Regular readers of this blog are well aware of the Department of Education’s penchant for racial bean counting. Today’s Federal Register includes a notice from the Department that continues the Department’s proud tradition. The notice is entitled “Application for New Awards; Center for the Study of Distance Education and Technological Advancement.” At first the notice seems like hundreds of other notices – “study and develop best practices for online education,” “collect data on outcomes,” and so on and so forth.

However, in Section III, “Eligibility requirements,” the notice suddenly becomes interesting. The first two prongs of the eligibility requirements are unremarkable. The third prong, though, requires that an eligible institution, “has minority student enrollment of not less than 15 percent.” The notice elaborates upon this requirement:

For purposes of this competition we are adopting the definition of “minority student” in 34 CFR 607.7 as a student who is Alaskan Native, American Indian, Asian-American, Black (African-American), Hispanic American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

To qualify as an eligible IHE for purposes of this competition, an IHE must have a minority student enrollment of no less than 15 percent. To determine the applicant’s minority enrollment percentage, use the following guidelines.

To qualify as an eligible IHE for this program, a postsecondary institution’s enrollment of minority students must represent at least 15% of its total enrollment (including graduate and undergraduate, full-time and part-time students, based on the most recent academic year for which IPEDS data are available). The Department will screen the applications to verify an IHE’s minority enrollment eligibility based on the criterion.

In our increasingly racially diverse society, there may not be an institution of higher education anywhere that has minority student enrollment of less than 15 percent. That is not the point. This is a crude form of racial bean counting. The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that racial classifications are constitutionally suspect and subject to strict scrutiny. Yet nowhere in the notice does the Department of Education proffer any reason why it is vital to the success of this program that an institution’s student body be no more than 85% white. Any institutions that accept federal money are already subject to federal nondiscrimination provisions, so it is unlikely that any institution whose student body is 85% white is discriminating on the basis of race. The Department does not claim that it is trying to stamp out overt discrimination.

Nor does the Department claim that these requirements are necessary to achieve diversity. I am skeptical of the diversity rationale in education, but this notice does not even make a half-hearted effort to offer the diversity rationale (or any rationale). Although there still would be no valid reason for requiring certain racial demographics in order for an institution to be eligible, there would at least be some symmetry if the rule required something like, “In the interests of diversity, a single ethnic group may account for no more than 85% of the student body.” But that is not what the notice says.

Therefore, it seems unlikely that any compelling reason for the race-based requirements can be offered, much less that the Department’s approach is narrowly tailored. Are black and Hispanic students innately any less able to engage in distance learning than are white students? Wouldn’t socioeconomic status have more of an impact, regardless of the person’s race?

Assume that there is an institution that would like to apply for this grant but that has a student body that is 90% white. Perhaps this is a small institution in rural Wyoming that primarily serves rural Wyoming residents. A grant to study effective distance learning strategies would likely be of great value to this institution and its students. Yet the Department of Education offers no option for institutions like our hypothetical Wyoming institution to demonstrate why they are the best applicant, even if the institution also had to demonstrate that the racial demographics of their student body are due to happenstance (i.e., almost all our students are from rural Wyoming, and 95% of people who live in rural Wyoming are white). Based on this notice, if your institution has the wrong racial composition, then you are out of luck.

This notice is blatantly racially discriminatory because one racial group – in this case, whites – is singled out for less-favorable treatment than every other racial group. It provides that at least 15% of the students must be a race other than white. One might think that this is intended to ensure that the grants go to racially diverse schools. But what of historically black colleges and universities? Even if their student enrollment is 95% black, they are still eligible for this grant. An institution located near a reservation that consequently has 87% Native American enrollment would also be eligible. Whites are the only racial group that disqualify an institution if there are too many of them in the student body.

Lastly, the Department is not accepting comments on this grant competition. People who object to racial classifications and any institutions that would want to apply for the grant but have the wrong demographic makeup do not even have the opportunity to express their objections.

The notice is available here.