In a few weeks, over 100 colleges and universities across California will lose access to essential funding for tutoring, academic counseling and other support services aimed at helping Black, Latino, Asian and Native American students succeed in college.
The change comes after the U.S. Department of Education said earlier this month that it was ending a grant program that supports “minority-serving institutions,” claiming that it illegally favors certain racial or ethnic groups.
Every state will lose money, but the Education Department’s decision hits California hardest. The state receives over a quarter of all of these diversity grants, since it has a high percentage of minority students, especially Latinos, and it has more college campuses than any other state.
The state’s community college system could lose $20 million next year as a result of the funding cuts, said Chris Ferguson, who supports finance and strategic relations at the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. The Cal State University and the University of California systems, which also receive this money, did not respond to questions about the amount of funding at risk.
Laney College, located just a few blocks from Oakland’s Chinatown and Little Saignon, has used these federal grants for the past 15 years to run the Asian Pacific American Student Success center on campus, helping students improve their English, build community and find work.
At the end of the month, David Lee, its longtime director, will lose his job. “It’s like a gut punch,” he said, standing in his basement office, which doubles as the Asian student center. All around him are signs of his legacy — posters on the wall from various campus events, photos of students and staff who treat the center as a second home.
After CalMatters reached out to the college about the future of the student center, Laney College’s Vice President of Student Services Lily Espinoza sent an email to faculty, saying that the space will continue to be available to students after Lee leaves, although with fewer staff to support it.
Of California’s 116 community colleges, 22 California State University campuses, and 10 UC campuses, about two-thirds receive these diversity grants. Colleges that receive these grants get to decide how they use the money to support students. The grants max out at about $600,000 per school per year.
Laney College gets much less than that, though. Lee said the school’s federal grant, about $300,000 a year, supports his salary, the salary of up to three part-time counselors and various expenses for events. The state also provides some money, and the college grants access to the basement office and community space for free.
The center is next to the boiler, which emits a loud humming noise for hours each day. A slanted pole runs through the middle of it, hiding wires and breaking up the space, which can only accommodate a few students at a time.
Still, Lee is proud of the program and the impact it has had. “There’s a lot of history here,” he said. “We’re the only center serving Asian students in Peralta.” Last year, roughly 5,500 Asian students attended one of the four schools in the Peralta Community College District, which includes Laney College, according to state data.
In his budget for next year, which was released in May, President Trump proposed expanding this federal grant program, known as “minority-serving institutions” grants, but he didn’t say why. Both Republicans and Democrats have long supported the program, especially those who represent states with large Latino populations such as California, Texas and Florida.
But Trump’s support for the program didn’t last long. In June, the attorney general for Tennessee and a legal advocacy group, Students for Fair Admissions, sued the U.S. Department of Education, claiming that the grant program was discriminatory. In July, the Department of Justice, which is representing the Education Department in the case, told the judge it would not defend against the lawsuit, saying grants to certain minority-serving institutions violate the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on discrimination.
The Education Department reiterated that reasoning with its decision last week to stop funding minority-serving institutions.
But some minority-serving institutions, namely historically Black colleges and tribal colleges, are exempt from the department’s decision. McMahon said last week that she’ll use the money that’s earmarked for minority-serving institutions, especially Hispanic-serving institutions, and redirect it toward those exempt schools instead.
The decision effectively pulls money away from California, which has a high concentration of Hispanic-serving institutions, and moves it to the exempt schools, which are generally located in swing states or states that voted for Trump in 2024. While California has many minority-serving institutions, and even one historically Black graduate school, none are recognized as historically Black colleges or official tribal colleges.
The first Mongolian student club
To be considered a historically Black college, the undergraduate institution must have been established prior to 1964 and have a track record of serving Black students, which is less applicable to a newer state like California. Becoming a registered tribal college is also difficult, even for schools that might otherwise meet the criteria.
As a result, most other minority-serving schools, including many schools with a high percentage of Black or Native American students, apply for a more general federal grant that only asks the institution to prove that it has less money per-student than the average school in the U.S. and that it serves a diverse population.
Laney College easily qualifies. Its enrollment is almost equally divided among Latino, Asian, Black and white students. The school is struggling financially under the state’s new community college funding formula, potentially requiring it to merge with another local college in the coming years. Its hard-scrabble reputation was depicted in the 2020 Netflix documentary Last Chance U, which profiled Laney College football players and the issues they faced in addition to their sport — including hunger and caring for their kids.
Laney College uses all of its minority-serving institution grant funding for the Asian Pacific American Student Success center. Colleges are typically only eligible for one of these grants, even when it may have numerous communities that need support. Though the center is focused on Asian students, anyone is technically welcome to the services it provides.
The center is what kept Narmandakh Suurinburneebaatar in school. After moving from Mongolia to Oakland in 2008, she spent years knowing just a few words of English. When she enrolled in an English-language learning course at Laney College in 2013, she wasn’t aware of the Asian student center. She was nervous at the time and struggled to talk with other students and teachers, she said. She dropped out before the end of the semester. She also enrolled in 2016 but dropped out again after the first semester.
In 2022, Laney College offered free classes in light of the decline in student enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Suurinburneebaatar’s son had also started moving through the Oakland school system, and she wanted to communicate with his teachers. She re-enrolled again, but this time, a representative from the Asian student center came to her English class, offering interpretation services for Mongolian speakers. It changed her entire trajectory.
The center offered support, she said repeatedly: support in school, in finding a job, and in taking care of her son.
In the fall of 2023, soon after discovering the Asian student center, she founded a Mongolian students club with a goal of strengthening the community, including one event that brought over 100 Mongolians to campus. Now Mongolian students from other colleges come to Laney because of its support services, and Suurinburneebaatar works part time at the Asian student center, tutoring others.
Proven success
The Asian center has never been financially secure, even before the Trump administration’s support for minority-serving institutions began to wane. The federal grant is awarded on a five-year cycle and Laney College’s final year was scheduled to end this month.
Though the college applied again for another five-year grant, and has received the grant for the past 15 years, successfully navigating three different grant cycles, it’s a competitive process and the money is never guaranteed. To receive the money repeatedly, schools need to prove their programs are successful.
In 2019, Lee co-published a study that looked at how counseling for English-language learners affected their performance. The study found that students who received counseling support were more likely to “return and re-enroll” than those who didn’t, though the study also found that academic performance was roughly the same for both groups.
At Southwestern College, a community college and a federally designated Hispanic-serving institution near San Diego, students were invited to join what’s known as a “learning community,” where they had access to specialized counseling and content tailored for Latinos. An evaluation conducted by the school found that students who participated in the grant-funded learning community were far more likely to stay in school, to graduate and to transfer to a four-year institution, said President Mark Sanchez.
Because minority-serving institutions have wide discretion as to how they use federal money, evaluating the efficacy of the entire program — including hundreds of institutions and thousands of programs — is tough, said Marcela Cuellar, a professor at UC Davis. Some programs are a mixed bag in terms of results. Nonetheless, Cuellar pointed to a few studies that show the grants’ broad-reaching impact on increasing students’ retention, reducing their debt, and improving graduation rates. She said the new cuts are “heartbreaking.”
Officials at both the community college system and the University of California system agreed with Cuellar, saying the cuts were concerning or troubling, according to their respective spokespeople. A spokesperson for the Cal State University system said it was too early to comment on the decision.
Using state funds, which currently represent about a quarter of the center’s annual budget, Espinoza said in her email to faculty that Laney College will replace Lee’s full-time position with a part-time faculty role next year. She also said the college will offer each student worker another campus job.
Lee has already offered Suurinburneebaatar a different campus job, but she said no. She’s taking five classes this semester in pursuit of a goal — to graduate this spring with an associate degree in business administration.