New Treasure of Sierra Madre—Minority Serving Institutions Are a Modern Illusion of Equity

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a classic 1948 Western directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart as Fred Dobbs, one of three desperate men hoping to strike it rich digging for gold in the mountains of Western Mexico. They indeed find gold but at high price. Murder, madness, and banditry ensue. Ultimately the gold is blown across the desert by the wind.

The movie came to mind when my colleague Gail Heriot shared letters she had written to members of Congress about “Minority Serving Institutions” (MSIs). These are the 710 or so colleges and universities whose enrollments include a high proportion of students from particular minority groups. If the college or university hits the magic number, it instantly qualifies for generous federal funding. Attaining MSI status is the gold. In 2023, the U.S. spent about $1.29 billion on MSIs.

The proportions needed to qualify for MSI status vary by group. To qualify as a “Predominantly Black Institution” (PBI) an institution must have at least 40 percent of its undergraduate students identify as black. (The 107 Historically Black Colleges and Universities are a different category.) But an institution need only a 25 percent enrollment of Hispanic students to qualify as an “Hispanic Serving Institution.” Asian American, Alaskan, and Pacific Islanders students have their own quotas.

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That’s a rough summary of the MSI game. For more details, one can consult the MSI Data Project, which offers an “Explore the MSI Designations” page. A further account appeared not long ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “What Does it take to be a ‘Minority-Serving Institution?’” The article quotes Mike Hoa Nguyen, the MSI Data Project’s principal investigator and an assistant professor of education at New York University, saying, “The MSI landscape is so unbelievably complex, in the way all 11 designations were created over a long period of time, using a patchwork legislative process.”

Complex, perhaps, but coveted definitely: colleges and universities are on the lookout for ways to obtain the designation. Of the 710 MSIs, 454 are four-year undergraduate American colleges. That’s a very high number of minority serving institutions, and one might well wonder whether America has enough bona fide minority students to warrant all those designations. According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO), “About one in five Title IV-eligible postsecondary institutions is eligible for MSI funding,”

The most famous line in the Huston movie occurs when the bandits, pretending to be federal troops, confront Dobbs, who asks, “Where are your badges?” The head bandit answers, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!”

What kind of proof do Department of Education officials seek when college officials assert they have crossed the MSI threshold? I suspect there is a lot more art than ancestry involved.

But the more fundamental question is whether the MSI program should exist at all. Is it good for America? Isn’t it just another way to smuggle racial preferences into college admissions? Didn’t the U.S. Supreme Court settle that matter with its 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and the University of North Carolina?

In fact, the MSI program, which dates from the early days of the Higher Education Act but has been repeatedly amplified, is an instrument of political patronage. The “Hispanic-Serving Institution” category was added in the Higher Education Amendments of 1992. Those who support its continued existence see it as a tool for “equity,” which drives upward mobility for whole ethnic groups and that encourages the formation of “culturally and racially validating campus environments.” (SHEEO). By contrast, those who see higher education mainly as a path of individual aspiration see the MSI program as an incentive for colleges and universities to classify and stereotype students.

The Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal advocacy group, is among the enthusiasts for MSIs. Indeed, in 2020, CAP called for increasing MSI support for Hispanic-Serving Institutions by an additional $1 billion. CAP quailed, however, at calling them “Hispanic-Serving” because it preferred the term “Latinx, a gender-inclusive term that more explicitly acknowledges Latin American ancestry.” CAP’s overall justification for these set-asides: “Minority-serving institutions collectively face the structural injustice of insufficient funding. Funding levels for MSIs serving Black, Latinx, Native American, Asian, and Pacific Islanders have consistently fallen short of what is needed to effectively serve these groups.”

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“Structural injustice” towards “groups” is the operative language in progressive rhetoric, which favors classifying people by race and distributing social goods accordingly. Another way to put this is that CAP favors using public money to create dependency among categories of people it calculates will favor its own social priorities.

This is the old “diversity” doctrine dressed up as some kind of social progress. The reality is that such classifications are unjust to everyone involved and, as it happens, they are also unconstitutional. The case that they are illegal is aptly presented in two letters to members of the U.S. House and Senate from Gail Heriot, Peter Kirsanow, and David Morenoff of the American Civil Rights Project.

MSI is part of the infrastructure of the progressive left’s attempt to use both the goodwill and the treasure of the American people to build an apparatus of ethnic division and political dominion in the United States. Let’s hope that the new regime in Washington takes the size of it and acts accordingly. The New Treasure of Sierra Madre, like the original, is no treasure at all, but just a delusion that leads people astray.

Image of University of Nevada, Reno by Dmiat on Wikimedia Commons