Report: Mandated DEI undergrad courses cost students and taxpayers over $1.8 billion

The costs of forcing undergraduate students nationwide to take courses imbued with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology is revealed to be over $1.8 billion.

Besides the tuition and taxpayer costs, mandated DEI costs about 40 million student hours per four-year period, says a report released Wednesday by the Goldwater Institute.

Titled “Billions for DEI in Higher Ed: The Cost of Indoctrination,” the report revealed that lawmakers in both Republican- and Democrat-led states allow publicly funded state universities to require undergraduate students to complete DEI courses to attain degrees, a reality that is “fueling greater financial subsidies for DEI than even the Biden administration provides.”

Led by Matt Beienburg, director of education policy and director of the Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy at Goldwater, the investigation uncovered numerous factors contributing to the billions of dollars in costs to both students and taxpayers and the millions of hours of student time spent in forced study of a divisive ideology in order to earn a college degree. 

Goldwater’s methodology included identifying DEI course mandates by first utilizing the work of free speech advocacy organization Speech First. After a review of about 250 colleges and universities throughout the country, Speech First discovered that 165, or two-thirds, “require students to take a DEI-related class to graduate.”  

Using the organization’s data as a springboard, Goldwater ultimately “identified a roster of 74 public university campuses across 30 states—together serving over 1.4 million full-time undergraduate students—that have a DEI course requirement for all undergraduates.” 

To analyze the financial costs of the DEI mandates, Goldwater drew upon data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which collects enrollment and financial information from most U.S. schools of higher learning. 

Goldwater highlighted several key findings of its investigation: 

(1) “DEI course titles often appear uncontroversial, even when infused with ideologically charged identity politics.” 

“Even uncontroversial-sounding DEI labels in red states, such as Iowa State University’s recently renamed ‘U.S. Cultures and Communities’ requirement, directs students to explore ‘intersectional understandings of diversity’ and ‘analyze systemic oppression and personal prejudice and their impact on marginalized communities and the broader U.S. society,’” the report observed. 

Goldwater warned as well that even “seemingly benign and completely apolitical topics have been infused with race- and gender-based identity politics.”  

The report noted, for example, that while the University of California (UC) San Diego lists “ideologically charged” course titles such as “PowerWealth&Inequality/HumDev,” “Race and Racisms,” and “Biology of Inequality,” the school’s DEI requirement is also satisfied with courses with titles such as “Child Family Community,” “Language, Culture, & Education,” and “Digital Media Literacy.”  

Nevertheless, the “DEI Course Proposal Submission Form,” used for faculty seeking approval for their proposed courses to meet UC San Diego’s DEI requirement, states: 

“… at least 30% of a course’s content should be devoted to the analysis of inequity with respect to one or more of the following groups: African American/Black Diaspora; Asian American and Pacific Islanders; LatinX/Chicanx; and Native Americans/Indigenous.”  

“Does the course examine the intersection of inequity based on dimensions of identity such as class, gender, LGBTQ identities, disability, citizenship, colonialism, and/or religion?” the form also asks faculty. 

(2) “Rather than—or in addition to—simply implementing a university-wide “general education” DEI component, public universities often seek to embed similar requirements into the specific degree programs, department, and/or colleges within the university.  

Goldwater provided the example of the University of Maryland, where a “Diversity Education Task Force – co-chaired by faculty and the school’s dean of undergraduate studies – unveiled a proposed roadmap in 2020 to not only rename the university-wide DEI course requirement from ‘Understanding Plural Societies’ to ‘Understanding Structures of Racism and Inequality’ … but also to require every major to embed DEI content into its core coursework.” 

(3) “In some cases, DEI instruction so blatantly crosses lines of overt political partisanship as to defy belief.”  

Here, Goldwater cited the example of the University of Virginia’s course EGMT 1530 titled “‘Hateinnany’: Fascism, Antifascism, and the Global Far Right,” for which a catalogue description blatantly names President Donald Trump in setting up a scene of “far right politics” and “fascism.” 

A syllabus also indicates the course expects students to engage in activism to oppose what is referred to as the “far right.” 

As a result of its investigation, Goldwater proposed the following recommendations: 

“State lawmakers must 1) build upon the work of Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation successfully eliminating DEI classes from the general education catalog at state universities, and 2) adopt the Goldwater Institute’s Freedom From Indoctrination Act to prevent similar mandates from being applied to students or faculty at the college, department, or program level as is increasingly common. 

“Given the extraordinary subsidy currently being extracted from students and/or state taxpayers to sustain forced DEI course mandates across the country, it is essential that state lawmakers and/or boards of regents adopt a concrete policy response.”