California Creates Its Own AANHPI-Serving College Designation

California now has its own answer to a federal program that Washington is trying to shut down. On September 29, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2374, a law that lets the state's public colleges and universities be formally designated as Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander-serving institutions. It arrives less than a year after the U.S. Department of Education announced it would wind down the federal grant programs that have supported AANAPISIs, the national version of the same idea.

What does AB 2374 do?

AB 2374, authored by Assemblymember Mike Fong of Alhambra, creates a state framework for campuses in the California Community Colleges, California State University and University of California systems to earn an AANHPI-serving designation. Designated campuses must develop strategic plans aimed at student success, including improving retention and graduation rates and providing academic and basic needs support, according to the governor's office.

The scale is large. The governor's office counts 248,686 Asian and 7,979 Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students in the community colleges, 71,413 Asian and 1,333 NHPI students at CSU, and 131,933 Asian and 2,454 NHPI students at the UC. That is more than 460,000 AANHPI students across the three systems.

"At a time when Minority-Serving Institutions face growing uncertainty on the federal level, California is reaffirming our commitment," said Fong, who chairs the Assembly Higher Education Committee.

One thing the announcement does not include is new money. The governor's office describes the designation and the planning requirement, not a dedicated funding stream, so what the label will be worth to individual campuses is still an open question.

Why the federal AANAPISI program matters

The federal Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions program has existed since 2007. It supports colleges with significant AANHPI enrollment and large numbers of low-income students, and it was built on a point that many people outside the community miss: the "Asian Americans do fine in college" story collapses as soon as you break the data apart.

Southeast Asian American students, many from Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian and Vietnamese refugee families, and Pacific Islander students often face college completion rates far below the Asian American average. Many are the first in their families to attend college, many work while enrolled, and many start at community colleges. AANAPISI grants paid for exactly the kind of support those students needed: mentoring, culturally specific counseling, Asian American studies courses and programs for first-generation students.

In December 2025, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the department would wind down its Minority-Serving Institution programs, including AANAPISIs, citing a Justice Department legal opinion that deemed them unconstitutional. Representative Judy Chu called the move "reckless" and warned it would "have devastating consequences" for students.

A state stepping in where Washington stepped back

AB 2374 cannot replace federal dollars on its own, but it does something the federal retreat threatened to erase. It keeps the category alive. A formal state designation gives campuses a reason to track AANHPI student outcomes, a framework for planning around them, and a basis for state or philanthropic funding later.

It is also fitting that California is the state doing this. The governor's office points out that the term "Asian American" itself came out of the Bay Area student movement of 1968, when students at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State organized for ethnic studies. More than half a century later, California's public colleges still educate a huge share of the country's AANHPI students.

The same signing season brought another win the community had been watching. Newsom also signed AB 2222, the journalist tax credit we covered when it was waiting on his desk, which could help keep in-language newsrooms staffed. Taken together, the two laws show a state treating AANHPI education and AANHPI information as infrastructure worth protecting.

What to watch next

Three questions will decide whether AB 2374 matters in practice. First, how many campuses apply for the designation, and how quickly. Second, whether the legislature attaches funding in a future budget, since a strategic plan with no resources behind it is a document, not a program. Third, whether campuses use the designation to disaggregate their data, which is the only way to see which AANHPI students are thriving and which are falling through.

For students at a community college in the San Gabriel Valley or a CSU campus in the Central Valley, the answer will show up in something simple: whether the counselor, the tutoring program and the first-generation student center are still there next year.