The number of newly enrolled undocumented, low-income students declined by half across University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) campuses between academic years 2016-17 and 2022-23, according to a new study. Published by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA and the UC Davis School of Law, the study says the enrollment decline resulted from legal challenges to the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program—actions that ramped up in 2017 and have since weakened the program.
Using data from the California Student Aid Commission, which provides state financial aid for undocumented and low-income students, researchers found that enrollment of undocumented students who received state aid to attend UC fell by 51% between these years, dropping from 1,181 undocumented students who received aid to 579 students, Inside Higher Ed reports. The rate of decline was similar at CSU, with undocumented student enrollment falling by 48%, from 2,219 students to 1,148 students. No other low- and lower-middle-income student group with similar high school grades experienced such declines.
The consistency of the findings across both UC and CSU “underscores how common it is for young Gen Z undocumented college students to struggle when DACA is beyond reach and when they are excluded from campus jobs and surrounding labor markets,” says William C. Kidder, study co-author and research associate at the UCLA Civil Rights Project.
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Undocumented students with less access to jobs, protections
The Obama administration first enacted DACA in 2012 after Congress failed to pass the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. DACA is meant to provide young undocumented immigrants who grew up in the U.S., known as Dreamers, with temporary relief from deportation (deferred action) and work authorization that allows them to apply to most job and internship opportunities, except those that require U.S. citizenship. In lieu of federal legislation that would provide individuals permanent legal status, DACA offers temporary legal status and must be renewed every two years. Since its implementation, over 800,000 DACA recipients have been able to attend school and work.
In 2017, the Trump administration aimed to end the program, but in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court halted those plans in 2020, arguing that the administration had not followed the proper procedures in their efforts to end DACA. However, litigation from Republican attorneys general have resulted in an indefinite freeze on granting of initial DACA requests. With DACA requests frozen, there are now more undocumented students without DACA protections than those with them, according to The Los Angeles Times. The vast majority of the estimated 100,000 undocumented students graduating high school each year do not qualify for DACA, which can leave them vulnerable to deportation and without permits to access well-paying jobs and find on-campus jobs. Undocumented students are also ineligible for federal financial aid, have limited access to state financial aid, and often pay out-of-state tuition for college.
Some states have implemented laws to support undocumented individuals. Making the study’s findings all the more alarming, California actually provides “the strongest, longest and arguably most robust set of state laws and university-level aid policies to support undocumented college students including in the realm of financial aid,” the study says.
California is one of 19 states, plus Washington, DC, to offer undocumented students access to state aid and in-state tuition, and the California Student Aid Commission has also made changes to its application to make it easier for undocumented students to apply for aid. However, Governor Gavin Newsom recently vetoed for the second time legislation that would have allowed the state’s public colleges to hire undocumented students for campus jobs, the Times reports. Critics of the legislation feared it would have put billions in federal funding at risk across the state’s public colleges.
The role of states, colleges and universities
Within the next two years, the Supreme Court could decide DACA’s legality. If the court rules that DACA is illegal, more than 500,000 current DACA recipients could be stripped of their ability to work legally and be at-risk of deportation. States and higher education institutions would then have to experiment with new ways to support undocumented students until there is federal legislative reform, the study says.
“One of the things that the public universities are good at doing is ensuring access to all people who are qualified to attend our wonderful universities,” Kevin R. Johnson, co-author of the report and a professor and former dean of the UC Davis School of Law, tells Inside Higher Ed. “We’re currently in a situation where highly qualified students who live here and have lived here for a long time, many of them aren’t having the ability to attend our universities. And it has all kinds of consequences on their lives and also on the diversity of our campuses.”