As a longtime journalist who specialises in higher education, I’ve written extensively about the life-changing role that Black-oriented scholarships have played in the lives of Black students.

“Being a Ron Brown scholar has allowed me to take my college experience to the next level,” Christopher Lyle told me in 2012 during a Ronald H. Brown American Journey Awards ceremony that I covered. Lyle – who received the Ron Brown scholarship in 2008 and went on to earn an MBA in 2019 from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the same business school from which President Trump graduated in 1968 – is currently Senior Manager of Revenue Strategy & Operations at DoorDash, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The Ron Brown scholarship is named after President Clinton’s secretary of commerce – and the first African American to hold the position – who was tragically killed in a plane crash in 1996 during an official trade mission to Eastern Europe.

But scholarships such as the Ron Brown scholarship are becoming more scarce.

In my home state of Wisconsin, for example, the state’s Supreme Court struck down a state taxpayer-funded scholarship known as the Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant Program. The programme, established by law in 1985, provided grants of up to $2,500 for low-income students of colour, specifically those who are Black, Native American, Hispanic, or certain Southeast Asian students who arrived in the US after December 31, 1975. The rationale behind offering the retention grant to such students is that they tended to leave college without a degree at higher rates than white and Asian students. But the Wisconsin high court rejected the idea, saying the scholarship could have been offered in a race-neutral way.

The Wisconsin case is part of a much larger trend in the US.

Since the Supreme Court outlawed the use of race in college admissions in 2023, the percentage of scholarships that base eligibility on race, ethnicity, gender or other demographic factors has dropped to 11 percent, down from 15 percent at the time of the decision, the Washington Post reports, citing data from the National Scholarship Providers Association.

William Jacobson, a Cornell Law School Professor and Founder of the Equal Protection Project, an initiative that challenges race-based scholarships as discriminatory, welcomes the trend of moving “away from the race-obsessed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion agenda”.

“To the extent scholarships are eliminating race and ethnicity as eligibility requirements, that is a good thing,” Professor Jacobson told me via his legalinsurrection.com email address. “Scholarships should be available to students without regard to race or ethnicity.”

Professor Jacobson noted that institutions can still legally take a student’s hardship into account, but “we cannot assume hardship merely based on skin pigmentation or ancestry, which reinforces negative stereotypes that some races and ethnicities are inherently less capable.”

Not all justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court agree with that sentiment.

“Why, instead of wielding the Equal Protection Clause as a sword against racism, do we employ it to shield against the promise of equality for all?” Justice Jill Karofsky asked. She argued that programmes such as the Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant Program “could be constitutional under an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that honours its purpose - to combat oppression”.

Wisconsin State Senator Dora Drake, a Democrat, worries that people are going too far in seeking to apply the 2023 Supreme Court ban on race-conscious affirmative action to scholarships. Drake benefitted from the Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant during her time at Marquette University. She graduated in 2015.

One of Drake’s staffers told QS Insights the Wisconsin lawmaker is looking at creating a scholarship that would use a factor such as a student’s zip code – rather than race – to determine eligibility.

Not all cases that concern race-based scholarships are being brought on behalf of aggrieved white or Asian individuals who – as was the case in Wisconsin – purportedly felt discriminated against because their race or ethnicity precluded them from being able to compete for a scholarship.

In 2025, the University of Iowa sought court approval to modify a scholarship named after Dr Ezra L. Totton, a distinguished Black chemistry professor who bequeathed the fund to show his gratitude to the university for admitting him to its graduate chemistry programme during the racial segregation period known as Jim Crow.

Dr Totton’s estate specifically stated that the $35,000 he willed to the university should be invested and that 90 percent of the interest should go to scholarships for Black students majoring in the physical sciences, preferably chemistry. But the university, fearing reprisals under the emergent view that the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious affirmative action applies to scholarships, sought court approval to change the words “Black students” to first-generation students.

Iowa’s high court disagreed, stating that while the university had a valid concern about the legal risks of administering a race-based scholarship, there was no basis not to honour the intent of the donor, who in this case indicated that the funds should be returned if the university could not distribute the funds as he requested.

The high court in Iowa also rejected the university’s argument that giving the scholarship funds to first-generation students would honour Dr Totton’s wishes.

“There is a world of difference between Dr Totton’s experience as a victim of a pernicious regime of de jure racial segregation and the life of a first-generation college student today at the University,” the Iowa Supreme Court wrote. The high court sent the case back to a lower court for further proceedings.

Not all disputes are being settled in court.

For instance, when the University of North Carolina Wilmington told the family of the late Dr Leroy Upperman that under new diversity restrictions, a scholarship the family had been awarding could no longer be directed toward Black students, the family yanked the $1 million endowment that supported the scholarship and transferred it to Howard University, a HBCU.

“There's no way that we’re going to not follow my father’s wishes for the money to go to an African American student, so we’re not changing the wording,” Dr Upperman’s daughter, Linda Upperman Smith, told WHQR in explaining the rationale behind moving the endowment to Howard, where her father earned a medical degree in 1938 before becoming one of the first Black physicians to practice in Wilmington.

Experts warn that stance may be harder to take in the future.

“I think that, going forward, donors and colleges will have to design scholarships around legally permissible factors related to educational inequality,” Marybeth Gasman, chair and Distinguished Professor at the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University – New Brunswick, told QS Insights.

She said the new criteria could include family income, eligibility for federal student aid, being a first-generation student or living in an area where few students attend college.

“I do think it’s important to be honest about these substitutions, however,” Professor Gasman said. “Being first gen is not the same as being Black in America, for example. There can be overlap, but erasing attention to race and racism is very dangerous given our history of discrimination.”

Professor Gasman said if race-neutral criteria are used, colleges will need to regularly evaluate whether they are reaching the students whose barriers actually were the reason for the scholarship.

Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert, said scholarships could expand outreach to underrepresented minorities, even as they shift the selection criteria to racially neutral criteria.

“If you increase the number of minority applicants, you will increase the number of minority recipients even if the criteria are purely neutral,” Kantrowitz said.

In terms of my advice to Black students going forward, no matter how lamentable the loss of race-specific scholarships as a remedy to past racial injustices may be, it is not something worth dwelling on.

It’d be far better, in my opinion, to study, volunteer in the community, pursue extracurricular activities and find one’s purpose in a way that makes one a more competitive candidate for scholarships of all kinds, not just the ones set aside for Black students.