Dive Brief:
- Young America's Foundation, a conservative activist group, sued the U.S. Department of Education this week over a federal grant program aiming to increase doctoral attainment among underrepresented students.
- The Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program is currently available to low-income, first-generation students, or those who are underrepresented in graduate education. The department defines those groups as students who are Black, Hispanic, American Indian, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiians or Native American Pacific Islanders.
- The federal lawsuit, filed in North Dakota district court, argues that the race-based qualifications for McNair participants violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause and asks the judge to permanently block the Education Department from including them as criteria.
Dive Insight:
The lawsuit comes a little over a year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions in the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College case, undoing decades of legal precedent.
Young America’s Foundation’s lawsuit marks one of the latest legal attacks on race-based scholarships or grants in the wake of the landmark decision. Even though the high court’s ruling didn’t touch on financial aid programs, some state officials have interpreted it to also prohibit race-based scholarships.
The same day the Supreme Court handed down the ruling, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey ordered the state’s colleges to stop considering race as a factor in scholarship programs. Ohio’s colleges have also been scrapping race-based criteria from their scholarships after Attorney General Dave Yost told college leaders that his interpretation of the ruling extended to these programs.
Young America’s Foundation’s lawsuit includes two plaintiffs who expressed interest in applying for the McNair program but are ineligible because they are White and don’t meet the other criteria for low-income, first-generation students.
“Denying a student the chance to compete for a scholarship based on their skin color is not only discriminatory but also demeaning and unconstitutional,” Scott Walker, president of Young America’s Foundation and former governor of Wisconsin, said in a statement “At YAF, we proudly defend our students’ right to be judged on their merit and abilities, not on race.”
Students who don’t belong to one of the groups listed as eligible for McNair programs may still participate if they belong to a demographic that is “underrepresented in certain academic disciplines,” according to federal regulations.
The Education Department created the McNair program in 1989, naming the program after a Black astronaut and physicist who died in the Challenger space shuttle explosion. It is one of the agency’s federal TRIO programs, which aim to help disadvantaged students from middle school onward.
The McNair program awards funds to colleges for research and scholarly projects to prepare students for doctoral programs. During the 2023-24 year, the Education Department doled out over $60 million for McNair projects at more than 200 colleges, according to federal data.
An Education Department spokesperson said Friday that it does not comment on pending litigation.
