The 25 Percent
Here is how an institution becomes a Hispanic Serving Institution in the United States. It does not declare a mission. It does not adopt a philosophy. It does not make a promise to the Latino community and then organize itself around keeping that promise. It crosses a line on a spreadsheet. When twenty five percent of an institution's full time undergraduate enrollment identifies as Hispanic, the school qualifies for the federal HSI designation. That is it. A demographic threshold. A number. And for three decades, that number has unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants intended to help these schools build the capacity to educate the students who are already sitting in their classrooms.
In September of 2025, the Department of Education announced it would end discretionary funding for HSI grant programs, calling the enrollment threshold an unconstitutional racial quota. Roughly 350 million dollars in grants that had already been appropriated by Congress were redirected overnight. The government did not argue that the money was being spent poorly. It argued that the criteria for distributing it were discriminatory. The number, the administration said, was the problem.
I am not a constitutional scholar. I am a speaker who has stood in front of students at more than three hundred colleges and universities, many of them Hispanic Serving Institutions. What I can tell you is what I have seen in those rooms. And what I have seen is this: the number was never the point. The students were the point. And the students are still there, whether the funding is or not.
Let me explain what 25 percent looks like from the inside of a lecture hall.
It looks like a young woman in the third row who is the first person in her family to set foot on a college campus. Her mother works two jobs. Her father sends money back to Puebla. She is carrying a course load and a family's expectations and the quiet terror of not knowing the unwritten rules that everyone around her seems to already understand. She does not know what office hours are. She does not know that you can ask a professor for an extension. She does not know these things because no one in her life has ever been in a position to tell her.
It looks like the counseling center that received an HSI grant three years ago and used it to hire the school's first bilingual therapist. It looks like the STEM bridge program that helped a community college in California's Central Valley move its transfer rate from dismal to respectable. It looks like the dual enrollment initiative at a school in the San Diego region that gave high school students their first proof that college coursework was something they could handle.
These are the programs that 350 million dollars built. They did not serve only Hispanic students. The grants, by law, were required to benefit all students at the institution. But they were designed with an understanding that schools enrolling large numbers of Latino students tend to be underfunded relative to their peers, and that closing that resource gap benefits everyone in the building.
The question was never whether 25 percent is the right number. The question was always whether the institution would treat that number as an obligation or an opportunity.
I want to be honest about something. The HSI designation has always been imperfect. I have spoken at institutions that carry the title and have done extraordinary work to build cultures of belonging for their Latino students. I have spoken at others where the designation exists on a government form and nowhere else. Where the 25 percent threshold was crossed not through intentional recruitment or community partnership but through the simple mathematics of a changing zip code. Where the students showed up, and the institution's response was not transformation but paperwork.
There are more than six hundred HSIs in the country today. They represent roughly 20 percent of all colleges and universities but enroll nearly a third of all undergraduates and more than 60 percent of all Latino undergraduates. Only 43 of those institutions have earned the Seal of Excelencia, a national certification recognizing schools that intentionally serve their Latino students rather than simply enrolling them. That is 7 percent. The gap between those two numbers tells you everything you need to know about the distance between counting students and actually serving them.
The critics are not wrong that a percentage is a blunt instrument. But the answer to a blunt instrument is a sharper one. It is not no instrument at all.
My mother came to the United States from Mexico at seventeen without documents, without a degree, without a single contact who could tell her how the system worked. My father arrived from El Salvador at eighteen under the same conditions. They raised two children in New York City on cleaning wages and construction wages and the unshakable belief that education was the door and their children were meant to walk through it.
I walked through it. I became the first person in my family to attend college. And then I walked 5,328 miles from Ecuador to North Carolina to understand, in my body, what it cost my parents to get here. I have spent the years since standing on stages at the kinds of institutions this policy debate is about, telling students that their families' sacrifices are not footnotes. They are the foundation.
What I have learned in those rooms is that the federal designation, for all its imperfections, gave administrators a language and a funding stream to do work they already knew needed doing. It gave them permission to name what was obvious: that a campus where a quarter or more of the students share a particular cultural background and a particular set of challenges might need to organize itself differently than a campus where that is not the case. Not preferentially. Differently. The way a hospital in a community with high rates of diabetes might allocate resources differently than one in a community where that is not the leading concern. Not because it loves those patients more, but because it is paying attention.
Eliminating the funding does not eliminate the students. It does not change the demographics. It does not alter the fact that Latino enrollment in higher education has doubled since 2005 or that the number of Hispanic high school graduates is projected to keep rising even as the total number of graduates nationally declines. The students are coming. The question is whether the institutions that receive them will have the resources to do more than simply admit them.
You can defund the designation. You cannot defund the need.
I think about that young woman in the third row. The one whose mother works two jobs. I think about what it took for her to get to that seat. I think about the fact that her institution's ability to provide her with a bilingual advisor, a mentorship program, a bridge course that meets her where she actually is rather than where the syllabus assumes she should be, may now depend on whether a state legislature or a private donor decides to fill a hole the federal government chose to create.
And I think about the number. Twenty five percent. It was always just a threshold. A starting line. It was never supposed to be the finish. The real work was always what happened after the institution crossed it. Whether it treated that moment as a bureaucratic event or as a moral one. Whether it looked at the students who brought it to that number and said, we see you. We are going to build something worthy of the fact that you are here.
Some institutions did that. Many did not. But the answer to that failure is not to strip the funding and walk away. The answer is to demand more of the institutions that receive it. To hold them accountable not just for the number they enroll but for the students they graduate. To insist that serving is a verb, not a label.
