This is a quick one. Back in May 2015, I wrote a story about the fight to secure access to tuition aid for undocumented immigrants in New Jersey. The-Gov. Chris Christie opposed it, deleting it from a bill that granted so-called DREAMERs — undocumented students who came to the states as children and attended New Jersey school districts — the right to in-state tuition status at state schools like Rutgers and the county colleges.
The debate then, as it is now, fell along party lines, with mostly Republicans opposing the tuition plan, and most Democrats supporting it. Much of the criticism was based on the notion that immigration status made these DREAMER students different or lesser. No one put it exactly that way — aside from the most hardline anti-immigrant organizations and politicians. They couched it in terms of fairness — why give someone who is here illegally access to aid and not a veteran (a red herring, because veterans and those in the military already get numerous educational benefits and because the bill did not preclude providing aid to vets).
Without Aid, College Still ‘Dream Deferred’ for Many Undocumented Students
Recent changes in the law let unauthorized immigrants pay in-state tuition, but without needs-based financial assistance higher education can still be out of reach
Cynthia Cruz-Diaz grew up in the New Brunswick area. She attended schools in the city and neighboring Franklin before graduating from New Brunswick High School in 2009.
A good student, Cruz-Diaz assumed that she would attend college and graduate with a degree in planning and public policy. Now 23 and six years removed from high school, she remains at least a year or two from her goal. The reason: Her immigration status.
Because Cruz-Diaz entered the country illegally with her parents when she was two years old, she does not qualify for need-based tuition assistance or financial aid. So, while changes in state law that allow students like her — those who grew up and graduated from a New Jersey high school but who are in the country without authorization — to qualify for in-state tuition, paying for college remains an almost insurmountable hill to climb.
“I don’t understand what my (immigration) status has to do with me being able to afford college,” she said. “They already look at us differently. For them to say we can’t grant (undocumented students) the aid or financial assistance other New Jersey graduates get — they are marking us with an ‘X.’”
Cruz-Diaz is among the hundreds of undocumented-immigrants in the state who were helped by a 2013 compromise between Gov. Chris Christie and the Legislature’s Democratic leadership, which allowed so-called childhood arrivals who attended and graduated from New Jersey high schools to qualify for in-state tuition at state schools. Previously, immigrant students were forced to pay out-of-state tuition at the state’s 11 four-year colleges and universities and 19 two-year community colleges.
