In thirty days — then in seventy more — an institution lost years of work with no transition plan and no off-ramp, only dates on a calendar marking when people would no longer have jobs.
That is not a policy adjustment; it is a betrayal.
That’s the story told in The Cost of Disinvestment, a powerful new report from the Center for Minority Serving Institutions at Rutgers University, written by Drs. Rebecca Perdomo, Melissa Salazar, and Stephanie Aguilar-Smith. They surveyed 73 program directors, faculty, staff, and students at HSIs nationwide in the wake of the $507.9 million cut. The findings are not abstractions; they are real people. Seventy percent said the cancellations took a major toll on their mental health. Nearly six in 10 said the damage landed hardest on students and frontline workers, the ones with the least power to absorb it.
Salazar told me this was different from anything HSIs had absorbed before not in degree, but in kind.
“The Department's decision was not driven by budgetary constraints but by the unfounded opinion that HSI grants constituted unlawful preferential treatment,” she said. Staff doing the direct work of keeping students enrolled became “collateral consequences of this broader political effort to defund DEI-related work.”
Announced three weeks before the new fiscal year, it left institutions no runway to plan. Perdomo, a co-author of the report, put the arc in context. Congress first appropriated $12 million for HSIs in 1995, growing past $400 million by 2023. What changed in September was not the size of the check, but Washington's willingness to write one at all.
“This decision rejected the work itself,” she said, “and broke commitments that institutions believed they could count on.”
One program director described holding an institution together after the money vanished. “I had to discontinue community programming and step back from funding promises made a year ago... I had to hear folks question my performance,” they said. Another worked 55 to 60 hours a week, alone, closing out a grant with no staff left.
These are the people who run the tutoring centers and sit with a nervous 19-year-old to explain how financial aid works — a large share of them people of color, many Latine, by Salazar’s account. Perdomo was careful not to blame institutions for a crisis imposed on them. The work never stopped just because the funding did; staff simply “absorbed additional responsibilities, hours, uncertainty about their own employment, and the emotional fallout of watching work they spent years building disappear.”
Dr. Marybeth Gasman, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education at Rutgers, said that the research highlights the inequities that so many MSIs continually face.
“They educate a highly diverse group of students and care deeply about the entire student body,” she said. “It is incredibly short-sighted of the Trump administration — and those in the House and Senate — to not support HSIs. They are an amazing return on investment, essential to social and economic mobility for their students."
The Department of Education justified the cancellations by calling Title III and Title V “racially discriminatory” — a framing that collapses under its own weight, since HSIs are overwhelmingly open-access and don’t select by race. What the cuts actually discriminated against was need. Half of all HSIs are community colleges, without a research university’s fundraising machinery.
“HSIs are the economic engines of their communities,” Salazar said, adding that they train the nurses, teachers, and scientists local labor markets need.
The researchers close with recommendations that should not be controversial in a functioning democracy. Don’t terminate multi-year commitments mid-cycle, they argued, or remove a support system without a replacement. They called for making funding for chronically under-resourced institutions stable rather than something colleges must fight for annually. None of that is radical. It is the bare minimum of governing in good faith.
One respondent said it best: “Giving students resources should never be controversial for the wealthiest nation in the world.” Another asked what’s now hanging over every HSI campus in the nation: “Who will pay attention to the issues now? Who will bring campus partners together to address equity gaps? How will this work continue?”
Eliminating the funding, Perdomo told me, does not eliminate the need. What disappears is the infrastructure that kept students from falling through the cracks.
Somewhere, a student who was supposed to sit down with that financial literacy coordinator is instead figuring out her loan paperwork alone. Multiply her by five million, and you see the true size of what was canceled on September 10 — not a line item, but a generation of students who were told, mid-cycle, that the country building their future had changed its mind.
Dr. Jamal Watson is a higher education consultant, professor and associate dean of Graduate Studies at Trinity Washington University and the author of this bi-weekly column. Watson is the former executive editor of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education (now The EDU Ledger) and is the author of The Student Debt Crisis: America’s Moral Urgency (Broadleaf Books, 2025)
