Trump plays the race card to deny Fresno State badly needed funds | Opinion

Fresno State is enjoying success in key ways:

• The six-year graduation rate for the 2018 cohort of freshmen — meaning those students who completed their bachelor’s degree in six years — reached 58%, the highest since 2009.

• Enrollment is up nearly 700 students this fall from last year, with a total of 25,000 students now attending Fresno State.

• Of the students enrolled, about 20,000 are homegrown Valley kids. Powering that is the Bulldog Bound program, which works with 94 participating high schools in the San Joaquin Valley to guarantee high school seniors admission if they meet California State University entry requirements. Nearly 50% of the students who began in Bulldog Bound remained enrolled at Fresno State last year, compared to what has been the typical average of 16%.
• For the 15th consecutive year, Fresno State students donated more than 1 million volunteer hours to the community. Last year the total was 1.6 million hours.
• And the Washington Monthly publication has named Fresno State the No. 2 university in the nation for return on investment. “The school that beat us is in Kentucky and has a $38,000 (a year) tuition,” Fresno State President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval said. Fresno State students pay about $6,600 a year. “So I am not sure how that works,” he said with a chuckle.

Each May Fresno State graduates 6,100 students. Eighty percent of them remain in the Valley, Jiménez-Sandoval said in a meeting with The Bee Editorial Board. A similar percentage of the teachers working at Valley schools earn their teaching credentials at Fresno State. Nearly 65% of area school administrators earned their master’s and doctorate degrees at the university. Other professions, like nursing and accounting, also depend on Fresno State graduates, he noted.

Then there are the agriculture and business schools at the university that provide new graduates into those key fields.

This background shows how important Fresno State is to its region, and by extension, to the state.

It also puts into perspective a decision by the Trump administration to strip away funding from Fresno State.

As reported by Bee staff writer Marina Peña, in September the university learned it would no longer receive federal grant monies as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. The federal government has been giving the grants for decades.

The cut to Fresno State: $5 million.

As told by Peña, “U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement that the grants were discriminatory for ‘restricting eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas.’”

To be a Hispanic-Serving Institution, a school must have an enrollment that is 25% Latino. California, of course, has many HSI universities. In the San Joaquin Valley, the list includes UC Merced and the State Center community colleges. Nearly 60% of Fresno State’s students are Latino.

McMahon’s statement is, to put it bluntly, ridiculous. No student gets turned away from Fresno State because it is an HSI school. Yet all students benefit from the federal grant given to Fresno State because it is Hispanic serving.

To stress that point again: All students benefit — not just Latinos — from services paid for by the federal grant.

How would all students be helped from such federal monies? Let me explain.

How federal funding helps

Tutoring, mentorships, internships. Those important aspects of a college education fall under the umbrella of academic services. It is this category that was boosted by the HSI grant, Jiménez-Sandoval said.

When Jiménez-Sandoval was the dean of the Arts and Humanities college, he was told by the-then provost to improve graduation rates. But how to do it?

Jiménez-Sandoval and colleagues realized there were required classes in the freshman year that many students struggled with passing. In the science fields, it was chemistry 1A and calculus. Another was the freshman writing course that all new students must take. Students who did not pass these courses could not advance.

The remedy today is called supplemental instruction. Here is how it works: A tutor is embedded in a chemistry 1A class to hear what is taught on a given day. That tutor then holds a session later that same day on the material. All students from the class must go to the tutoring so they can get their questions answered. This way learning difficulties are handled in nearly real time — not a week or even day before a midterm or final exam.

From the early data that has been gathered, students using the tutoring have a grade-point average of 3.24. Those who don’t use the tutoring have a GPA of 2.39.

To explain it another way, the passing rate of students with tutoring is 95%. For those without, 76% pass the class.

The tutoring is available to all students. Period. There is no racial eligibility requirement.

But cutting the federal dollars to support tutoring will jeopardize what supplemental instruction has achieved.

Grant cut wrong

No one from Trump’s Education Department reached out to Jiménez-Sandoval to learn how ending the HSI grant would impact Fresno State.

To simply take money away from schools that have high Latino enrollments, without first finding out what the impact might be and whether that is even a good policy choice, is a) short-sighted, b) discriminatory, c) dumb and d) all of the above. Shaming HSI universities for simply being what they are — what McMahon is doing — is just wrong.

Jiménez-Sandoval and his fellow CSU presidents are today scrambling to make their budgets as California’s overall budget situation is bad. The last thing he needed was the federal government to be working against Fresno State by yanking the HSI grant. But that is what has happened.

This story was originally published October 9, 2025 at 5:30 AM.

Tad Weber

Opinion Contributor,

The Fresno Bee

Tad Weber is an opinion writer at The Fresno Bee.