HSIs Face a New Test: Serving Students Without Federal Support

Salem State University campus.It was the fall of 2024 when Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts, crossed the 25% enrollment threshold to become designated as a Hispanic-Serving Institution.

The conversation about what to do to prepare for the moment began at the university a decade earlier, said Dr. Elisa Castillo, assistant vice president for Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) Initiatives at Salem State University. That included surveying students about their needs and implementing changes that came from the data.

“We have been able to be really intentional about what it means to be not only an intentional HSI but an authentic HSI,” Castillo said. “We’re not interested in the designation just because, we’re interested in serving our students and really living our mission.”

As the nation’s Hispanic population continues to grow, so too has the relevance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions, colleges where at least a quarter of undergraduates are Hispanic. But Trump administration cuts to diversity, equity and inclusion programs and federal funding for HSIs have diminished some of the luster of achieving the designation, particularly for institutions that once saw the threshold as a pathway to additional resources. Now, colleges that have reached — or are approaching — the status are navigating a new landscape, deciding whether to pivot while continuing to serve the students whose enrollment helped make them HSIs in the first place.

Federal rules define an HSI based in part on having undergraduate full-time equivalent enrollment that is at least 25% Hispanic, though institutions must also meet other eligibility requirements to apply for federal Title III and Title V programs. The federal government has historically provided grants intended to help designated institutions expand educational opportunities, academic offerings and student attainment.

Castillo said the designation was always seen as the beginning of their journey.

Salem State began organizing a working group in 2022 as its enrollment moved toward the HSI threshold. University leaders wanted to understand who their students were and what they needed. A student survey identified needs that included greater access to financial support and language assistance for family members who often did not understand enough English.

Castillo said Salem State responded by translating materials into Spanish and Portuguese and creating a directory of bilingual employees. The university also developed culturally affirming programs and helped identify internships and mentoring opportunities.

The effort was part of a broader attempt to rethink what it means to serve a student population that is increasingly Hispanic, multilingual and first-generation.

Castillo said the university has been listening to students through surveys, bringing them to leadership conferences and connecting them with people from other states. That ongoing dialogue, she said, continues to shape the work.

The approach is producing some encouraging results. Hispanic enrollment has increased 22% over the past five years, Castillo said, while retention has also increased.

There’s work to be done around the graduation rate, which declined significantly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For Hispanic students who began at the university in 2017, the six-year graduation rate was about 55.8%, but has fallen to 39.6% for Hispanic students who began in 2019.

The work has also attracted outside support. Castillo said the university recently received a $5 million gift supporting its HSI work.

Salem State’s approach is not universal.

Dr. Gina Ann Garcia, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Education who studies HSIs, said it is important that institutions take different approaches as they anticipate reaching HSI status. There’s added pressure to do so after U.S. Department of Education officials announced a year ago that they would end funding for Hispanic-Serving Institution grant programs. The institutions doing the work most effectively, she said, are approaching it from multiple directions.

“It’s a complex answer,” said Garcia, the author of “The HSI Movement: Strategies Driving Change at Hispanic-Serving Institutions,” which will be released in October. “A lot of people were focused on the [federal] grants and implementing programming through the grants. Then, some were doing both. The people taking a multidimensional approach to HSIs … are getting it right.”

Some campuses, she said, have focused heavily on pursuing federal grants and implementing programming through those grants. Others have pursued funding while simultaneously making broader institutional changes. Garcia said she’s seeing more institutions lean into servingness, where colleges and universities actively and intentionally serve Hispanic students.

“Emergers are working harder than the [HSI institutions],” Garcia said. “They’re doing the work because they know [the enrollment shift] is coming.”

The shift of thinking around diversity programs has left some institutions reconsidering where HSI work belongs, Garcia said. On some campuses, HSI initiatives had been closely connected to diversity, equity and inclusion offices and programs, creating another layer of uncertainty as institutions respond to changes in DEI policy and funding.

Some campuses are moving the work under different names, she said.

But Garcia cautioned against treating the end of grant funding as the end of the work.

“They think the work is over at this point, and it’s not. The students are still there.”

At Montgomery College in Maryland, administrators have taken a different route to institutionalizing that work.

The college became Maryland’s first federally designated HSI in 2021. Hispanic enrollment has continued to increase, from 4,560 students in fall 2021 to 5,989 in fall 2025, according to spokesperson Marcus Rosano.

But the college decided not to create a standalone HSI initiative.

“Following the work of our HSI Task Force, the college made a conscious decision not to create a separate HSI initiative that sits off on its own,” Rosano said. “Instead, the recommendations have been incorporated into our broader work around student success, enrollment, academic planning and community engagement.”

That includes multilingual access, clearer workforce pathways and data-informed approaches to student success.

The college tracks retention and graduation as well as completion of gateway math and English courses, course pass rates and credit accumulation.

Those measures show some promising movement. Over the past three years, Montgomery College’s three-year graduation rate for Hispanic students has increased by 3.7 percentage points, compared with a 2.1 percentage-point increase for the student population overall. The college is also seeing positive trends in math and English completion, course pass rates and credit accumulation.

The numbers illustrate a distinction that leaders and researchers say can get lost in the designation itself.

“The designation is important, but enrollment only tells part of the story,” Rosano said. “We’re also looking at whether students come back, whether they’re making progress and ultimately whether they complete. The data gives us reason to be encouraged.”

For some colleges, the designation may still represent access to resources and an opportunity to build new programs. For others, it may become a catalyst for institutional change. And for some, Garcia said, the HSI work is increasingly being folded into broader efforts around equity and student success rather than maintained as a distinct identity.

The underlying question remains whether colleges view Hispanic-Serving Institution status as a designation they have earned or a responsibility they should have accepted long before reaching the population threshold.

At Salem State, Castillo said the university sees itself as an outlet that can help produce the region’s next generation of leaders.

And that work, she suggested, does not depend on what the federal government calls the institution or the funding it can give to support that work.

This story originally ran in The EDU Ledger's October 2026 edition. Subscribe here for full access.