Caminos De La Ciudad (City Pathways) has announced that the program will be terminated in September 2026 due to the loss of funding for Hispanic Serving Institutions, unless new funding can be secured.
Although DHSI, a grant under the HSI designation, was awarded for a five-year cycle and Caminos planned to continue their program until 2027, it was terminated by the U.S. Department of Education.
Caminos De La Ciudad is a program grounded in serving Latino and Chicano students by providing on-campus resources such as academic counseling, workshops, personal support meetings, and academic success events.
City College was awarded a five-year cycle DHSI (Developing Hispanic Serving Institutions) grant in 2022. With this grant, Caminos aimed to support students who identified as Latino or Hispanic while documenting success rates, persistence, retention, graduation, and transfer rates.
While the program is culturally Latino-centered, all students are encouraged to utilize the resources Caminos offers. There are no exclusions based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality; all students will receive equal treatment.
Miguel Zaragoza, the director of Caminos, stated, “A lot was accomplished in our short period, and I wanted to see that continue to be successful and grow over time. Learning the unfortunate larger impact that the federal government is having on not just our program but programs across the nation has been challenging.” said Miguel
HSI (Hispanic Serving Institution) is a federal designation given to qualifying college campuses with a 25% full-time equivalent undergraduate Hispanic student enrollment. After approval, an institution would then be allowed to apply for grants that have their own unique objectives. But two of the grants have since been defunded by the Trump administration.
City College was introduced as a Hispanic Serving Institution in 2015 and received a $2.5 million grant to develop a program called SAGE that supports first-year Latinx students (officially retired in 2020).
Since then, City College has established programs such as SESI (STEM, Equity and Success Initiative), HSI early college program, Caminos De La Ciudad, and an LRCCD districtwide HSI committee.
As of Sept. 10, 2025, the U.S. Department of Education ruled the discontinuation of discretionary grants. It was determined by the Department of Ed that these grants discriminated by offering government benefits to institutions that met racial and ethnic quotas and were therefore unconstitutional.
Grants such as DHSI and PPOHA were considered discretionary grants and were officially terminated.
U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said, “The Department looks forward to working with Congress to reenvision these programs to support institutions that serve underprepared or under-resourced students without relying on race quotas and will continue fighting to ensure that students are judged as individuals, not prejudged by their membership of a racial group.”
Caminos De La Ciudad is one of the many programs throughout the U.S. that has felt the effects of this decision.
Since 2022, Caminos has worked with students privately and has hosted events to build community outreach.
“We have had at least 1,300 student interactions with over 65 events that we’ve planned throughout these two years, ” said Samantha Ramirez, the student support specialist at Caminos. “I feel like if we had more time, we would be able to collect more of that data and transfer rates since it takes two or three years for students to transfer”.
This change will not just affect the available resources on campus for City College students. Still, many members of the Caminos program will lose their jobs should the termination be finalized. Although the program’s termination is still set for September 2026, there are ongoing efforts to secure funding.
Sacramento City College President Albert Garcia said, “We decided even before we got this bad news from the feds that we value these programs so much, we want to figure out a way to institutionalize them so that the programs don’t have to go away. Caminos won’t go away; the federal funding that we were getting from the HSI grant for Caminos will go away.”
Caminos has released a form for students to provide their testimonies and advocate for the program to continue (link embedded).
Miguel recommended that students vote and partake in federal elections as a way to advocate for these programs.
“Call your local congressional representative, you can get that information online, and those pieces help to let them know, like what are the concerns that you have as a constituent of their community, and letting them know that these programs exist and are being cut and how this has impacted you or others,” he said.
Samantha Ramirez shared her experience working with Caminos and has stated, “I feel like, for the college overall, we do a really good job of meeting our students at their intersections. There are multiple layers to our students, and I think we’ve done a really good job of trying to build spaces where they feel comfortable or at home, and we want to keep building that up”.
