DENVER — Colorado colleges — primarily in rural, underserved areas of the state — are losing millions in funding after the Trump administration last month announced an end to $350 million in federal grant programs for minority-serving institutions across the country.

The state is home to 14 minority-serving institutions, or public colleges and universities with a high percentage of specific demographic groups — Hispanic, Native American or Black students, for example — and a large concentration of students with financial need.

In Colorado, 13 of those schools are designated as Hispanic-serving institutions, meaning they have 25% or higher Hispanic or Latino undergraduate enrollment. One school, Fort Lewis College, is a Native American-serving nontribal institution.

“We’re going to continue to do our best to meet the needs of our students, but it will be challenging, given we’ve been greatly supported by these resources for many years,” said Kristyn White Davis, vice president of enrollment management, marketing and extended studies at Colorado State University Pueblo, which is losing more than $3 million.

The federal money being cut often funded campuswide positions or initiatives such as career counseling centers, college recruitment efforts, internship coordinators and services for low-income and first-generation students, education officials said.

“These initiatives didn’t just serve Hispanic students — they benefit the entire student body with supports aimed at boosting student success across our colleges and universities,” said Angie Paccione, executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, in a statement. “… Now, because of these cuts by the Trump administration, many institutions are being forced to dismantle these efforts, hurting students and Colorado’s economy.”

Democratic state legislators identified the following six institutions as being the most impacted by the funding cuts:

•Adams State University in Alamosa

•Colorado State University Pueblo

•Fort Lewis College in Durango

•Lamar Community College

•Morgan Community College in Fort Morgan

•Pueblo Community College

On Sept. 10, the U.S. Department of Education announced an end to discretionary funding to grants for minority-serving institutions, calling the program discriminatory and unconstitutional.

“Discrimination based upon race or ethnicity has no place in the United States,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a news release. “To further our commitment to ending discrimination in all forms across federally supported programs, the department will no longer award minority-serving institution grants that discriminate by restricting eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas.”

The $350 million in discretionary funding that was going to support minority-serving institutions in 2025 will be diverted to “programs that do not include discriminatory racial and ethnic quotas and that advance administration priorities,” the Education Department said.

‘It will have a long-term effect’

The Colorado Community College System, which serves more than 124,000 students at 13 colleges across the state, is bracing for the loss of more than $5 million to its campuses.

One of those schools, Lamar Community College, is poised to lose nearly $3 million. The money would have funded five new positions, including a role working with middle- and high-schooler students in the rural, southeastern Colorado community to engage and recruit them for college, the college’s president, Rosana Reyes, said.

The grant was administered last October and recruitment work began in the spring, Reyes said. After concentrated engagement with local K-12 students, Reyes said Lamar Community College saw a 14% increase in first-time college students enrolling. The money, she said, helped students from all kinds of backgrounds continue their education.

“We can’t remember the last time we had such a huge increase in that population,” Reyes said. “It’s a great example of what this grant was going to do. The additional positions would have been a game-changer. The loss of this grant is not going to stop us from looking for more opportunities to serve our students. But it will have a long-term effect.”

For years, the state has promoted the eradication of educational attainment gaps, noting that higher education increases the likelihood of community members having better health outcomes and improving their economic mobility.

Colorado has the highest number of residents with a college credential in the nation, at 62.9% for adults between the ages of 25 to 64, according to a 2024 report from the Lumina Foundation. However, Black and Hispanic educational attainment rates were at 41.6% and 30.3%, respectively, during the same time period.

The Colorado Democratic Latino Caucus, the Black Democratic Legislative Caucus of Colorado and the Joint MENASA Muslim Caucus of Colorado sent a letter to the state’s congressional delegation and Gov. Jared Polis this week urging action on the federal funding cuts.

The letter said the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding for minority-serving institutions would primarily impact Colorado’s two-year colleges and rural institutions.

“Meaning that, once again, we are taking away opportunities for economic mobility from those already at the greatest disadvantage,” the state legislators wrote. “Our federal government has chosen to limit access to educational opportunity in pursuit of a harmful narrative that serves to only further divide Americans from one another.”

‘We are a scrappy institution’

CSU Pueblo had been awarded $3.6 million in federal grants that are now discontinued.

White Davis, one of the campus’s vice presidents, said that amount of money represents a “substantial” loss for a smaller, regional institution like CSU Pueblo, which serves around 4,000 students, nearly 34% of them Hispanic.

The grant money was focused on student support services, advising roles and internship coordinator positions, White Davis said.

“We intend to do the very best we can and are working as a campus leadership team, as well as our faculty resources, to think of creative ways to continue to provide critical student support services, but we have to acknowledge some of those support services students are accustomed to having may not be available in the future,” she said.

Adams State University in Alamosa will lose a nearly $2.5 million grant intended to help local high school students take advantage of concurrent enrollment credits to make the transition to college easier and more affordable, said Jacob Rissler, the school’s vice president of advancement.

“That would have been serving all students,” Rissler said. “But we are a scrappy institution. We do the best we can with what we have. We don’t have the funding we typically would have, but we’re still going to do our mission to serve all students.”

Rissler said Adams State will seek out private donors and philanthropic foundations to make up for the lost funds.

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