September 13, 2006

Hunt renews call to give immigrants tuition help

Higher-education conference discusses access

By LAURA GIOVANELLI

Winston Salem Journal

CHAPEL HILL-- Former Gov. Jim Hunt urged higher-education leaders from around the country yesterday to fight for illegal immigrants' access to higher education.

Hunt threw his support behind a state bill proposed last year that would have given illegal immigrants in-state tuition if they attended a North Carolina school for at least four years, graduated from one of the state's high schools and signed an affidavit promising that they intended to pursue citizenship. The bill died after a firestorm of counterattacks and after several legislators withdrew their support.

"It's the right thing to do. They're children of God, and they ought to be treated right," Hunt said. "Just because it's tough, you don't give up."

Hunt was one of many speakers at a national higher-education conference on college access and affordability held this week at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

About 150 admissions, financial-aid and other higher-education officials from private and public colleges talked about how to educate an increasingly diverse generation of American college-age students, at a time when other countries are outpacing the United States in the number of young adults who have a college degree.

UNC-CH Chancellor James Moeser has said that the conference's goal is to change or at least create discussion about policies at institutions, and at a state level, laws.

His university's Carolina Covenant program, which promises a group of students who come from low-income families that they will graduate debt-free, has been noted as a national model for colleges to enroll more of the poorest students. There are more than 940 UNC-CH students in the program. Their college bills are covered by federal Pell grants, work-study programs, and state and university scholarships.

But yesterday, Moeser said that it was unlikely that any changes to state law to allow illegal immigrants in-state status would come this year.

"This is not a popular issue in this state. I'm not sure when that right time should be," he said. "The real loser here is the state's economy long term."

Even if the law was changed, most illegal immigrants wouldn't be eligible for federal financial aid. Average in-state tuition for undergraduates at North Carolina's public universities is $2,275 this school year, but the actual cost for books, fees and living expenses is thousands more. Out-of-state tuition averages $12,579 a year. Many of the state's community colleges allow illegal immigrants to enroll at an out-of-state rate.

There are now 10 states that offer in-state tuition to illegal immigrants under certain guidelines, according to the National Immigration Law Center, but there is a fight on the federal level over illegal immigrants' opportunities after high school. They can attend public elementary and high schools.

Marta Tienda, a demographer from Princeton University, said that by 2010, more Hispanics will have been born in the United States than those that immigrated. They will be American citizens eligible for aid and in-state tuition.

But limiting their parents' college opportunities will severely limit them, said Andrea Bazan-Manson, the president of the Triangle Community Foundation and the former executive director of El Pueblo.

Conference attendees have wrestled with such topics as the burden of college costs on the middle class, college graduation as a sign of American competitiveness, academic preparation, affirmative action and the multi-cultural wave of college-aged people who may or may not go on to college.

Julius Chambers, a former chancellor of N.C. Central University and the director of the Center for Civil Rights at UNC-CH's law school, urged conference attendees to use graduation from a racially integrated school as a factor in admissions "rather than a perceived minus." He argued that such an admissions policy would be an incentive for parents to send their children to more diverse high schools.

Different races need to learn about each other, Chambers said, "and we don't do it in the system that we are operating."

Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com