The Treasury Department wants to remove the tax-exempt status of private schools that consider race in admissions, scholarships, financial aid or athletics.
That announcement this month may her as a simple enforcement measure, which targets colleges engaged in overt discrimination.
However, if finalized, the proposal would unfairly punish institutions that welcome students from all backgrounds but have a history – and mission – of expanding access and opportunities to students from communities that higher education has too often excluded.
As much as 18,000 private schools and colleges the entire country would be subject to the rule, jeopardizing those already operating on thin financial margins.
Losing the tax exemption would be catastrophic, and here’s why: Charitable giving will almost certainly decline if contributions are no longer deductible. Schools’ investment income could become taxable. Budgets would shrink and, inevitably, programs would be closed.
The students who will suffer the most will be those who can least bear the consequences, including first-generation students, working parents returning to school, and Black, Indigenous, and Latino students who are looking for opportunity and an anchor, not preferential treatment.
Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free bi-weekly higher education newsletter.
The change could create deep uncertainty for historically black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, Hispanic and predominantly black institutions and even faith-based colleges — particularly those that offer scholarships, recruiting 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 their enrollment. Both approaches are important, but neither means an institution excludes students from other backgrounds.
I know this story personally as a graduate of Spelman College, a historically women’s college, and as a co-author of a book about the school’s first presidents, mostly white women and Christian missionaries, who built this institution against a backdrop of segregation.
Spelman and similar institutions exist because black students have been excluded—by law, institutional policy, and widespread discrimination—from most American institutions of 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 a powerful but often overlooked chapter in their history.
In the early 1900s, many leading American colleges instituted formal or informal quotas limit the admission of Jewish students. In the 1930s, Jewish academics expelled from European universities by the Nazi regime arrived in the United States to find Great Depression-era unemployment – and anti-Semitism – alive and well.
While much of American higher education did not want to make room for these scholars, HBCUs did. The researchers identified 51 refugee scholars who taught at 19 HBCUs. There is a profound lesson to be learned from this story.
Institutions created for black students who other colleges had excluded recognized the humanity and talent of other scholars who had been sidelined. Their commitment to a historically underserved community did not make them excluded. This allowed them to better understand why it is important to open closed doors.
We should not confuse efforts to expand opportunity with illegal discrimination. A college that provides additional guidance to first-generation students or creates a STEM support program in response to the barriers Native American students face is attempting to close an existing gap, not confer an arbitrary preference.
This is an attempt to ensure that the college experience is roughly the same for every student, regardless of zip code, family income or race.
Scholarship programs for 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 these barriers don’t exist won’t make the barriers disappear. It just makes them harder to solve. If this Treasury Department proposal moves forward, colleges will be forced to choose between risking their own financial survival and abandoning programs that actually reduce disparities in student outcomes.
Either way, students lose, as does a country that needs more citizens to hold valuable degrees and credentials, not fewer.
Related: Eliminating race-based scholarships blocks path to college, students say
Reasonable people can disagree about the best way to expand access to higher education and ensure that students and taxpayers receive the best return on investment they deserve.
Certainly, these establishments can and must do more to improve the results of the students they welcome. But punishing institutions that try to expand opportunity is not a good answer. It targets bad actors, abandons students who can least afford to bear the consequences, and takes our unfinished work as proof that the work itself was wrong.
The universities that would be most affected would remain powerful evidence not only of what makes American higher education great, but also of what makes it good: its ability, despite its flaws, to expand opportunity, recognize human potential, and provide a path forward for those society has cast aside.
Yolanda Watson Spiva is president of Complete College America, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to closing achievement gaps and increasing college completion. She is co-author of “Dare to Educate: The Legacy of Spelman College’s Early Presidents.»
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story on the tax-exempt status of colleges was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Register with Hechinger weekly newsletter.
The article OPINION: Colleges should not be punished for trying to give every student a fair chance appears first in the Hechinger report.
