Member Explains Impacts One Year After End of Federal Grants to Hispanic-Serving Institutions

It’s been one year since the Trump Administration announced the U.S. Department of Education would eliminate grants to Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). Within the CSU system, 21 of the 22 campuses are HSIs, and it is estimated that the system lost $43 million because of the cuts to HSI federal funding.  

Amber Gonzalez, CFA Sacramento member and Child and Adolescent Development professor, co-leads a project called the CSU HSI Action Research Network. She said the loss could be even higher — maybe $60 or $70 million — because not all grants may have been reported to the CSU system’s office and some grants were eliminated before they even started.  

The loss of these federal funds has already had a significant impact on our campuses and programming as campuses are needing to shift money from other areas to fund programs that used to be supported by HSI grants. Prior to September 10, 2025, not-for-profit colleges and universities that had an enrollment of Pell-eligible and under-resourced undergraduate full-time students and at least 25% Latine students were eligible to apply for federal funding that supported Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) including HSIs.  

Since becoming an HSI in 2015, Sacramento State consistently applied for federal grants and used the funds to expand and sustain culturally responsive programs and services that directly supported our students, most of whom are first-generation, low-income, and come from historically marginalized communities. Sacramento State was able to get no-cost extensions for a lot of its federal HSI grants, but a lot of those extensions end on September 30, 2026, Gonzalez said.  

“We had a grant that really helped us think about how to design equitable internships for our students, and we can’t offer that faculty and staff learning community the same way that we were able to offer it in the past,” Gonzalez said. “A lot of planning had to go into place over the summer with folks that lead these efforts to preserve and advance the initiatives that were developed with much less money.” 

These grants ending comes up in conversations in the CSU HSI Action Research Network, which includes faculty, staff, and students from eight CSU campuses who work to understand what it means to be an HSI and truly serve Latine students.  

The CSU HSI Action Research Network recently received an Equity in Action Grant from the CSU Student Success Network that is aimed at increasing campus collaborations around what it means to serve Latine students, take documented models that are working on one campus and pilot them at other campuses, and contribute to the knowledge base of serving Latine students and equity actions across the CSU HSI campuses.  

As a network, they have engaged in multiple discussions about ways to continue work that HSI grants previously funded, Gonzalez said, and campuses are thinking about various options. Some are considering implementing student success fees, while others are approaching donors and other organizations for grant opportunities. Additionally, campus leaders are reviewing their budgets more intentionally to ensure they can fund successful initiatives and programs for the long term – which has its own set of unique challenges, Gonzalez added.  

“Something else that I think we’re doing a lot of is really trying to figure out how can we build bridges between academic affairs and student affairs or the different cultural academic resource centers,” Gonzalez said. “So we’re not doing the same thing in multiple areas, but rather we’re partnering so that we can offer the same services to students without duplicating efforts. When engaging in conversations about programming and services, we need to have access to the rooms and tables that are reviewing budgets so that we can think through these challenges together – students, faculty, and staff need to be in those brainstorming rooms.”  

At the end of the day, Gonzalez said that universities must make commitments to their students and endeavor to better understand how what works for one group of students may not work for another. Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) will likely continue to face chronic underfunding, and Sacramento State is no exception. The campus relied on federal funding to provide critical support to students and any reduction or loss of these funds will have a direct and significant impact on the services and opportunities the university is able to offer.  

However, given that 21 of our 22 CSUs are HSIs, what we need to do now is learn from each other so that as a CSU HSI system, we continue to serve our students and their families and improve equitable outcomes for Latine students while advancing research regarding institutional mechanisms for reducing inequality.