The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Funding for minority colleges is held up in Senate
Both parties back money, but GOP ties it to law rewrite.
WASHINGTON — A federal program to bolster science, mathematics and engineering at minority-serving colleges has been caught in a partisan tug of war in the Senate, where inaction and gridlock are starting to have real-world consequences.
Stuck in the Senate’s morass is $255 million a year that both parties want to give historically black colleges, tribal colleges and higher education institutions that serve Hispanic students to help bolster science, technology, engineering and math — or STEM — over the next two years.
Senate Democrats tried to advance that funding in a stand-alone bill last week, but Republicans objected. They want the program as a sweetener for a broader overhaul of federal higher education law.
The stalemate has left minority-serving institutions and their students preparing for the worst. Funding officially ran out Sept. 30 with the end of the last fiscal year, and while the Education Department has assured them money will continue to flow through this school year, education leaders are already looking for cuts. Planning for the next school year has all but stopped.
Presidents of the colleges “are having serious conversations right now, telling people they’re going to be laid off,” Harry Williams, the president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents public black colleges, said Wednesday. “We have faculty, we have students right now attending our campuses, and they are making plans to try to find something else — to pack up their families to move somewhere else.”
For more than a decade, chronically underfunded minority colleges have relied on federal STEM funding, allocated under the Higher Education Act, to pay for research laboratories, faculty salaries and other central aspects of their science programs. College presidents say the funding is vital to fill the pipeline of minority graduates flowing into STEM professions. Historically black colleges and universities, known as HBCUs, enroll 10% of all black college students but produce 21% of all black STEM graduates.
“We talk a lot about diversity in the workplace, and HBCUs are the answer,” said Lily McNair, president of Tuskegee University. More than a third of the students at Tuskegee major in science, technology, engineering or math, McNair said, making the $840,000 in federal STEM funding that it receives “critical.”
Black colleges and universities have long enjoyed bipartisan support, and under a House-passed bill called the Future Act, each year they would receive $85 million of the annual $255 million in STEM funding. But just days before the funding expired, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Education Committee, blocked its passage in the Senate. A former college president and longtime supporter of black colleges, Alexander demanded progress on rewriting parts of the Higher Education Act instead.
“Black and brown students becoming STEM graduates should not be a partisan issue,” said Lodriguez Murray, senior vice president for public policy and government affairs at the
United Negro College Fund, which represents private black colleges, and has led the campaign to support the Future Act.
Democrats accused Alexander of using black colleges as bargaining chips. Their version of a comprehensive revision of higher education law would address thorny issues like campus sexual assault, accountability for for-profit colleges and exploding student loan debt — which are not addressed in Alexander’s legislation.
But Alexander appears undeterred. Unlike the Future Act, he said, his package of bills would achieve bipartisan objectives such as simplifying the federal financial-aid application and restoring Pell grants for some prisoners. It would also make permanent the STEM funding stream for minority colleges.