HSI program or cut funding.

“There are some concerns in the community that since this is a race-conscious program, that the current administration may try to link this to DEI criteria, even though it is not,” Deborah Santiago, co-founder and chief executive officer of Excelencia in Education, wrote in an email to The Journalist’s Resource.

Santiago pointed out that while HSIs receive federal funding based on their percentage of Hispanic students, they do not limit who they serve by race or ethnicity.

HSIs student bodies tend to be quite diverse. While HSIs comprise just 20% of U.S. colleges and universities, they educate more than 60% of all Hispanic undergraduate students, according to new data Excelencia in Education released April 16. HSIs also educate 24% of Black undergraduates, 42% of Asian undergraduates and 18% of non-Hispanic white undergraduates nationwide.

HSIs and federal education funding

HSIs compete annually for three different types of grants offered by the Department of Education’s Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program. These three grants provided HSIs a total of about $351 million in fiscal year 2024, according to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. The federal government’s fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 of the following year.

HSIs also receive funding from the Department of Agriculture and National Science Foundation. They received at least $62.5 million from those two agencies combined in fiscal year 2024, the association reports.

While the overall amount of federal funding that HSIs receive is substantial, officials with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities argue it does not go far when divvied up among a rapidly expanding network of institutions. Last spring, the organization’s president, Antonio R. Flores, asked Congress for a new, separate allotment of funding to help HSIs address a backlog of facility repairs, upgrades and maintenance.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated last year that HSIs have deferred maintenance backlogs of almost $100 million each, on average.

“HSIs commonly report challenges in securing funding for digital and facility infrastructure needs, including insufficient state funding and declining tuition and fees revenue towards addressing capital project[s],” Flores told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies in written testimony on May 3.

Researchers Gina Garcia and Jessie Hernandez-Reyes also point out that federal funding has not kept pace with growth among HSIs. This has created funding inequities among them, they write in a 2023 blog post for the nonprofit EdTrust.

“For example, in 2009 there were 293 HSIs eligible to compete for $216.7 million. By fall 2020, there were nearly twice as many (559) HSIs eligible to compete for $306.2 million,” write Garcia, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Hernandez-Reyes, director of policy and advocacy at the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Campaign for College Opportunity.

Many HSIs get left out. According to the Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project, 47% of institutions that qualified for HSI funding in 2021 received it. That is an improvement over the previous year, however. In 2020, 39% of all eligible institutions got funding.

A key source of indirect funding for HSIs — the federal Pell Grant Program — could face a budget shortfall of $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2025, which would apply to the 2025-26 academic year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The program provides low- and moderate-income students with grants to help them pay for tuition, housing and other higher education costs.

About 43% of students at HSIs received Pell grants in 2021, on average, the Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project finds. That’s 9 percentage points higher than students enrolled at schools that are not HSIs, on average.

“HSIs are more likely to educate students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, many of whom are first-generation, and/or from low-income households,” researchers Andrew Martinez and Nichole M. Garcia note in a 2020 report from the Rutgers’ Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

The Pell Grant Program could experience a larger deficit in fiscal year 2026, projections from the Congressional Budget Office show. By the end of fiscal year 2026, the shortfall would be an estimated $9.9 billion.

HSIs and student outcomes

HSIs seek to promote educational and economic equity while helping diversify the U.S. workforce. Hispanic adults lag behind white, Black and Asian adults in both college attainment and personal income, federal data show. They are overrepresented in low-wage jobs such as dishwashers, groundkeepers, preschool teachers, maids and drywall installers and underrepresented in professions such as attorney, pharmacist, school psychologist, engineer and chief executive, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 21% of U.S. Hispanics age 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2022, compared with 42% of white adults, 28% of Black adults, and 59% of Asian adults in the same age group. The Census Bureau’s report on educational attainment does not include information on Native American adults.

“The data tell us time and again that a college degree is the most reliable pathway to the middle class: 74% of workers with college degrees have good jobs, compared with 42% of workers with no more than a high school diploma,” researchers at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce write in a report released last year.

Peer-reviewed research published over the past decade generally offers an incomplete picture of student performance at HSIs. Many academic journal articles focus on a single institution or on institutions in a single state, so their results likely cannot be generalized to HSIs nationwide. Even so, these studies provide data and context journalists can use to try to gauge how well HSIs in their area meet the needs of students and the demands of legislators.

It’s worth noting that many higher education scholars refer to students with Latin American ancestry as “Latino” or use the more gender-inclusive term “Latinx.” Many government agencies and researchers use the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” interchangeably, although, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 52% of people of Latin American descent prefer to describe themselves as Hispanic.

Some of the most common themes explored in academic journals in recent years:

Degree completion. Many HSIs have been criticized for having low graduation rates. In one paper, researchers Frances Contreras and Gilbert J. Contreras analyze data for HSIs in California and find that Hispanic student graduation rates were lower than those of white, non-Hispanic students at all 42 community colleges they studied. “Despite the fact that Latinos represent a sizable critical mass of the student body, their completion rates in the HSIs examined over a 6-year period represents systemic failure,” the authors write in 2015 in the Journal of Hispanic Higher Education.
Why schools seek the HSI designation. In a paper published in 2021, higher education professor Stephanie Aguilar-Smith finds that “HSIs seek grants for varied ends — to pool money, address institutional needs, gain legitimacy, and support students. But ultimately, participants’ race-evasive framing of grant seeking leads me to argue that many HSIs seem to capitalize on their Latinx students.”
The concept of what researchers call “servingness.” Researchers interrogate HSI practices to try to differentiate schools that are truly serving Hispanic students from those that are simply enrolling them. Higher education scholars Gina A. Garcia, Anne-Marie Núñez and Vanessa A. Sansone conducted a systematic review of 148 journal articles and book chapters to develop a conceptual framework of “servingness” at HSIs. This framework “can help administrators, faculty, and staff in HSIs better understand how to transform their institutions in order to better serve Latinx students,” the authors write in 2019 in the Review of Educational Research.
Racial and ethnic diversity among HSI faculty and administrators. Some researchers argue that the climate of an institution is reflected in its employee diversity. In a 2017 paper, researchers Rosa Maria Banda, Alonzo M. Flowers and Petra Robinson write that there is “a disappointing representation of underrepresented faculty in full-time faculty positions in colleges and universities, specifically within the HSI context.”
Black students at HSIs. Researchers are particularly interested in the experiences of Black students, who historically have been underrepresented in higher education, at HSIs. For one study, a group of researchers conducted focus groups with 33 Black students at an unnamed HSI in California in 2018. They found that many of the Black students felt disconnected from the university and that there was “a systematic climate of anti-Blackness that perpetuated institutional, organizational, and interpersonal experiences,” they write in a 2021 paper in the journal Urban Education.

Since 2020, several nonprofit organizations have released white papers and reports outlining their own analyses of data related to HSIs, namely Excelencia in Education and the American Council on Education as well as EdTrust, Third Way and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

The most recent is from the American Council on Education and the Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project, released March 27. It examines higher education data from 2018 and finds that minority-serving institutions, as a whole, “play a crucial role in advancing economic mobility for students of color.”

When researchers looked specifically at four-year public universities, they learned that HSIs awarded more degrees to Hispanic students. The 160 HSIs in their sample awarded bachelor’s degrees to a combined 1,847 Hispanic students. Meanwhile, the 476 public universities in their sample that were not HSIs awarded degrees to a total of 166 Hispanic students.

Another key finding: HSIs allowed more Hispanic students to transfer in from other schools. About half the students who transferred to those 160 HSIs were Hispanic, as were one-tenth of students who transferred to the 476 institutions that were not HSIs.

However, HSI graduation rates were relatively low. A little over 40% of full-time undergraduate students who attended public universities that were HSIs graduated within six years, on average. The average graduate rate for public universities nationwide was just above 60% in 2018, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

4 story ideas and key questions for journalists

It’s important for journalists to help their audiences understand what Hispanic-serving institutions are and the role they play locally and nationally. To help, here are four story ideas.

1. Hispanic-serving institutions’ impact on local communities.

If there are Hispanic-serving institutions in your area, find out what they are doing to help Hispanic students get into college, succeed in their classes, stay on track to graduate and secure jobs and internships. Try to assess how well those efforts are working. Some important questions to ask:

Have these colleges and universities received federal funding? If so, how much and how are they using it?
How are students from different demographic groups performing at these schools? Look at multiple measures, including graduation rates, freshmen retention rates, student debt loads and earnings after graduation. Note trends in student scores on state licensure exams and graduate school-entrance exams as well as the number of students earning degrees in more lucrative career fields. An academic study published in 2020, “Tailoring Programs to Best Support Low-Income, First-Generation, and Racially Minoritized College Student Success,” offers helpful insights and context.
How does student performance at these schools today compare with student achievement before they became Hispanic-serving institutions?
What changes have occurred in local communities since the schools became Hispanic-serving institutions? For example, has community support grown or diminished? How are HSIs engaging with their surrounding communities? Are more local high school students enrolling there? Examine changes to local economies, including employment rates, homeownership rates and business openings and closings. A December 2023 report from the nonprofit Urban Institute, “A Snapshot of the Communities That Hispanic-Serving Institutions Serve,” may generate additional questions worth considering.

2. How a constitutional challenge to federal funding strategies could affect HSIs.

In March, a conservative think tank sent letters to leaders of the U.S. House and Senate urging them to “defund and repeal” federal programs that fund colleges and universities based on their students’ race or ethnicity.

“Of the many such programs, those for Hispanic Serving Institutions (“HSIs”) are the largest and best funded,” the American Civil Rights Project‘s director, executive director and board chairman write in the letters. “These programs are patently unconstitutional and should therefore be repealed.”

Key questions you should answer in a story examining this issue are:

Do constitutional law scholars agree with the American Civil Rights Project’s assessment? What factors must be considered?
How are influential legislators responding to the letters?
Are students, faculty and administrators at minority-serving institutions worried?
What do researchers who study minority-serving institutions or U.S. politics have to say?
Who has the power to alter the federal program or the way it funds minority-serving institutions — and what would that process look like?
What is the likelihood such a change actually would take place?

3. The competition for federal higher education funding.

About 18% of HSIs’ revenue in fiscal year 2022 came from federal agencies, according to a December 2024 analysis from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Examine the process that colleges and universities must follow to become designated as Hispanic-serving institutions and the process for seeking federal funding. Ask administrators at HSIs about their experiences. Also, ask those that have received federal Education Department grants to explain how they know whether that money is making a difference for local students or simply helping the schools make ends meet.

For years, researchers and higher education administrators have criticized the Department of Education’s grant program as failing to meet the needs of HSIs, especially at a time when state funding for public universities and community colleges is uncertain. “State budgets and spending are expected to shrink in fiscal year 2025,” the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association writes in a January 2025 report, adding that institutions in Arizona, California and Louisiana are “facing painful state budget deficits.”

4. How much does faculty diversity matter?

A 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office points out that Black and Hispanic faculty are underrepresented at colleges and universities nationwide. In fact, Black and Hispanic people are less represented among faculty than they are in other professional fields, including engineering and law. In fiscal year 2021, 17% of faculty at Hispanic-serving institutions were Hispanic, according to the report.

What does this mean for students and for higher education broadly? This story should aim to answer these larger questions:

What are the demographics of faculty at HSIs in your area and how has that changed over time?
What barriers do HSIs face in recruiting and retaining Hispanic faculty?
Does faculty diversity influence student performance? There is a lot of peer-reviewed research on this topic, but no scientific consensus. A 2021 paper analyzes data collected over several years from a cohort of nearly 3,000 Black, Hispanic and Asian students who started college in fall 1999. A main takeaway: “A more diverse campus predicted higher GPAs for students of color,” researchers write. Meanwhile, a 2023 paper examines racial bias in grading medical school students’ work, a problem that greater faculty diversity could help address, the authors write.
How do local students feel about faculty diversity? This is relevant considering students are consumers who often spend thousands of dollars a year on tuition alone. A 2022 paper provides a broad overview on the issue. Researchers reviewed 33 studies on student perspectives on faculty diversity in North America, published from 1992 to 2019. The authors write that their findings “are clear in that students, especially underrepresented students, wish to see more diverse faculty and administration. Students also perceive a gap between [institutes of higher educations’] stated commitment to diversity and their effectiveness in achieving diversity.”

Hispanic-serving institutions: A primer with story ideas and guiding questions for journalists