Publicly funded college sued over ‘blatantly discriminatory’ race-based tuition waiver program

A North Dakota college was hit with a civil rights complaint for a tuition waiver program that is open only to certain racial groups.

The Equal Protection Project (EPP) filed a civil rights complaint this month against Bismarck State College (BSC) over a”blatantly discriminatory” tuition reduction program that excludes white students, which it alleges violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The college’s Cultural Diversity Waiver (CDW) program is open to students who are  “African American/Black, Alaska Natives, Asian American, Hispanic, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Latino/a/x, Multiracial, [or] Pacific Islander,” according to the college's website. It offers accepted students up to a $1,250 tuition reduction each semester, up to eight semesters.

“We are troubled that with all Bismarck State’s nondiscrimination rules, no administrator thought to ask why the university was continuing an obviously discriminatory program and to put an end to it,” EPP founder William A. Jacobson said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “What is the campus culture that allows such discrimination to continue in the open?”

EPP has filed similar civil rights complaints over programs at a number of universities, including race-based scholarship programs at Western Kentucky University and pre-college medical science programs at The State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo that allegedly use racial preferences in the admissions process.

In June, the Supreme Court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions as a violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, ruling against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The rulings sparked increasing challenges to race-based programs both inside higher education and in the corporate world.

“Bismarck State needs to extend the deadline for the upcoming tuition waiver program cycle so that students who did not apply because of the racial and ethnic barriers have a chance to apply,” Jacobson said. “Bismarck State also needs to retroactively apply tuition waivers to students who were excluded based on these racial and ethnic barriers.”

“BSC complies with ND State Board of Higher Education (SBHE) policies,” BSC Public Relations Manager Juanita Lee told the DCNF. She said the college’s waiver is “in compliance” with SBHE Policy 820, which encourages the use of fee and tuition waivers to “promote enrollment of a culturally diverse student body.”

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