Racing to Serve or Race-ing for Money? Hispanic-serving Institutions and the Allocation of Racialized Federal Funding

• In Event: 4412 - Section on Latino/a Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Latina/o/xs and Education

Abstract

A long-standing strategy to alleviate racial inequalities in higher education has been to establish and strengthen minority serving institutions (MSIs); Colleges and universities with the mission or capacity to serve under-represented students. MSIs now make up roughly 800 of the nation’s colleges, enrolling nearly 25 percent of all students. It is often presumed that MSIs operate with a mission to alleviate broad inequalities by race. Yet, the degree to which this remains true for Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs)—the fastest growing subset of MSIs—is contested and unexplored systematically. Because HSI status is conferred primarily based upon Latinx student enrollments, we analyze how federally recognized HSIs conceptualize their roles as minority serving institutions. We do so by conducting a content analysis of the population of successful Title V ‘Developing Hispanic Serving Institution Grant’ abstracts to the U.S. Department of Education between 2009 and 2016 (N=220). Our findings indicate great consistency in how HSIs conceptualize their challenges as MSIs, but substantial variation in how they seek to ‘serve’ Latinx students. Assessing the variation, we argue that HSIs operate from divergent racial logics; some (11 percent) that center Latinx student experiences in their quests for federal funding; the majority (85 percent) that tacitly center Whiteness by seeking to benefit the institution and all its students, such that Latinx students are ancillary beneficiaries; and a minority (4 percent) that use HSI funds to fundamentally serve educationally advantaged groups such that racial inequalities in higher education are likely exacerbated.

Author

• Nicholas Vargas, University of Florida