DREAM Act Portal Forum - CUNY refunds fees to undocumented students who unknowingly overpaid

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The fear of deportation rules most aspects of an undocumented immigrant’s life, from driving to working to reporting a crime. But for many children who were brought to this country at a young age, applying for college is the first time they’re confronted with the reality of their legal status — or lack thereof. And even though around 20 states offer in-state tuition to certain undocumented students, many of those who qualify for such benefits still wind up paying more than they should.

Now, thanks to the persistence of one campus group, at least 150 undocumented students will get back the thousands of tuition dollars they unwittingly overpaid.

The City University of New York announced this week that it will refund fees to immigrant students who paid out-of-state tuition despite qualifying for the in-state rate. The decision came after the CUNY DREAMers group (kids affected by the DREAM Act) alerted school officials to the fact that many of the school’s immigrant students were paying about $4,000 a semester more than they needed to.

“I was going to quit school. It was too expensive,” Freddy Vicuna, a computer engineering student at CUNY and undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant, told the Associated Press. Vicuna said the school has already reimbursed him about $7,500.

According to the nonprofit Immigration Policy Center, as of 2007 (the most recent data available) approximately 65,000 undocumented immigrant kids graduate from high school in the U.S. each year, but only an estimated 5 to 10 percent go to college. Comparatively, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that of the 3 million or so youths who graduated from high school in 2013, about 65.9 percent, or 2 million of them, went to college.

One of the factors contributing to the huge disparity between undocumented students and everyone else is the high cost of higher education paired with a lack of information about what kind of financial aid is actually available to undocumented students.

Laura Bohorquez is trying to change that.

As the Educational Empowerment Program coordinator with United We Dream, a national immigrant youth-led advocacy group, Bohorquez works to close the communication gap between students, administrators, and students. She also knows firsthand how valuable that communication is — and how discouraging its absence can be.

Bohorquez, now 27, immigrated from Mexico to the small town of Brewster, Wash., when she was 4 years old. In 2003, Washington rewrote its definition of "resident" to include anyone who’d lived in the state for three years prior to receiving their high school diploma or GED there, regardless of immigration status. But by the time Bohorquez started the college application process a few years later, the fact that undocumented students were now eligible for in-state tuition was still not well known. In fact, she said, admissions officers told her she was not eligible for any financial aid.

“It’s true, I wasn’t eligible for federal aid, but [in-state tuition] was not something I ever found out about until I enrolled in the school and took it upon myself to look into it,” Bohorquez told Yahoo News.

Fortunately for her, Bohorquez said she had a supportive high school counselor who was aware of her immigration status and helped her find local scholarships for families, like hers, that worked in agriculture. Out of the 80 she applied for, Bohorquez says she received about 15, adding up to around $35,000 — “a buffer” that allowed her to take a risk and enroll at Western Washington University, where she eventually found out about in-state tuition.

Not all undocumented students are that lucky.

“A lot of students are let down and turned away,” she said, explaining that a perception that they can’t afford tuition often encourages students to go to a community college from which its hard to transfer or, worse, deters them from applying for continuing education at all.

“What I’ve learned through my work and my own experience is that you have to do a lot of self-advocacy because there is a lack of educators supporting these students,” Bohorquez said. “My goal is for students to own their role, but for educators to own their role as well.”

Thanks to a 1982 Supreme Court decision, all kids in the U.S. are eligible for free public education from kindergarten through 12th grade. That ruling was specifically intended to prevent the creation of an uneducated second class. But in 1996 Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, an expansive crackdown that, among its provisions, imposed tighter restrictions on in-state tuition, prohibiting state colleges and universities from offering in-state tuition to undocumented students without offering the same discounted rates to all U.S. citizens.

College was essentially eliminated as an option for a population of high school graduates who otherwise would have continued their education. States soon started taking the matter into their own hands.

“Over the last couple of years we’ve seen more states passing bills around allowing undocumented students access to in-state tuition, and even more so seeing states offering financial aid to undocumented students,” said Suzanne Hultin, a policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures’ (NCSL) Education Project in Denver. The NCSL tracks in-state tuition programs for undocumented students.

“I think a lot of it comes down to economic development and jobs and realizing that in order for people to qualify for the majority of jobs they’re going to need some sort of post-high school credential,” Hultin told Yahoo News. “It’s just part of a bigger push to get more students through college or university because the economic payoff for states is huge.”

Organizations like TheDream.US, a national scholarship fund for DREAMers, partner with schools around the country to offer additional scholarships to those undocumented students who qualify for in-state tuition. In September 2014, CUNY announced it was joining TheDream.US’s list of partner schools.

Whereas legislation like the DREAM Act, which attempts to further eliminate the barriers to college and, ultimately, citizenship for kids who’ve lived in the U.S. illegally since childhood, have faced highly politicized challenges, in-state tuition for undocumented students seems to have bipartisan appeal. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican known for his hard line on border security, signed one of the country’s first laws granting in-state tuition to qualifying undocumented students, and has continued to stand by it.

“It’s really defensible. Who doesn’t want to take care of kids?” said Ann Morse, director of the NCSL’s Immigrant Policy Project in Washington, D.C. “But that doesn’t solve the federal problem.”

The "federal problem" is that like Laura Bohorquez, who not only graduated from college but also completed her master's, the undocumented students that CUNY is now refunding may graduate with less student debt, but they’ll still be undocumented.

http://news.yahoo.com/cuny-refunds-u...234245248.html