TLG Managing Partner Jeff Tenenbaum Quoted in Inside Higher Ed Article, “Will Race-Based Scholarships Survive?”

TLG Managing Partner Jeff Tenenbaum was quoted in a new article in Inside Higher Ed titled, “Will Race-Based Scholarships Survive?”

“Trump’s second term has “certainly amplified and sped a lot of this up,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, managing partner at Tenenbaum Law Group PLLC, “but this was going on well before that.””

As universities and scholarship providers navigate this rocky terrain, legal experts say they’ve been highly sought after for advice—and their guidance on race-based scholarships ranges.

Tenenbaum’s law firm has conducted at least three dozen “DEI audits” for nonprofits, often involving scholarships with race-based criteria.

And “we’ve advised them those are likely illegal,” he said. “If you don’t want to risk being sued or being subject of a federal investigation … you need to either abandon your program or change your eligibility criteria to something else, something that’s not race and that’s not a proxy for race.”

But there are “unanswered questions” about what a proxy for race is, he added. For example, if students discuss race in response to broader scholarship application essay questions, that’s arguably safe for a scholarship provider to consider, according to Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in SFFA.

Tenenbaum said his firm has come up with a “laundry list” of alternatives to race-based criteria for clients “that should pass muster under the law,” including income-based criteria.