“Minority-serving institution” (MSI) is a term used to describe a range of postsecondary institutions. There are MSIs with founding missions to educate a particular demographic of students, such as historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and tribal colleges and universities (TCUs). In addition, there are MSIs that have met a federally defined threshold of enrollment of a particular demographic and student financial need (measured by proportion of Pell Grant-eligible students), such as Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions (AANAPISIs).
The Higher Education Act of 1965 created the first provision for federal funding for such institutions when it defined HBCUs, and new MSI designations have been included in subsequent reauthorizations of the landmark act, most recently in 2008.
Concurrent with the evolution of MSIs, U.S. society has seen linguistic shifts that pose challenges to the label. The use of “minority” to describe non-Whites has decreased in popularity and has been increasingly replaced with “people of color.” Within the field of education, some scholars have begun using the term “minoritized students” to capture the reality that it is not a student’s inherent nature to be of minority status but that it is context-specific and socially constructed.
As a student of higher education and a research associate, I study MSIs and have become familiar with the pivotal role they play in our society. MSIs enroll roughly 20 percent of all undergraduate students and almost 40 percent of all undergraduate students of color. They disproportionately afford educational opportunities to socioeconomically marginalized groups, and have emerged as leaders in both teacher and STEM education. Their commonalities and successes have led to a growing body of literature, which has further embedded the term “minority-serving institution” in academia and broader society.
Howard University announced earlier this year that they would be launching the first Ph.D. in higher education with a focus on MSIs. The term made it into the platform of a major presidential candidate for the first time this past election cycle, when it appeared in Hillary Clinton’s plan for a $25 billion fund to “support historically Black colleges and universities, Hispanic-serving institutions, and other minority-serving institutions.”
While not yet a complete misnomer in the national demographic context, which is projected by the U.S. Census to become more than 50 percent non-White by 2044, “minority” has already reached a breaking point when used to describe the U.S. public school student population, which became “majority-minority” in 2014. The Census projects that, by 2020, the population of U.S. children overall will also reflect this shift.
With these changes fast approaching, and in light of their tremendous contributions to educational and economic opportunity, I believe that “equity-oriented institutions” should replace “minority-serving institutions” in our lexicon. Student financial need is a critical factor in being eligible for all of the designations other than HBCUs and TCUs, and these two have legacies of offering educational opportunities to low-income students.
