ED to Roll Back McNair Grant’s Race-Based Criteria

The Education Department plans to eliminate any race-based eligibility criteria for the McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement award, a $60 million grant program designed to increase access to doctorate-level degrees.

The decision, first reported Tuesday by Politico, settles a lawsuit from the Young America’s Foundation that argued the current criteria are discriminatory. But court filings confirm that the agreement was voluntary. It follows a series of moves from the Trump administration to eliminate any race-based eligibility criteria for scholarships, student support services and federally funded programs.

Currently, at least two-thirds of the students in a college’s McNair program have to be both low-income and first-generation. Only the remaining third can qualify solely because they came from an “underrepresented group.” And while many of the low-income students also happen to be Black, Hispanic and Indigenous—the racial groups deemed “underrepresented” by federal code—some are also white or Asian.

And nowhere does the law limit “underrepresented groups” to race, McNair experts add. For example, many white women pursuing careers in STEM have benefited from the program.

Still, the lawsuit, which was filed in 2024 on behalf of two white students, argued that any degree of race-based consideration was illegal. A federal judge dismissed the case in January 2025, but YAF appealed and used multiple Trump executive orders that targeted diversity, equity and inclusion to bolster its arguments.

YAF only agreed to drop the lawsuit after guidance from the Department of Justice prompted the education secretary to commit to repeal McNair’s race-based eligibility criteria in a “forthcoming rule making.”

The DOJ’s first statement, released in December, declared that “any allocation of benefits … based on a person’s race is anathema to the U.S. Constitution” and that ED should create new regulations for the program. The solicitor general later told Congress that the government wouldn’t defend certain aspects of the McNair program in court and referenced the YAF lawsuit.

This is not the first time the Trump administration has used lawsuits to expedite desired policy changes without congressional backing.

A similar course of events played out last year when Tennessee sued ED over the criteria for the Hispanic-serving institution grant program. DOJ and the solicitor general said they wouldn’t defend the program after finding some parts unconstitutional. The Education Department ultimately defunded the program for fiscal year 2025, even though litigation continues.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the legal group representing YAF, said this agreement is a major win.

“Young people hoping to pursue graduate school should be helped and encouraged, not burdened by institutional racism,” Dan Lennington, WILL’s managing vice president and deputy counsel, said in a news release. “This should serve as a warning to other universities that continue to offer race-restrictive scholarships.”

College access advocates have been concerned about the fate of the program since Trump took office.

The president’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal, released in May, recommended eliminating McNair and the rest of TRIO, a collection of college access programs. And while Congress overrode the president and maintained flat funding for TRIO, the Education Department has still leveraged its own budgetary powers to cancel funds for at least 18 of the more than 200 McNair programs.

Kimberly Jones, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, which advocates for TRIO, discouraged McNair directors from “making any decisions in isolation regarding potential changes to program recruitment or services.”

“At this time, it is important to know that the current statutory and regulatory framework governing the McNair program remains in place,” she wrote in a message to COE members. “Federal regulations cannot be changed unilaterally or immediately.”

When asked about the next steps following Tuesday’s agreement, department spokesperson Ellen Keast said the Trump administration “plan[s] to make corresponding changes to our regulations.” She declined, however, to provide further detail about what exactly those changes will entail and whether the low-income and first-generation criteria will remain.

(Of the two students represented in the case, only one met the criteria of being a first-generation student. Neither came from a low-income household.)

Amanda Fuchs Miller, president of Seventh Street Strategies and the former deputy assistant secretary of higher education programs, said that it’s hard to imagine any way the Trump administration could change the eligibility criteria without breaking the law.

“The statute requires those who are underrepresented to include Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Native American Pacific Islanders … [it also includes students who are] Black (non-Hispanic), Hispanic and American Indian,” she wrote in a social media post. “[I] will be interested to see what ED does in regulations as they can change the definition of underrepresented but should still have to follow the statute (which is not what they seem to say they are going to do).”