Educating the Mind and Spirit: The American Indian College Fund Celebrates 25 Years

For 25 years, the American Indian College Fund has worked to provide Native American students with access to higher education, offering both student scholarships and financial and programmatic support for tribal colleges. To mark its anniversary while preparing for more growth and success in Native education, the College Fund is implementing new paths in an effort to help more Native students succeed in their educational pursuits. There has long been a legacy of disparity with regard to education in Indian Country. Today, higher education attainment is still lower among American Indians than for any other segment of the population— attributable to failed federal government policies, lack of funding, and Native peoples’ distrust of formal education due to the horrors of the boarding school experience assimilation efforts.

Although organizational planning had begun in 1987, the American Indian College Fund issued its first annual report in 1990.

In the late 1960s, the rise in civil rights activity and increased access to education through community colleges helped prompt the tribal college movement. In 1968, citizens of the Navajo Nation recognized that their people needed an educated and skilled workforce to ensure successful leadership, and a venue to perpetuate tribal ways of living. Navajo leaders also knew that the key to obtaining a higher education for the majority of their people was making education both geographically and culturally accessible and affordable. This meant allowing students to attend classes close to home, and also creating curricula that met modern educational needs while honoring students’ cultural values and traditions. The people therefore established Navajo Community College (Diné College)—the very first tribal college.

Other tribes soon followed the Navajo example, creating tribal colleges to serve their own reservation communities. Each institution was tailored to fit their communities’ needs in language, culture, economics, and physical geography. Despite their differences, tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) then and now share the mission of working to uplift Native people from poverty to prosperity, while recognizing the vulnerability of Indigenous cultures and languages and the value in preserving them.

As TCUs began to proliferate, the need for funding grew. Public funding came with the first version of the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act, signed into law in December 1978 by President Jimmy Carter. But there was still no private funding, and most TCUs did not receive local or state monies. Twentyfive years ago, in 1989, the American Indian College Fund was established by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and its allies to provide private funding for the TCUs and to help assist Native students financially so they could attend tribal colleges.

Since its inception, the College Fund has provided nearly 100,000 scholarships and fellowships to Native students, totaling more than $78 million. Such financial assistance helps make higher education affordable to the communities that TCUs serve and is the hallmark of the tribal college movement.

Despite such opportunities and the progress made, it is still not enough. Nationwide, Native youth continue to face some of the lowest high school graduation rates. On average, less than 50% of Native students graduate each year in the seven states with the highest percentage of American Indian and Alaska Native students, according to the Civil Rights Project. In addition, with Native students having few or no financial resources, higher education attainment rates are 13%—the lowest of all racial and ethnic groups, according to the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

Post-secondary education attainment is a high priority for national education organizations and funders. Many have adopted a goal of ensuring that 60% of the adults in the United States have a post-secondary credential by 2025. The College Fund has enthusiastically adopted that goal. With a focus on the American Indian tribal college communities it serves, the 60% goal will break the cycle of poverty and solve its attendant problems of limited access to health care, transportation, and housing.

According to Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and CEO of the College Fund, it isn’t enough for Native students to get into college. In order to succeed in their education and careers, students need to complete their credential and degree programs. They need to graduate. But because American Indian students often are faced with obligations to dependent children or extended family members— while also confronting the pressures of extreme poverty such as lack of food, lack of transportation, and inability to pay for utilities— many students are faced with tough choices: stay in school or attend to the responsibilities of everyday life.

Crazy Bull, who has devoted her career to promoting success for Native students in education, recalls her early days at Sinte Gleska University, when the school offered coffee and lunches for students to entice them to enroll. For many students, that was their only meal of the day. “Students should not be faced with the choice as to whether to pay their heating bill in the dead of winter or to be able to go to school,” Crazy Bull maintains. “It is difficult to devote oneself to one’s studies when you are worried about where your children’s next meal is going to come from. Too often our students’ educations become a casualty of the poverty they face.”

To ensure student success so they can escape poverty, the College Fund is kicking off its 25th anniversary fundraising campaign to meet its 60% attainment goal. Achieving that goal means more scholarships for more students, and more resources for the TCUs to build student service programs and offer expanded academic and vocational opportunities. The College Fund will be unveiling new messaging and a slate of fundraising events to meet the financial need for education in Indian Country. And the need is monumental.

To meet this need, the College Fund will endow a four-pillar education plan to help Native children succeed from early childhood all the way through college. Firstly, the plan seeks to employ early childhood education programs, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) initiatives, literacy programs, Native language and cultural immersion, learning labs, study-skills tutoring, and early college programs. The second pillar will focus on programs that help provide access to post-secondary education, including career and skills advising, GED education, college readiness, high school/TCU partnerships, and scholarships. Thirdly, the plan will provide meaningful higher-education opportunities for TCU students, including integration of technology to enhance student learning, place-based education strategies, mentoring programs, leadership training, apprenticeship and internship programs, as well as accreditation support for TCUs. Finally, the plan will support employment opportunities, including counseling for first-time job seekers, career planning and advancement, and job search advice.

By combining its four-pillar plan to support Native education and students through all stages of learning, along with fundraising opportunities that grow educational programs at TCUs across Indian Country, the American Indian College Fund is working to strengthen higher education in tribal communities. As the College Fund celebrates its 25th anniversary, it is preparing to help educate the mind and spirit of future generations of Native students.

Dina M. Horwedel is the director of public education for the American Indian College Fund.