America’s Tribal Colleges And Universities Hope For Transformation Under Biden Administration

Among the thousands of institutions that will receive nearly $40 billion in new funding for higher education as part of the recently passed American Rescue Plan, America’s Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) stand out as having some of the greatest need and also perhaps the greatest opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime transformation.

The 35 TCUs will receive about $50 million in total from the $36 billion provided under the recently passed American Rescue Plan to all accredited public and private nonprofit, two-year and four-year institutions. And they are estimated eventually to receive another $143 million from the approximately $3 billion set aside for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), TCUs, Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and the Strengthening Institutions Program (SIPs) institutions. 

With new and equitable investments, along with other aspects of President Biden’s Plan for Tribal Nations, the TCUs have reason to hope that not only will their historical problems of being under-resourced begin to be addressed, but that their unique strengths and mission also will be advanced at levels not previously seen. Increased technology, greater affordability, lower student debt, and better college completion rates all may be brought within reach. And with those could come a boost to TCUs’ contributions to economic revitalization of Indian Country.

Scope of TCUs

TCUs are unique institutions dedicated to bringing higher education opportunities to Native Americans. Because of the government-to-government relationship between the federal government and the American Indian and Alaska Native tribes that charter most TCUs, these colleges are not technically MSIs, although they are often referred to as a category of MSIs.

Typically located on or near Indian reservations, tribal colleges and universities (sometimes referred to as tribally controlled colleges) serve a dual mission: first, they preserve and sustain American Indian and Alaska Native traditions, languages and culture: and second, they provide postsecondary opportunities and career and technical training to tribal members.

The first TCU was Navajo Community College, now known as Diné College, founded on the Navajo reservation in Tsaile, Arizona, in 1968 and accredited in 1976. There are now 35 regionally accredited TCUs in the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), which was formed in 1973 and serves as a support and advocacy network for TCUs. These institutions were created and chartered by federally recognized Indian tribal governments, or, in two instances (Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico), by the federal government. Both of those institutions charge no tuition or room and board fees, and their enrollment is limited to American Indian and Alaska Native students.

All member institutions are represented on the AIHEC Board of Directors. Carrie L. Billy, has been the President and CEO of AIHEC since 2008. Prior to that, she served as the director for President Clinton’s White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities. Billy was formerly federal relations counsel for the American Indian Higher Education Consortium.

Most of the operational funding for TCUs is provided by the federal government through the Department of the Interior, although a few states also include small appropriations for them in their budgets. The average annual tuition runs about $3,600 per year.

All TCUs began as two-year institutions, and all of them still offer two-year degrees and shorter term certificates. But now, 18 also grant four-year degrees in particular fields. Five TCUs award Master’s degrees, and one – Navajo Technical University in Crownpoint, New Mexico – is developing the first PhD of any TCU – in Diné Culture, Language and Leadership.

Total college student enrollment at the TCUs is approximately 40,000 students, but about 120,000 other individuals are enrolled in their various non-credit courses and community programs. To qualify for funding as a TCU, one of the requirements is that at least 50% of enrolled students must be members of an American Indian or Alaska Native tribe. However, because they are open-admissions institutions, almost all TCUs also admit students from other backgrounds, with about 15% of their enrollment on average now constituted by non-Indian students.

AIHEC created the American Indian College Fund in 1989 to help raise scholarship money for students attending TCUs. The fund has since become fully independent and now obtains and provides private support for scholarships and educational programming for Native students attending the full array of colleges and universities in the U.S.

The Challenges and Hopes for TCUs

Tribal colleges face both chronic and acute challenges. They have historically been underfunded, a problem exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of their students are from low-income families living in rural areas with inferior infrastructure, particularly internet service.

They have not often been the beneficiaries of major private gifts, although that situation saw a bit of a turnaround in the last year with the multiple million-dollar grants that MacKenzie Scott gave to five TCUs. And, with few exceptions, they are not in line for either operating or capital improvement funds from state legislatures.

And then the pandemic hit, deepening TCUs’ financial struggles. As has been well-documented, Covid-19 had a drastic and disproportionate impact on poor communities and communities of color. Native American communities were hit particularly hard.

• American Indians and Alaska Natives with Covid-19 were hospitalized at nearly four times the rate of their non-Hispanic white peers and died at nearly twice the rate of their non-Hispanic white peers.
• The loss of Native elders can put tribes’ connections to their language, traditions and cultures at risk. As one example, Robert Bible, President of the College of Muscogee Nation, a tribal college in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, died from the coronavirus in late 2020.
• While TCU enrollment overall was down about 5% due to the pandemic, that figure masked the fact many of the smaller TCUs, especially in the most rural areas with limited internet connectivity, saw losses of 15% or more.
• And although TCUs have traditionally lagged behind other colleges in completion rates, the pandemic threatened to widen that gap even further.

I asked Carrie Billy this week what President Biden’s various plans, including the American Rescue Plan and the American Families Plan, could potentially mean for the TCUs. She told me the institutions were cautiously hopeful that collectively the plans could be a “once-in-a-lifetime” chance for them to not just become a bit more equitably funded but to transform themselves into the kind of institutions Native communities most needed.

Billy added, “We are concerned, however, that when proposals are developed without truly understanding our experiences and being attentive to the historic and systemic inequities in the programs used to drive transformation, TCUs – and Indian Country — will still be left behind. The Biden administration needs to take the time to understand our needs and address the systemic inequities in existing system and federal programs. If they do that, then we truly could be on the brink of an historic opportunity.”

It would mean that in addition to strengthening that in addition to strengthening Native language and culture programs, the TCUs would have more of the resources they need to become engines for job creation for their tribes. The change Billy envisions goes beyond workforce development, which often means preparing people to take jobs that are already there. It means making jobs that don’t now exist – in areas such as advanced manufacturing, IT, energy, and technology. Billy said, “with the unemployment rate on some reservations reaching 50-60%, unless the TCUs can help our communities grow our own new economic capacity, the full measure of what TCUs can and should accomplish will not be reached.”

There are more than 500 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States. Empowering tribal communities and helping them realize economic prosperity remain significant challenges. The nation’s TCUs seek – with equitable funding and expanded opportunities – to be key resources in meeting those challenges and becoming even stronger assets for the nation overall.