Editorial: Tribal colleges deserve state funds

Thursday, February 8, 2007  

"On Friday morning, Tom Shortbull, president of Oglala Lakota College, and representatives of the three other tribal colleges in South Dakota plan to testify before the Legislature's Appropriations Committee. They want to plug a loophole in tribal college funding.

At present, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs funds tribal colleges $4,563 for each full-time American Indian student, or students who are enrolled in an Indian tribe.

That's fine. The loophole is that each of the four colleges also has a number of 'non-beneficiary students,' who are either non-enrolled Indian students or non-Indian students. The BIA provides no funding for those students.

Shortbull and other college officials are asking South Dakota lawmakers to approve SB112, which would appropriate $500,000 from the general fund to the Board of Regents, which would parcel it out to tribal colleges per their numbers of full-time-equivalent non-beneficiary students."

Get the Story:
Editorial: Tribal colleges deserve state funding to plug loophole (The Rapid City Journal 2/8)

Relevant Links:
American Indian Higher Education Consortium - http://www.aihec.org
Tribal Colleges and Universities - http://www.ed.gov/about/inits/list/whtc/edlite-index.html
American Indian College Fund - http://collegefund.org

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