As the Hispanic population in America has grown, so, too has the number of Hispanic-Serving Institutions, from under 200 in 1994-95 to 571 in 2020-21. However, the amount of Title V funding—federal dollars granted to expand opportunities for Hispanic students—has not kept pace, resulting in increased competition for the money. It’s growing increasingly hard for HSIs to get funding this often-transformative funding: only 40% of eligible HSIs received Title V dollars in 2020. In a new briefing, Excelencia in Education, a Latino student success organization, isolates the challenges that HSIs are experiencing and the strategies that they are using to get this critical money.
One of the main obstacles that schools have in applying for Title V grants is decentralized structures for doing so, the briefing found. Without dedicated offices for these efforts, it becomes very hard to get all of the necessary people working together to write a successful grant.
According to Dr. Stephanie Aguilar-Smith, an assistant professor at the University of North Texas who studies grant-seeking by HSIs, the reason schools have this problem is simple: money.
“It’s expensive,” she said. “You have to have the money from the get-go to build this office, to staff this office, the get professional training about grant-writing, management, and implementation.”
Dr. Deborah A. Santiago, co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education
“We’re seeing more of that” among the schools that Excelencia profiled for the brief, Santiago said.
Another challenge is institutionalizing initiatives: sustaining them long-term after the grant money has run out. According to Aguilar-Smith, it’s important for cash-strapped institutions to think creatively about how positions can be folded into institutional budgets and to look for additional, non-Title V grant funding.
