American Indian College Fund

The American Indian College Fund is a nonprofit organization that helps Native American students, providing them with support through scholarships and funding toward higher education. The Fund provides an average of 6,000 annual scholarships for American Indian students and also provides support for other needs at the tribal colleges ranging from capital support to cultural preservation activities. Charity Navigator gave the College Fund a four-star rating.

The American Indian College Fund (the College Fund) was established in 1989 as a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization to provide American Indians with student scholarships. The College Fund also helps support tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) located on or near Indian reservations through capital grants and programs such as cultural and language preservation, early childhood education programs on-campus for children of students and community members; fellowships for faculty development; and college readiness, internship, career readiness, and leadership development programs.

Today American Indians account for only 1% of all college students, and 13.6% of American Indians over age 25 years old have a bachelor’s degree compared to 29.3% of the overall population. Poverty is part of the reason so few American Indians and Alaska Natives go to college, with current data showing that 28.3% of the American Indian and Alaska Natives living below the poverty level compared to 15.5% of the overall population.

During the Civil Rights Acts and Native American self-determination movements in 1960s and 1970s, tribal leaders decided there was a need for change in failed federal education policy to improve education for American Indian students to serve their communities, leading to the creation of tribal colleges and universities (TCUs).

In 1968, the Navajo Nation created the first-of-its-kind educational institution—a college controlled by the tribe, located on the Navajo reservation, to provide a quality higher education to the surrounding community, known as a tribal college and university. TCU presidents established the College Fund in 1989 in New York City to raise private-sector funds for scholarships for American Indian students and to raise money for financial support for the tribal colleges, while broadening awareness of those institutions and the College Fund itself.

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