When it comes to reaching the nation’s college completion goals, Minority Serving Institutions, or MSIs, should be seen as “experts in the education of low-income, first generation, and under-represented students.”

That’s one of the key points of a new policy brief issued this week by the Institute for Higher Education Policy, or IHEP, a D.C.-based organization that seeks higher education reform through research and policy.

“In this time of economic stress and rapid demographic shifts, we will need to turn to MSIs, which are experienced in doing more with less and are recognized leaders in educating and graduating students of color,” the brief states of MSIs, which enroll more than 2.3 million students or nearly 14 percent of all students, including African-American, American Indian, Hispanic and Asian American Pacific Islander students. “MSIs are one of our greatest resources as we press forward to accomplish our national completion goals.”

While the brief is meant to cast MSIs in a more favorable light than they are sometimes portrayed or seen, it also highlights the Lumina Foundation’s MSI Models of Success project.

The project, which began in fall of 2009 and is set to conclude this fall, seeks to “dramatically increase college completion” among first-generation, low-income students and students of color. It involves 25 MSIs and, among other things, seeks to improve the ability of MSIs to use data to inform decisions that will boost completion rates.

An evaluation of the project — being done by Princeton, N.J.-based Mathematica Policy Research — is ongoing and won’t be available until after the completion of the project.

Not everyone is convinced that MSIs, or American institutions of higher education in general, for that matter, need to increase graduation rates as called for in the Lumina project. Restoring the United States to its former place as the most college-educated nation in the world by 2020 is also a goal of the Obama administration.