Universities Weblog

Illegal immigration has become a big issue in the American Presidential campaign. And the nice people at Scholarships Dot Com have a pretty good analysis of that issue online at the moment.

I don't usually refer to my personal blog here, but I talked about this issue some there recently. In 2005, college finances became a campaign issue for the GOP candidate in the Virginia governor's race. He wanted to argue that undocumented immigrants shouldn't be allowed to pay in-state tuition. It might have been a good point to make if there hadn't have been so many weightier issues to deal with. The candidate, Jerry Kilgore, tried to make it a fiscal issue. But the actual monetary value of the issue was pretty small when compared to other campaign issues (like road construction in the state's DC corridor) and it was seen as more of a red herring than a real issue. Kilgore lost.

You have to be here legally to get the Pell grant. And for most scholarships, you have to fill out the fafsa (the federal document that is used to decided if you're eligible for the Pell grant) and get what you can from state and federal aid before private scholarship awards start to look at helping you out.

Scholarships Dot Com examines one of the points debated by the GOP candidates recently. Most of the undocumented immigrants applying for college didn't actually break US law themselves; their parents did. And often the college applicant was too young at the time to even remember it.

It will be interesting to see how the issue of immigration develops as a Presidential campaign issue and whether the college attendance rates for undocumented immigrants (and the question of how they finance college) becomes an issue.

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