The Treasury Department wants to strip tax-exempt status from private schools that factor race into admissions, scholarships, financial aid or athletics.
That announcement this month may sound like a straightforward enforcement measure, one that targets colleges engaged in overt discrimination.
If finalized, though, the proposal would unfairly punish institutions that welcome students from every background but have a history — and a mission — of expanding access and opportunity for students from communities that higher education has too often excluded.
As many as 18,000 private schools and colleges nationwide would be subject to the rule, putting those already operating on thin financial margins in peril.
Losing tax-exempt status would be catastrophic, and here’s why: Charitable giving will almost certainly fall if contributions are no longer deductible. Schools’ investment income could become taxable. Budgets would shrink and, inevitably, programs would close.
The students who suffer most would be those who can least afford the consequences, including first-generation students, working parents returning to school and Black, Indigenous and Latino students seeking an opportunity and a foothold, not preferential treatment.
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The change could create profound uncertainty for historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, Hispanic-serving and predominantly Black institutions and even faith-based colleges — particularly those with scholarships, recruitment initiatives or student-support programs intended to address historic disparities.
Of course, these institutions are not interchangeable. HBCUs have a distinct history defined by their founding missions, while many other minority-serving institutions are designated as such based on whom they enroll. Both approaches matter, and neither means that an institution excludes students from other backgrounds.
I know this history firsthand as a graduate of Spelman College, an all-women historically Black college, and as a co-author of a book about the school’s early presidents, mostly white women and Christian missionaries, who built that institution against the backdrop of segregation.
Spelman and institutions like it exist because Black students were excluded — by law, institutional policy and rampant discrimination — from most of American higher education.
Their long history also reveals something broader about the role that minority-serving institutions and HBCUs have played in expanding opportunity — and not just for Black people. Consider one powerful but often overlooked chapter in their history.
During the early 1900s, many leading American colleges instituted formal or informal quotas limiting the admission of Jewish students. In the 1930s, Jewish scholars driven from European universities by the Nazi regime arrived in the United States only to find Depression-era unemployment — and antisemitism — alive and well.
When much of American higher education would not make room for these scholars, HBCUs did. Researchers have identified 51 refugee scholars who taught at 19 HBCUs. There is a profound lesson in that history.
Institutions created for Black students whom other colleges had excluded recognized the humanity and talent of other scholars who had been pushed to the margins. Their commitment to a historically underserved community did not make them exclusionary. It gave them a deeper understanding of why opening closed doors matters.
We should not confuse efforts to expand opportunity with unlawful discrimination. A college that provides additional advising to first-generation students or creates a STEM-support program in response to the barriers Native American students face is trying to close an existing gap, not confer an arbitrary preference.
It’s an attempt to make sure the college experience feels roughly the same for every student, regardless of zip code, family income or race.
Scholarship programs aimed at underserved populations exist because certain groups of students have faced and continue to face real barriers to enrolling in and completing college. Pretending that history doesn’t matter and that those barriers don’t exist won’t make the barriers disappear. It just makes them harder to address. If this Treasury Department proposal moves forward, colleges will be forced to choose between risking their own financial survival and abandoning programs that are actually closing disparities in student outcomes.
Either way, students lose, and so does a country that needs more of its citizens to hold degrees and credentials of value, not fewer.
Related: Cutting race-based scholarships blocks path to college, students say
Reasonable people can disagree about how best to expand access to higher education and ensure that students and taxpayers receive the best return on investment they deserve.
To be sure, these institutions can and must do more to improve outcomes among the students they enroll. But punishing institutions for trying to widen opportunity is the wrong response. It targets the wrong actors, abandons the students who can least afford the consequences and mistakes our unfinished work for evidence that the work itself was misguided.
The colleges that would be most affected remain powerful evidence not only of what makes American higher education great, but also of what makes it good: its capacity, despite its flaws, to widen opportunity, recognize human potential and offer a path forward to people society has pushed aside.
Yolanda Watson Spiva is president of Complete College America, a national nonprofit dedicated to closing attainment gaps and increasing college completion. She is co-author of “Daring to Educate: The Legacy of the Early Spelman College Presidents.”
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about colleges’ tax-exempt status was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
