According to a complex funding formula to be laid out in the bill, colleges and universities in the Prairie State would receive $6,000 for every black or American Indian student enrolled. Hispanics don’t fetch that much — only $4,000 per student. White and Asian students don’t get any money at all.

The bill, S.B. 3965, was introduced on July 30 by state Senate Majority Leader Kimberly A. Lightford, a Democrat from Maywood, a town in the Chicago metropolitan area. The House version is being written by state Rep. Carol Ammons, also a Democrat from the Champaign-Urbana area. S.B. 3965 appears nowhere online because it hasn’t had its first reading. But Ammons’s chief of staff told me that both the state Senate and state House bills will include the recommendations of a report that the Commission on Equitable Public University Funding published in March.

The commission was created by a 2021 bill, also introduced by Lightford, and worked for two years on the report. Public Act 102-0570 tasked the commission with establishing an “equity-based funding model for the allocation of state funds to public universities.”

A working group within the commission came up with the race-based funding formula, which works in the following manner: Each college and university in Illinois would have an “Adequacy Target,” which takes into account its various functions and missions to devise how much the institution should receive from the state.

Then, a “Resource Profile” would estimate the resources the institution already gets, such as other moneys from the state, “as well as student tuition and fees and ‘other’ institutional resources, such as private gifts, grants, and contracts.”

The difference between the two would be the “Adequacy Gap,” which is to be “calculated by subtracting the Resource Profile from the Adequacy Target.” The Adequacy Gap then becomes “the primary driver of future state allocations.” Translation: The long-suffering taxpayers of Illinois will be on the hook to fill it.

The racial shenanigans come in the Adequacy Target. Among the many things Public Act 102-0570 required of the commission were “remediating inequities in funding that have led to disparities” and “providing incentives to all 4-year institutions of higher education in this State to enroll underrepresented and historically underserved student groups, including students who are Black, Latinx, or from low-income families.”

An “equitable funding formula” assumes there are “differences in students’ ability to pay, and factors in the different levels of support needed for students from varying backgrounds to be successful,” the report said — hence the different subsidies for different races added in the Adequacy Target.

Intersectionality also yields dividends. “Students with multiple characteristics are placed one tier above the tier associated with their highest characteristic,” the report noted.

As with all diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, this one stems from the existence of real racial disparities. Page 9 of the commission’s report pointed out that only 23% of black Illinoisans have bachelor’s degrees or higher, compared to 40% of white Illinoisans and a whopping 67% of Asian Illinoisans. The number for Hispanics is an even smaller 17%, and their subsidy is inexplicably lower than that of black Illinoisans.

The problem is that, as is always the case, Illinois legislators and the commission’s members find in these disparities prima facie evidence of one cause: systemic racism. “Historical and continued systemic has created significant disparities in college access, affordability, and completion for black, Latinx, and other underrepresented and historically underserved students in the state,” Public Act 102-0570 says.

This is just an evidence-free assertion based on the conjectures of critical race theory. The evidence actually suggests that disparities in all areas of life are caused by background variables such as family formation, access to good schools, etc.

Throughout the report, the writers doggedly insist their formulas and recommendations were arrived at in “evidence-based, data-driven way.” But their entire scheme is based on a faulty premise.

There is something else. Something consequential happened between Public Act 102-0570 and the establishment of the commission in 2021 and the issuance of the report and the filing of S.B. 3965 this year. To wit, the Supreme Court of the United States judged in 2023 in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case that racial preferences were unconstitutional.

Never mind that that the bill also comes decades after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which plainly states, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

It’s impossible to see how all these things will square up in the courts.

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Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.