Colleges and universities in the North Bay are preparing to end grant-funded programs years ahead of schedule after the administration of President Donald Trump announced the cancellation of federal grants nationwide for more than 600 schools that serve large shares of Latino students.
Santa Rosa Junior College, Sonoma State University and Napa Valley College are among the nearly 170 designated Hispanic-Serving Institutions, or HSIs in California, meaning at least a quarter of their student population identifies as Hispanic or Latino.
The funding will be revoked and repurposed by the Trump administration by next September, leaving local institutions to decide whether they will scramble to replace it, or shut the doors on numerous specialized programs.
At Santa Rosa Junior College, three grant-funded programs will be terminated early due to the loss of funding. Leaders at SRJC say they will not replace the funding but will quickly sunset the programs and continue ongoing work to provide similar services across campus.
For Napa Valley College, the funding cuts come on top of the non-renewal of another federal grant meant to support students with disabilities and those who are the first in their family to pursue higher education. Amid an evolving landscape, college leadership said they are evaluating the impact and potential solutions to address the shortfalls in a way that preserves services for students.
At Sonoma State, where turmoil and upheaval have been campus constants in recent years, the latest cut equates to another aftershock. It will do some damage, but it will be contained to a single program.
Specifically, the cuts will result in the shuttering of SSU’s PUERTA initiative, which last year had been awarded nearly $3 million over five years by the HSI grant program, with the express purpose of increasing the number of Hispanic students in pre-professional health, nursing and teaching pathways.
That focus on career pathways hewed closely to one of the top priorities of Mildred Garcia, chancellor of the California State University system, whose 23 members include 21 of the state’s 167 HSIs, the most nationwide.
The termination of the HSI program, Garcia said in a statement, “will have an immediate impact and irreparable harm to our entire community.
“Without this funding, students will lose the critical support they need to succeed in the classroom, complete their degrees on time, and achieve social mobility for themselves and their families,” she said.
Gerald Jones, Sonoma State’s vice president of student affairs, noted that the university had been given an “automatic no-cost extension” of funding through next August. “So that will allow us to wind down services appropriately, as opposed to dismantling services immediately.”
The sad truth, said Stephanie Manieri, executive director of the Santa Rosa-based nonprofit Latino Service Providers, “is that without these resources, many students are going to struggle to navigate higher education alone.”
By providing workshops, mentorship, “even basic school supplies,” she said, HSI-funded initiatives “allow a wide range of Latino and non-Latino students to make it through college, graduate, and contribute to our local economy at a high level.”
30-year-old program cancelled
After offering grants to HSIs since 1995, the U.S. Department of Education, now run by Trump appointee and former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, announced on Sept.10 its intention to end the program.
The department alleged the program, supported by previous administrations of both parties, was based on “racial quotas,” and that its grants were thus “unconstitutional” and “discriminatory” against non-Hispanic students.
While that move was not unexpected, said state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, D-Yolo, whose district includes all of Napa and parts of Sonoma County, it was nonetheless “abhorrent.”
The Education Department announced its intention to transfer the tens of millions of dollars taken from HSIs to historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, and tribal schools. Cabaldon described that reallocation as “very cynical” and “an attempt to drive a wedge between communities in this country.”
The HSI program being cut “has nothing to do with admissions, or the hot button issues often involved in the culture wars,” said Cabaldon, a former college professor who has held various high-level positions in education policy and administration.
Its purpose, he said, is to help HSIs “get better at serving those students by learning from each other, engaging in joint research projects and pilot programs, to see what works.
“This is really about a network the federal government has helped curate and advance, to improve Latino student achievement.”
Leaders at each of the North Bay’s HSIs underscored the inevitable, negative effects the deep federal cuts will have on some of their most vulnerable students.
Santa Rosa Junior College
Santa Rosa’s community college, with the North Bay’s largest student body, will lose over $10.5 million in HSI funding, which supports three programs at the school. Just over 41% of all students that enroll at SRJC identify as Hispanic or Latino.
Lazamiento, a grant-funded $2.8 million initiative, is designed to expand the academic pipeline for students transferring to four-year universities and to improve degree and certificate completion rates through specialized tutoring, peer coaching and library support. The program began in 2020 and is set to end later this month.
The largest grant-funded program, Avanzando, supports the retention of students — especially those who are underrepresented — that are enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and health sciences programs. The $4.7 million initiative began in 2021 and was set to continue into 2026.
Transformando, a five-year, $3 million program geared toward fostering belonging and streamlining support services to improve academic incomes will now have to end ahead of schedule.
The services offered to students enrolled in the Lazamiento and Avanzando programs in the years since the initiatives began have since been integrated into existing, non-grant funded areas of the campus curriculum — a plan SRJC Superintendent and President Angélica Garcia said was put in place years ago to ensure services did not go away when the funding expired.
“Transformando, that particular grant has a focus on online learning and ethnic studies,” Garcia said. “That particular work, we have to accelerate a bit more to see how we are able to meet as (much) of our goals and objectives that we had set up in the grant, but on a much shorter timeline.”
The federal government’s end to HSI funding sets up a dangerous and misinformed narrative that the grant-supported programs exclude students based on their ethnicity, Garcia added.
“One of the misconceptions that happens around HSIs is that those dollars are only for students who are Hispanic,” she said. “That could not be further from the truth. The federal grant dollars support access and student success and completion and those programs are available to all students.”
In a time where colleges, universities and K-12 districts are facing deep financial deficits, SRJC leaders say this particular loss will not leave the college in a fiscal hole.
“While I am incredibly disheartened and passionately (having) other feelings as well about the news, I am equally passionate about the fact that the work does not stop — we will not be distracted by this,” Garcia said. “We are still here… this college and this community has weathered a myriad of financial hardships over this time.”
Napa Valley College
Napa Valley College, where about about half of students identify as Latino, three HSI grants received by the school equate to a total of $10.8 million over several years.
Two of those, a $5 million grant to increase graduation rates for students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs and a nearly $3 million grant that supports students in completing their degrees, were set to expire before the revocation of funds a year from now.
The third, meanwhile, was meant to provide the college with funding through 2027. Circulo, the program funded by that $2.9 million grant, aims to meet the needs of Hispanic and first-generation students by providing support for distance education, technology infrastructure and peer mentoring.
“Because of the constantly evolving federal funding landscape, we are in the process of evaluating the impacts that cuts to HSI funding may have and how to address those shortfalls,” Superintendent Torence Powell said in a statement.
The college is simultaneously navigating the loss of other funding streams. For years, Napa Valley College has received more than $300,000 per year under the Department of Education’s TRIO Student Support Services program. This money supported low-income, first-generation students and individuals with disabilities with advising and tutoring in order to lead them to successful completion of their degrees. For Napa Valley College, that grant came to an end Aug. 31 and has not been renewed in the next five-year cycle.
TRIO, a group of eight federal programs meant to support students from disadvantaged programs, is under threat nationwide in the next fiscal year. This year, some institutions are seeing delays and cancellations but the program has not been eliminated.
“Prior to the conclusion of the program, the 130 students supported by the program were connected with alternate resources to ensure they continue their academic journeys at NVC with the support they need to be successful,” Powell said.
Even with $10 million in its discretionary fund balance at the end of the 2024-25 academic year and the recent windfall of $6 million in COVID-19 relief tax credit funds, the end of the TRIO SSS and HSI grants puts a new financial strain on the college as it navigates lower-than-anticipated cash from local property taxes, a cut in state funding and increasingly contentious negotiations with its faculty and classified unions.
“The leadership team remains committed to sound fiscal practices to ensure the district’s reserves are strong and that we have the capacity to support not just this year but the years to come,” Powell said at a recent board meeting.
Sonoma State University
At Sonoma State, the loss of HSI funds will take its place on a list of myriad other challenges now facing a university that will soon say goodbye to Interim President Emily Cutrer, who will give way to the school’s fifth president in a little over three years. It was Cutrer who in January announced broad cuts — to staff, faculty, academic programs and departments, along with Sonoma State’s entire athletics program — to grapple with the school’s roughly $24 million budget deficit.
The loss of the PUERTA program, funded completely by an HSI grant, will be partially offset by the $90 million in one-time funds lavished on the campus in recent months by the state Legislature and CSU system.
That rescue package includes $5 million earmarked for a new-and-improved career center. While that facility will provide “core support” to all undergraduates, including Hispanic students, said Jones, the VP of student services, the funds being yanked by the Trump administration will do lasting damage.
“It means we now have less resources to expand mentoring, advising and career programs which support those served by PUERTA – first-generation, low-income, Latino students. And it slows our progress toward our equity goals.”
You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.
You can reach Tarini Mehta at 707-521-5337 or tarini.mehta@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @MehtaTarini.
Report For America corps member Adriana Gutierrez covers education and child welfare issues for The Press Democrat. You can reach her at Adriana.Gutierrez@pressdemocrat.com.