The Biden administration isn’t alone in shoveling public money into diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
DEI course mandates at state universities cost taxpayers and students at least $1.8 billion over each four-year period in which undergraduates must complete the requirements, according to the findings of a Goldwater Institute investigation released this week.
During that time, students will spend 40 million hours taking DEI classes needed to earn their degrees at public universities in at least 30 states.
The financial hit exceeds the $1 billion spent by the Department of Education and the $100 million by the Department of Justice on DEI hires, grants and programs from 2021-24, figures released last month by Parents Defending Education.
“Unfortunately, this massive federal footprint is dwarfed by the in-kind contributions forcibly extracted from students and state taxpayers for DEI efforts, all under the watch of their local lawmakers in both red and blue states alike,” said the report, “Billions for DEI in Higher Ed: The Cost of Indoctrination.”
The study drew from a 2024 report by Speech First that found 165 of 250 higher-education institutions require students to take a DEI-related course to graduate.
From that roster, Goldwater identified DEI graduation mandates at 74 public universities in 30 states that serve 1.4 million full-time undergraduates.
At some universities, DEI classes are folded into general education requirements for graduation. At others, the courses are embedded into specific degree programs.
In most cases, universities have not expanded the number of courses required for graduation, meaning that their DEI requirements displace courses that students would ordinarily take.
“Absent this mandate, students could either a) complete their studies with one fewer course, or b) apply their tuition costs to a more academically relevant course of instruction in its place,” said the report by Matt Beienburg, Goldwater director of education policy.
Some DEI courses have relatively innocuous-sounding titles like the University of California Berkeley’s “American Cultures,” while others are more obvious.
At the University of California San Diego, the DEI general ed requirement can be filled by taking classes such as “Economics of Discrimination,” “Latin American Studies & US Liberation,” “Latinx Theatre and Performance Power,” “Race and Racisms,” and “Biology of Inequality.”
DEI instruction at some colleges “so blatantly crosses lines of overt political partisanship as to defy belief,” said the report, starting with the University of Virginia.
Virginia’s flagship university offers a gen-ed course called “’Hateinnany’: Fascism, Antifascism, and the Global Far Right” that names President-elect Donald Trump in the context of “fascism” and “far right politics.”
Diversity course mandates can be found in both red and blue states, often pushed by woke faculty senates with little resistance from administrators or governing boards, meaning that any changes may have to originate with the state legislatures.
The only state to have taken action so far is Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation in May 2023 banning DEI programs and course requirements from the state’s public universities.
The report recommended adopting the Freedom from Indoctrination Act, model legislation developed by the Goldwater Institute and Speech First, “to eliminate all DEI requirements.”
“Under this legislation, only students actively seeking a degree in fields focused upon racial and gender identity shall find themselves steeped in the current avalanche of politicized DEI ideology,” said the report.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.