From: A White College Student's Father [Email him]

My son will be entering college in the fall.  He is interested in serving in the military for a while.  He is a skilled sailor and was thinking about the Coast Guard.

He was surprised to discover that they do not have an ROTC Program.  They have something called the COLLEGE STUDENT PRE-COMMISSIONING INITIATIVE.

It seemed like a good program and something that he might be interested in, until we discovered that only students from a very restricted number of colleges, specifically Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs)  are eligible to participate.

Be a sophomore or junior undergraduate student enrolled, accepted for enrollment or pending acceptance (if accepted, acceptance letter must be submitted prior to beginning CSPI) in a full-time Bachelors degree program at an accredited college or university designated as a Minority Serving Institute (MSI). The following links are for current federally designated MSIs:

• Historically Black Colleges and Universities
• Predominantly Black Institutions
• Hispanic Serving Institutions
• Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions
• American Indian Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities
• Alaska Native Serving Institutions
• Native American Serving, Non-Tribal Institutions

• Schools not designated as an MSI may be considered on a case-by-case basis provided that they had a minority student population averaging at least 50% of the total student enrollment for the previous three years. If your school is not listed and you are unsure if your school meets the eligibility criteria, please contact your local recruiter.

There are about 5,300 colleges and universities in USA. Counting all the various Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), I  don't believe that the total number of colleges from which students can participate in this CG program can be more than about 25% of all USA colleges, and almost all of these will be in the southern third of the USA.

This seems like a very discriminatory program to me.

James Fulford writes: It's meant to discriminate against whites. The Coast Guard has never had any trouble finding, fit, motivated, patriotic young men to guard the nation's coasts and engage in Search And Rescue—as long as they were willing to accept that most of them would be white men from coastal areas.

However, if they want to recruit from urban blacks (including black ladies like Lt. Jones, below) and Hispanic immigrants, they're going to have try a little harder, and that means bribing them with scholarships: