Overview of Minority-Serving Institutions in the United States

Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) are colleges and universities across the United States and U.S. Territories enrolling significant percentages of racially minoritized undergraduate students or created with the explicit purpose of serving specific populations of racially minoritized students under various programs created by U.S. Congress (U.S. Department of Education, n.d.). About one in five Title IV-eligible postsecondary institutions is eligible for MSI funding (Nguyen, Ramirez, & Laderman, 2023). All MSIs must be accredited, degree-granting public or private non-proprietary (not-for-profit) colleges and universities. While MSIs are federal institutional-level designations codified in the Higher Education Act of 1965, states have a stake in this matter. The following analysis is an opportunity to highlight MSIs, given their outsized roles in educating racially minoritized and other minoritized students. Because most studies have focused on discussing MSIs solely at the institutional or national levels, this piece explores MSIs at the regional and state/territory levels. Using available information from the MSI Data Project (2017-2021), this piece contributes to our knowledge of MSIs by reporting on MSIs across U.S. Census divisions and states/territories. Moreover, different from how existing literature describes seven MSI designations, following Nguyen, Ramirez, & Laderman (2023), this piece reports on 11 MSI designations. Namely, this offers more precision around which designations an institution may be eligible for. This descriptive analysis is appropriate for laying the landscape of public MSIs (Loeb et al., 2017).