Tribal colleges and universities, generally located in the Plains and deserts of the western U.S., seldom draw the attention of the mainstream news media. But extreme funding cuts the Trump administration recently proposed have put them under a national spotlight.
Tribal colleges and universities would lose nearly 90% of the funding they get from the U.S. Department of the Interior if Congress supports the White House’s budget proposal for the new fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
The Department of the Interior proposed reducing their annual allocation from about $183 million this year to about $22 million in 2026. Funding for the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico would be completely eliminated.
Tribal and higher education leaders say a loss that large would be devastating.
“The numbers that are being proposed would close the tribal colleges,” Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, told ProPublica in June. “They would not be able to sustain.”
Tribal colleges and universities, commonly known as TCUs, are a relatively new type of higher education institution. They were created to prepare tribal citizens to work in and strengthen their tribal nations. The Navajo Nation founded the first one less than 60 years ago. Diné College, formerly known as Navajo Community College, has grown from about 300 students who gathered at a community school in 1969 to about 1,800 students at a college with seven locations in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico.
Today, there are 37 TCUs, 35 of which are accredited. Most are located on or near reservation lands in 15 states, stretching from California to Michigan and into Alaska.
Tribal colleges prepare tribal citizens
At TCUs, students study academic subjects and vocational fields while also learning about their tribe and practicing its language, customs and spiritual traditions, says Dina Horwedel, director of public education at the nonprofit American Indian College Fund. Tribal elders, recognized for their knowledge, often help lead lessons.
Horwedel says TCUs are a manifestation of tribal sovereignty. That term, common in conversations about tribal issues, refers to the inherent authority of tribes to govern themselves as independent nations.
“Native nations said, “Look, we want to educate our own people in our own way,” she explains.
Some TCUs still primarily serve citizens of a single tribal nation. But many TCUs draw students from surrounding cities and states, providing educational opportunities that otherwise do not exist in many rural areas.
All TCUs offer associate degrees, 22 offer bachelor’s degrees and nine award master’s degrees, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. In 2023, Navajo Technical University became the first TCU to introduce a doctoral degree program.
TCUs receive the bulk of their funding from the federal government as part of its trust and treaty responsibility to tribal nations. America’s obligation to provide tribes with services, goods and other support, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, is derived from hundreds of treaty agreements the U.S. made with or forced upon tribes centuries ago in exchange for their land.
The U.S. government has failed, however, to provide the money it promised, a ProPublica investigation last year revealed. Reporter Matt Krupnick estimated that Congress had underfunded TCUs by a quarter-billion dollars a year.
“The outcome is crimped budgets and crumbling buildings in what the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights once called the ‘most poorly funded institutions of higher education in the country,’” Krupnick writes.
Several federal agencies fund TCUs but the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Education provides the biggest share. TCU administrators will be watching closely as Congress finishes putting together a federal budget for the new fiscal year.
The process could take months to complete. Congress, in recess for the month of August, seldom passes spending bills on time, a Pew Research Center analysis finds. However, it has proposed providing as much or more funding for the Bureau of Indian Education in 2026 as it does this year, Krupnick, who has covered TCUs for ProPublica, tells The Journalist’s Resource.
Helping journalists cover tribal colleges
Higher education researchers Natalie Youngbull and Theresa Ambo urge news outlets to help get the word out about TCUs.
“TCUs are not covered enough and that’s an issue in and of itself” says Ambo, an associate professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “When they get overlooked, audiences miss the opportunity to understand the goals of these institutions and the innovative work the staff and students are engaging in at these institutions.”
Youngbull, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma and an editor of the Tribal College and University Research Journal, says this point is worth emphasizing: The vast majority of TCUs are open-access institutions, which accept all students who meet their basic admission requirements.
Tribal colleges and universities do admit students who are not Native American. To maintain their federal funding, though, at least half of a TCU’s full-time students must be citizens or enrolled members of federally recognized tribal nations, Youngbull notes.
To help journalists better understand and cover TCUs, The Journalist’s Resource asked experts for advice. We interviewed researchers, college administrators, education reporters and Indigenous student advocates. We also read academic reports, op-ed articles and essays written by Native American leaders, scholars and journalists. We synthesized that information to create this list of six things journalists need to know or do when reporting on tribal colleges and universities.
1. There are 574 federally recognized tribal nations, each of which has its own system of government. Keep in mind there is no standard law or policy among them that outlines how they will work with journalists or handle journalists’ requests for information and interviews.
As sovereign nations, tribes recognized by the federal government have the right to govern their own people and property. If you are not a citizen or enrolled member of the tribe you want to visit, make sure you have a basic understanding of the laws and policies that might apply to you before you go. For example, find out whether some areas of a tribal college may be off limits to you and whether there are restrictions on what you can photograph.
Start by checking tribal government websites and reading “Press Freedom on Tribal Lands,” a guide created by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Be aware that some tribes forbid people outside their tribal community from seeing or even hearing certain things — for instance, the recordings of tribal elders and sensitive tribal information such as the location of sacred sites.
“For some tribes, centuries of forced assimilation and criminalization of their religious practices mandated the adoption of internal confidentiality protocols,” scholars at the Native Nations Law & Policy Center at UCLA write in a 2020 report.
Tribal records generally are not considered federal records subject to the federal Freedom of Information Act. However, federal agencies collect and make public various data on TCUs and Native American students. Keep in mind, too, that when a tribe shares information with a federal agency, the agency may be required to share it with journalists who request it.
2. Examine TCUs’ impact on rural communities.
Horwedel, of the American Indian College Fund, says TCUs play a key role in building tribal workforces and workforces in rural communities broadly. They provide teachers, health care workers and other professionals who are in particularly short supply in remote areas in the Great Plains, the Sonoran and Mojave deserts, and Alaska.
She notes that in 2020, Salish Kootenai College in Montana became the first TCU to introduce a bachelor’s degree in nursing, merging Western medicine with Native American spiritual practices.
“In Montana, health care facilities are so far from small, rural communities that colleges and universities like SKC are doing lifesaving work,” Horwedel adds. “Nurses stay in the community. Graduates are making house calls.”
The Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, a magazine that focuses on tribal colleges, highlights examples of community impact and student success. Joy Harjo, who attended and taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts before being named as the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2019, is featured in one article. The magazine has recently published articles on a fashion show at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, an heirloom seed preservation project at Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in North Dakota and Leech Lake Tribal College’s efforts to protect wild rice beds in Minnesota.
Academic research on tribal colleges and universities also provides insights.
For example, a 2021 academic paper examines a collaboration between Iḷisaġvik College in Alaska and a state-run university in Michigan to make chemistry classes more culturally relevant. Researchers explain that this would help Native American students relate what they learn in class to their own culture and personal experiences, which may, in turn, encourage more Native people to study the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
A report released earlier this year by the American Council on Education and New York University’s Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project examines the performance of TCUs and other higher education institutions that serve large percentages of racial or ethnic minorities.
3. Pay attention to enrollment trends.
Colleges and universities across the U.S. have seen a steep decline in Native American students since 2009. The number of students who identified as American Indian or Alaska Native has fallen 36% — from 195,413 students in fall 2009 to 125,407 in fall 2023, the most recent year available from the National Center for Education Statistics.
TCUs also experienced a drop, but not as big. They lost 18% of their Native American students, on average, from fall 2010 to fall 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics’ most recent report on the topic.
While Native American enrollment at TCUs has fallen in recent years, their efforts to recruit and retain students are worth journalists’ attention.
Some TCUs have experienced substantial growth. A few examples:
- Nebraska Indian Community College’s enrollment more than doubled to 474 students from fall 2010 to fall 2022.
- At Tohono O’odham Community College in Arizona, enrollment almost quadrupled from 207 students to 922.
- The number of students attending the Institute of American Indian Arts, located in New Mexico, almost tripled to 868 students.
Another interesting trend: Many TCUs draw students from various tribal nations. Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota, for example, takes in students from tribes located in South Dakota and North Dakota as well as Michigan, Oklahoma, Wyoming and other states. Its students represent more than two dozen tribes, the college points out in its 2023-24 Fact Book.
That’s why Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton, an education reporter and former vice president of the Indigenous Journalists Association, says journalists should not make assumptions about the identity of the TCU students they interview or encounter on campus.
“With that in mind, [I] would encourage folks to ask a more open-ended question that should be asked of every single source: Can you tell me about your connection(s) to the school and this community?” Krehbiel-Burton wrote in an email to The Journalist’s Resource.
Another enrollment trend worth watching is the growing number of TCU students who do not have a tribal affiliation. This is particularly noteworthy considering the federal government does not give tribal colleges funding for students who are not citizens or enrolled members of federally recognized tribes. Almost 22% of TCU students are not Native American, federal data from fall 2022 show.
Two TCUs do not admit students who do not have tribal affiliations: Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico. Both are operated by the Bureau of Indian Education.
4. Avoid conflating tribal colleges and universities with DEI initiatives.
Although TCUs serve Native Americans and promote education equality, they are not diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives. It’s a critical distinction, especially now that the Trump administration is working to eliminate DEI at colleges and universities.
DEI programs vary across higher education, but generally aim to create environments where students and scholars from marginalized groups — racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities and low-income students, for example — feel welcome and can thrive.
“Our funding is not Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) support, welfare, or reparations — it is a pre-paid obligation, yet we continue to receive only pennies on the dollar,” Aaron Payment, a member of the board of directors of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan, writes in a February 2025 guest essay for Native News Online.
The U.S. Department of Education recently sent a letter to the National Indian Education Association, a nonprofit organization representing K-12 students and educators, affirming that Indigenous history is not a banned DEI topic for tribal K-12 schools. The Education Department also explains that the federal government recognizes its trust and treaty obligations to tribes.
Although the letter does not specifically address TCUs, tribal college leaders expressed “tempered optimism” over the letter, Inside Higher Ed reporter Sara Weissman reported in June. She added that “tribal college leaders have been waiting to hear those words from Trump administration officials, especially after some of their grants were paused amid broader efforts to slash federal spending viewed as related to DEI.”
To more clearly differentiate TCUs from programs that center on student race or ethnicity, some organizations do not refer to TCUs as minority-serving institutions, although the federal government has formally designated them as such. The U.S. Department of Education provides additional funding to minority-serving institutions, often referred to as MSIs.
In recent months, some conservative organizations have pushed to abolish the MSI program, or parts of it. Earlier this summer, the state of Tennessee and the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of one type of MSI: Hispanic-serving institutions. Students for Fair Admissions filed the lawsuit that, in 2023, prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to ban race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
The American Indian College Fund asks journalists who reach out to it for interviews to read a short statement that explains that TCUs are different from MSIs.
“Native people are members of sovereign Indian Nations who signed treaties with the federal government,” the statement explains. “Those treaties created a political relationship that confers both legal and moral obligations on the United States to support Native people in many ways, including education. This is why TCUs are different than minority-serving institutions (MSIs).”
5. Practice patience.
Krupnick says it is important to keep two things in mind when building relationships with officials at tribal colleges and universities. First, TCU officials typically do not have much experience or training in working with journalists, so they might not understand how journalists do their work.
Second, because TCUs do not have as many resources as their larger mainstream counterparts, they do not have a dedicated person or team of employees to respond to journalists’ questions.
“Meeting them where they are is the important thing and recognizing they’re busy and you’re not their priority,” Krupnick says. “Every person on campus seems to have multiple jobs.”
He suggests starting with the president’s office and asking for guidance. He warns that it can sometimes take a lot of time and effort to figure out who has the information you need and get them to respond to email or phone calls. Although it is often not possible, especially on deadline, the best way to find people and get information is by going to the campus in person.
“There are times I’ve asked for enrollment numbers or budget numbers, and you just go to the president or the chief financial officer or whoever has those records, and you sort of play it by ear,” Krupnick says. “It can take them a while, so give them time.”
6. Double check your stories to confirm key facts and weed out tropes and stereotypes.
Take care to get names right. News stories sometimes get tribal nations’ names wrong or, worse, refer to them solely by the name of their reservation or casino.
The nonprofit Native Governance Center created a guide on appropriate terminology to use when writing and talking about Native nations. It stresses, however, that terminology frequently changes and that Indigenous people do not all prefer and use the same terms and phrasing.
“Using appropriate terminology to talk about Native nations shows respect for nations’ sovereignty,” the guide explains. It also “contributes toward Native narrative change” — a movement among tribal communities to promote accurate representations of Indigenous people.
Krehbiel-Burton, a reporter at the Tulsa World, recommends using a tool the Indigenous Journalists Association created to help newsrooms avoid stereotypes and storytelling clichés. The “Bingo Card” can help them identify potentially problematic words and phrases such as “broken families,” “dying language,” “poor education” and “warrior.”
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