Decision won’t cost N.C., officials say, but critics say colleges shouldn’t ignore broken laws
North Carolina’s community college system has ordered the state’s 58 campuses to admit illegal immigrants, overturning a policy of letting the heavily enrolled schools set their own rules for handling undocumented applicants. David Sullivan, the system’s top lawyer, dispatched a memo this month telling the community colleges that state regulations require the schools to admit illegal immigrants who meet the schools’ basic requirements of being either a high school graduate or an adult in need of skills training.
“That’s just wrong,” said state Sen. Richard Stevens, a Raleigh Republican and co-chair of the higher education committee. “The law ought to be changed.” Rep. Winkie Wilkins, a Person County Democrat who chairs the House committee on community colleges, said he was “blindsided” by the news.
The state’s community colleges focus on training and retraining the work force, usually through skills and trade education. Melinda Wiggins is executive director of Student Action With Farm Workers, which helps children of migrant farm workers get into high school and college. She said barring illegal immigrants from community colleges penalizes youths who were brought to the United States as children. “North Carolina is their home. It’s where they’ve been raised and lived,” Wiggins said. “By denying them an education, we’re really creating an underclass of folks here in the state who cannot contribute to society.”
N.C. public schools must accept children of illegal immigrants under federal regulations. The University of North Carolina system admits undocumented applicants, but a bill to provide in-state tuition to some was quickly shot down in 2005.
Decision won’t cost N.C.
Community college executives said the admissions guidelines won’t cost the state. Illegal immigrants must pay out-of-state tuition, $7,465 for a full class load, which is more than the actual cost of providing the education, $5,375, the officials said.They also emphasized that under the old policy, with most schools admitting undocumented applicants, 340 of the 270,000 students last year — or about one-tenth of 1 percent — were illegal immigrants. If that figure quadrupled, the system could handle it, Sullivan said. “Colleges should immediately begin admitting undocumented individuals,” Sullivan wrote in the Nov. 7 memo.
It’s unclear how many schools prohibited illegal immigrants from enrolling. A study this year by a Duke University graduate-level class listed 22 campuses as having a written or unwritten policy to bar undocumented applicants. The Observer contacted the three schools nearest to Charlotte, McDowell Technical, Cleveland and Stanly community colleges. All said they had no such policy and had been admitting illegal immigrants. Central Piedmont Community College has been admitting illegal immigrants. Wake Technical Community College, in Raleigh, was among the schools that had to change its policy after the recent memo. “We had just always required appropriate documentation,” including legal residency, said Laurie Clowers, the school’s public relations director.
After review, a policy change
The new policy memo came after an unverified complaint that an illegal immigrant was dismissed from one of the colleges and after the Duke class’s study. The study was prompted by an unrelated research request from the community colleges. The community colleges are required to keep an open-door admissions policy, but were allowed in 2004 to set their own regulations on illegal immigrants.
Sullivan said administrators reviewed that practice this year. They discovered a 1997 advisory letter from the office of then-Attorney General and now Gov. Mike Easley that, while not addressing illegal immigrants specifically, said that the community colleges cannot impose nonacademic criteria for admission. “We thought through the policy again,” Sullivan said, and concluded they were wrong to let schools reject undocumented applicants. Easley’s current staff deflected any comment on whether the community colleges were correctly interpreting the 10-year-old letter. “You’re going to have to ask the current attorney general that,” said Sherri Johnson, Easley’s communications director.
Questions of legality
Robert Luebke, an education policy analyst with the conservative Civitas Institute in Raleigh, said the new community college directive orders the schools to ignore the fact that the prospective students are breaking the law.”These students cannot legally work in North Carolina,” Luebke said in a prepared statement. “Subsidizing the education of students who can only work using a forged or stolen Social Security card is absurd.”
N.C. Sen. Fred Smith and Salisbury lawyer Bill Graham, both Republican candidates for governor, both said they oppose admitting illegal immigrants. “People can’t pick and choose which laws they’re going to follow,” Smith said, “and which laws they’re not going to follow.”
Mike Taylor, president of Stanly Community College, said the out-of-state tuition expense effectively serves as an exclusion for illegal immigrants, since many cannot afford the extra cost. That means members of that community can’t get job training. “We’re put between a rock and a hard place on this,” Taylor said. “These same people we can’t admit without paying out-of-state tuition can graduate as valedictorian from any high school in Stanly County.”
