It’s been a week since University of Hawaiʻi President Wendy Hensel broke the news that a new directive by the U.S. Department of Education will severely cut millions from the university’s budget as soon as Oct. 1.
UH administrators are still trying to get their arms around the impact of losing what’s known as Title III grants, which is federal money set aside for minority serving institutions like UH, Chaminade University and Hawaiʻi Pacific University.
The Conversation has asked to talk to UH administrators, who are still knee deep in assessing the damage. But HPR did get the opportunity to sit down with the provosts at the two private colleges.
Lance Askildson is at Chaminade. The Catholic university was already hurting from earlier cuts. The school could see a hit of more than $9 million. At this point, it is not expected that anyone will lose their job. But Askildson said in the long term, the cuts could affect access to college.
On the other side of Honolulu, Hawaiʻi Pacific University had been dreading the news that was handed down this month. It estimates that its losses are more than $2 million in federal aid. Acting Provost Brenda Jensen said that the cuts are being characterized as race-based, but that the money goes to support the whole school.
Interview highlights - Chaminade
On Title III funding
LANCE ASKILDSON: I want to emphasize that this funding goes to strengthen the entire institution. So the category of funding under which the Title III funds fall is titled Strengthening Institutions. And so the idea is, yes, there are some criteria by which institutions are awarded funds. In this case, we need to have a minimum of 10% Native Hawaiian-Pacific Islander enrollment, but we also have to have a minimum of 33% Pell (Grant) eligible, which is a measure of socioeconomic capability. So we're serving historically marginalized students as well as socioeconomically marginalized students, and those criteria help us strengthen services and academic quality for all students who attend Chaminade.
On where cuts will be made
ASKILDSON: At this point in time, we are not anticipating that anyone would lose their jobs as a result of this. However, we are having to narrow some of our student services, student advising, career services. A lot of the direct services that have been funded by these Title III grants at Chaminade are services available to the entire campus community, and that's where we're going to have to be creative to ensure that we can continue to offer advanced career planning and paid internships and other types of mentorship from industry leaders in the community without the federal funding that supported this for many years.
On what Chaminade has been communicating to students
ASKILDSON: We're telling the students that we are going to do everything within our power to avoid cutting programs. But some of the programs may become more narrow, and so hours may be limited, there may be fewer opportunities for paid internships or community mentoring. Some of the professional development that we provide to our faculty has been reduced. Opportunities to engage in undergraduate research have been curtailed. So I think it's less of a kind of direct loss of opportunity, but rather a narrowing of existing opportunities.
On the effect of long-term cuts
ASKILDSON: Broader narrative here is beyond those cuts to minority serving institutions and the Title III grants, it's one of broad divestment from higher education, and specifically broad divestment from access to higher education from those most marginalized, historically and currently. And so if you are coming from a multi-generational family, if you're coming from a first-generation college family, if you're coming from a low-income family, I think you should be very concerned about what this augurs for the future of college access.
Interview highlights - HPU
On the Strengthening Institutions grant
BRENDA JENSEN: The latest order from the Department of Education affected minority-serving institutions, of course, the Native Alaska and Native Hawaiian programs, specifically under the Title III funding. And so in that program, we had a Strengthening Institutions grant, and it was a very broad wrap-around services program that was targeted really for kids. … Even though it was a Title III grant, it was open to everyone. It was open to anybody. We were targeting Pell (Grant) eligible students, as well as just anyone who needed the extra help for developmental math and reading. … So that was a fairly large grant that was supporting about $600,000 to $700,000 a year, and the overall award was about $3.5 million.
On no-cost extension
JENSEN: If my interpretation is correct, I think that what it is saying is that the fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, and so there’s basically two weeks left in the current fiscal year. And so we have a year of no-cost extension is what we call it. Basically you have another year to wrap up spending the remaining two weeks of your grant, and so we have a little bit, just because the entire grant did start late, and we did have what we call rollover funds from year-to-year, we have a little bit more than two weeks worth of funding to be able to close out the project more gently, but that's basically what it means.
On potential job loss and cuts being characterized as race-based
JENSEN: This grant does have support for about nine full-timers, and so we are going to have to figure out how to discontinue those that are specifically grant-funded and see if we can work that into the regular operational budget. And so that activity is a little bit too new for us to be able to say yes or no, we're going to be able to lay people off. We haven't been able to make that decision yet. But overall, this is one hit that's part of other financial concerns that are happening across the board, and so we do have to figure it out with a little bit more time. … It’s just this thought that the grant projects themselves are somehow race-based – that's so incredibly not true in all of these cases. Just because this was the way that the funding was structured doesn't mean that there was anything going on that was offering preferential treatment.
This story aired on The Conversation on Sept. 17, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this interview for the web.
