Central Arkansas Settles Scholarship Inquiry With ED

The University of Central Arkansas will have to review all programs, memberships, scholarships and activities, including those involving external organizations, that have any sex- or race-based preferences or limitations, under a resolution agreement reached with the Education Department over a complaint that focused on 10 privately funded scholarships.

The university has 60 days to conduct the review and report back to the department’s Office for Civil Rights on whether it plans to discontinue any of those programs or activities. If the university opts to continue with a race- or sex-based preference or limitation, it will have to explain why it believes that policy is consistent with federal civil rights laws.

OCR didn’t complete its investigation before Central Arkansas opted to enter into a resolution agreement, but investigators identified “concerns that the university administers or promotes sex-specific, sex-preferred, race specific, and/or race preferred scholarships that discriminate against students based on sex and/or race,” according to a letter about the investigation. The department will monitor the agreement for two years to ensure the university fully complies with federal law.

The Equal Protection Project, an advocacy group, argued in an October 2025 complaint that 10 scholarships administered by the university’s foundation were discriminatory because they were designated for students from specific racial backgrounds or of a particular sex. For example, the Jennifer J. Westpfahl Women in Finance Scholarship is for female students studying finance.

According to OCR, the university acknowledged “that the scholarships at issue in this complaint are restricted on the basis of sex and/or race and [did] not assert a legal justification for the manner in which the scholarships are administered, offered, or promoted by the university.”

UCA spokeswoman Tiffany Head said in a statement that eight of the scholarships referenced in the complaint were modified prior to the resolution agreement and the other two are on hold until the eligibility guidelines are revised.

“The UCA Foundation has been proactively reviewing and updating scholarship eligibility criteria over multiple years to ensure compliance with federal requirements,” Head said. “Many scholarships had already been modified, but in some cases, older documentation still appeared online while system updates were finalized. We have previously addressed OCR questions in both the Biden and Trump administrations related to scholarship language and continue to work collaboratively with OCR to ensure both current and future scholarships align with all civil rights laws.”

The agreement follows mounting scrutiny of race-based scholarships, which intensified after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions policies in 2023. Colleges and universities have sought to change scholarships’ eligibility criteria to race-neutral alternatives, but some donors who established the programs have balked at those efforts.

William Jacobson, who leads the Equal Protection Project, celebrated the resolution agreement in an online post, writing it “may be one of our clearest victorys” [sic]. (The project has filed numerous civil rights complaints over programs and scholarships with race- or sex-based criteria.)

Jacobson wrote that he hopes this agreement becomes a model for future civil rights resolution agreements in part because of the requirement for the university to review all its programs and scholarships, including those with outside entities.

“It addresses the ‘hide and seek’ and rebranding games universities play, as well as the whack-a-mole problem where the university ends or modifies one program only for another to pop up elsewhere,” he wrote. “This is a whole-of-university approach, and we love it.”