Kentucky Attorney General Russell ColemanThe U.S. Department of Justice and the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education have reached a preliminary settlement agreement that would end the state’s policy of offering in-state tuition rates to undocumented students who graduate from Kentucky high schools.
The agreement comes after the DOJ filed a federal lawsuit in June challenging Kentucky’s practice of extending in-state residency status—and the accompanying lower tuition rates—to any student who completes high school in the state, regardless of immigration status. The Justice Department argued this policy creates unequal treatment by providing financial benefits to undocumented immigrants while denying the same rates to U.S. citizens living in other states.
“No state can be allowed to treat Americans like second-class citizens in their own country by offering financial benefits to illegal aliens,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in announcing the federal lawsuit.
The legal challenge reflects broader federal immigration enforcement priorities under the Trump administration, which has issued executive orders aimed at preventing undocumented immigrants from accessing taxpayer-funded benefits or preferential treatment in government programs.
Kentucky’s Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman has supported the federal position, arguing that state policy conflicts with federal law prohibiting undocumented immigrants from receiving college benefits unless identical benefits are available to all U.S. citizens. In July, Coleman urged the Council on Postsecondary Education to voluntarily withdraw the regulation rather than pursue costly litigation.
“The federal government has set its immigration policy, and the Council must regulate in accordance with it,” Coleman wrote to the CPE. “To that end, I urge the Council to withdraw its regulation rather than litigate what I believe will be, and should be, a losing fight.”
Under the tentative settlement terms, the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education has acknowledged that its tuition policy violates federal law and agreed to terminate it immediately. However, the agreement remains pending approval from U.S. District Court Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove in the Eastern District of Kentucky.
The Kentucky case mirrors a similar federal challenge resolved earlier this year, when Texas reached a settlement with the DOJ over comparable in-state tuition policies for undocumented students.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a prominent Latino civil rights organization, has filed a motion seeking to intervene in the Kentucky lawsuit on behalf of affected students. The motion remains under judicial review. MALDEF was previously denied intervention rights in the parallel Texas case.
The policy change could significantly impact college affordability for undocumented students who have spent their formative years in Kentucky’s educational system. In-state tuition rates are typically substantially lower than out-of-state rates, making higher education more accessible for students from families with limited financial resources.
Kentucky became the third state to end its in-state tuition policy for undocumented students when a settlement was announced Monday.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | amriphoto/E+/Getty Images | klyaksun and SAHACHAT/iStock/Getty Images
The Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education agreed to terminate its offering of in-state tuition to undocumented students, according to a settlement filed in court Monday, WKU Public Radio reported.
The termination of reduced tuition remains tentative, as the settlement has yet to be signed by a district court judge, but if it does come to fruition, Kentucky would be the third state to capitulate to demands of the Trump administration on the issue.
President Trump’s Department of Justice has sued multiple states over their policies that provide in-state tuition to undocumented students, arguing that doing so discriminates against out-of-state Americans. Republican-led states that were sued quickly agreed to scrap the policies. But Kentucky, governed by a Democrat, took longer. (Similar lawsuits against Minnesota and Illinois are still pending.)
The state attorney general, a Republican, told the council that the lawsuit would be a “losing fight,” WKU reported.
The Trump administration and state Republicans leaders have used these lawsuits to go around state legislatures and Congress to change policies and programs.
Some higher education and legal experts have called the practice unlawful collusion and tried to intercede on behalf of the immigrant students in court, but they’ve had little luck so far.
MALDEF, the same Latino civil rights group that tried and failed to intervene in the Texas lawsuit, has filed a motion to intervene in Kentucky, but the court has yet to rule on that request.
Things have been bleak in higher education the last couple of years, and no doubt they will remain bleak for a while. But it recently became clear to me how we’ll know that we are turning the corner: it will be the moment when provincial governments start allowing significant rises in domestic tuition.
This became clear to me when I was having a discussion with a senior provincial official (in a province I shall not name) about tuition. I was arguing that with provincial budgets flat and declining international enrolment, domestic tuition needed to increase – and that there was plenty of room to do so given the affordability trends of the last couple of decades.
What affordability trends, you ask? I’m glad you asked. Affordability is a ratio where the cost of a good or service is the numerator and some measure of ability to pay is the denominator. So, let’s look at what it takes to pay average tuition and fees. Figure 1 shows average tuition as a percentage of the median income of couple families and lone-parent families aged 45-54. As you can see, for the average two-couple household, average tuition (which – recall last Wednesday’s blog – is an overestimate for most students) has never been more affordable in the twenty-first century. For lone-parent families, current levels of tuition are at a twenty-year low.
Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition and Fees as a Percentage of Median Family Income, Couple Family and Lone-Parent Families aged 45-54, Canada, 2000-2024
Ah, you say, but that’s tuition as a function of parental ability-to-pay – what about students? Well, it’s basically the same story – calculated as a percentage of the average student wage, tuition has not been this cheap since the turn of the century, and in Ontario, it has dropped by 27% since 2017. And yes, the national story is to a large degree a function of what’s been going on in Ontario, but over the past decade or so, this ratio has been declining in all provinces except Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Figure 2: Number of Hours Worked at Median Hourly Income for Canadians Aged 15-24 Required to pay Average Undergraduate Tuition and Fees, Canada and Ontario, 1997-2024
And that’s before we even touch the issue of student aid, which as you all know is way up this century even after we take student population growth into account. In real dollars, we’ve gone from a $10B/year student aid system to a $20B/year system with the vast majority of growth coming on the non-repayable side, rather than from loans.
Figure 3: Total Student Financial Assistance by Type, Selected years, 1993-94 to 2023-2024, in Millions, in $2023
In fact, student aid expenditures are so high nowadays that across both universities and colleges we spend about $3 billion more in student aid than we take in from tuition fees. That’s NEGATIVE NET TUITION, PEOPLE.
Figure 4: Aggregate Non-Repayable Aid vs Aggregate Domestic Tuition fees, 2007-08 to 2023-24, in Billions, in $2023
So, yeah, affordability trends. They are much more favorable to students than most people think.
Anyway, the provincial official seemed a bit nonplussed by my reply: my sense is that they had never been briefed on the degree to which tuition increases have been thrown into reverse these past few years, and he certainly didn’t know about the huge increase in non-repayable aid over the past few decades. They didn’t push back on any of this evidence, BUT, they insisted, tuition fees weren’t going up because doing so ishard and it’sunpopular.
To which I responded: well, sure. But was raising tuition any easier or less unpopular in 1989 when the Quebec Liberal government more than doubled tuition? Than in the mid-90s when both the NDP and Conservative governments allowed tuition to rise? Than in 2001 when the BC Liberals allowed tuition to increase by 50%? This has been done before. There’s absolutely no reason it can’t be done again. The only thing it will take is the courage to put the requirements of institutions that actually build economies and societies ahead of the cheap, short-term sugar highs of chasing things like “affordability”.
Now, to be fair, I don’t for the moment see any provincial governments prepared to do this. If there is one thing that seems to unite provincial governments these days, it is an inability to make hard decisions. But this particular political moment won’t last forever. It might take a serious, long-term recession to knock it into various heads that no matter how much money we sink into them, natural resources and construction alone won’t run this economy. Eventually, we’re going to have to re-build the great college and university system we’re in the middle of trashing.
And we’ll know that moment has come when provincial governments agree that domestic tuition should rise again.
A few days ago, someone mentioned how nice it would be if students could have their tuition level held steady after enrollment, so they could plan. It got me thinking.
The usual version of that proposal assumes that students enroll full-time at a given tuition level, then sail through, full-time, unimpeded, until their on-time graduation. The benefit to the students (and their families) is obvious, both in terms of absolute amounts of money and in terms of predictability. As a parent who has been paying out-of-state tuition since 2019, I get the appeal.
Of course, the rest of the economy doesn’t freeze costs for years at a time, and college employees live in that economy. So annual tuition increases would still have to happen, but they could only be inflicted upon new students. In any given year, freshmen would pay more than sophomores, who would pay more than juniors and so on. The first year that happened, the increase for freshmen would have to be pretty dramatic to ensure that future years would generate enough revenue. Or, theoretically, states could make up the difference.
That doesn’t seem likely.
For example, Pennsylvania hasn’t even passed its budget yet for this year. You know, the one that we’re several months into. Uncertainty rolls downhill; asking us to guarantee years in advance when we don’t even have this year’s figure yet isn’t realistic. In its defense, the state is dealing with a federal funding situation that could be described as mercurial. Higher ed funding at the state level competes with other priorities, such as the state versions of Medicaid.
Now, if the promise of fixed tuition led to a more rational federal budgeting process …
OK, OK. Seriously, though, using variable revenues to cover fixed costs is a dangerous game. Very elite private schools often have the option of using endowment returns to provide predictable operating funds, which, in turn, could lead to more predictable tuition charges. But those of us at the mercy of annual (and frequently late) state allocations don’t have that option.
Even allowing for all of that, though, I can’t help but wonder about the student that the model assumes. It’s essentially the IPEDS model: first-time, full-time, degree-seeking, supported by family. In the community college world, that describes a small minority of the student body.
Here, students move into and out of full-time status from semester to semester. Sometimes life happens and they step out for a bit (or longer), then decide to return years later. They usually work for pay, often full-time, while they’re taking classes. Stop-start patterns of enrollment make predictable tuition harder to define. They also necessarily lead to higher increases for those who come back, since the entire increase for any given year is visited upon new students, rather than being spread evenly across classes.
Free community college would have solved this, of course, by setting a figure of zero and leaving it there. As long as operating support increased with costs, that would be sustainable, and it’s admirably simple. But that doesn’t appear to be on the table at the federal level, and states can’t deficit spend during recessions, which is usually when demand for other services increases and tax revenues drop.
If we could set public funding in a way that covers fixed costs, leaving only the variable costs to be covered by tuition, then there could be a real possibility for a (clearly defined) tuition freeze. Or at least the levels would be low enough that annual increases wouldn’t hurt so much. Until that happens, though, it’s just untenable. As a parent, that bothers me, but the blame should be placed where it actually belongs.
I want to show you something kind of intriguing about how tuition is changing in Canada.
By now you might be familiar with a chart that looks like Figure 1, which shows average tuition, exclusive of ancillary fees (which would tack another $900-1000 on to the total), in constant $2024. The story it shows is one of persistent real increases from up until 2017-18, at which point, mainly thanks to policy changes in Ontario, tuition falls sharply and continues to fall as tuition increases across the country failed to keep up with inflation in the COVID years. Result: average tuition today, in real terms, is about where it was in 2012-13.
Figure 1: Average Undergraduate Tuition Fee, Canada, in $2024, 2006-07 to 2024-25
Simple story, right? Boring, even.
But then, just for fun, I decided to look at tuition at the level of individual fields of study. And what I found was kind of interesting. Take a look at Figure 2, which shows average tuition in what you might call the university’s three “core” areas: social science, humanities, and physical/life sciences. It’s quite a different story. The pre-2018 rise was never as pronounced as it was for tuition overall, and the drop in tuition post-2018 was more pronounced. As a result, tuition in the humanities is about even with where it was in 2006 and in the sciences is now three percent lower than it was in 2006.
Figure 2:Average Undergraduate Tuition Fee by Field of Study, Canada, in $2024, 2006-07 to 2024-25
This got me thinking: how is it possible that the overall average tuition is rising so quickly when so many big disciplines are showing so little change? So I looked at the change in each discipline from 2006-07 to 2024-25. Figures 3 and 4 show the 18-year change in tuition for direct- and second-entry programs (and yes, this is an admittedly English Canadian distinction, since the programs in Figure 4 are also at least partially direct entry in Quebec).
Figure 3: Change in Real Tuition Levels, direct-entry undergraduate programs, Canada, 2006-07 to 2024-25
Figure 4: Change in Real Tuition Levels, second-entry undergraduate programs, Canada, 2006-07 to 2024-25
Two very different pictures, right? Quite clearly, second-entry degrees – which are a tiny fraction of overall enrolments – are nevertheless dragging the overall average up quite a bit. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to work out exactly how much because – inexplicably – Statscan does not use the same field of study boundaries for enrolment and tuition. But, near as I can figure out, there are about 15,000 students in law in Canada, 5,000 in pharmacy, 3,000 in dentistry and 2,000 in veterinary science. So that’s 25,000 students (or 2% of the undergraduate total) in fields with very high tuition increases, and a little back-of-the-envelope math suggests that these increases for just 2% of the student body were responsible for about 15% of all tuition growth.
Now, there is one other thing you have to look at and that is what is going on in engineering. This field has the fastest-growing real tuition over the period (26%) but is also the fastest-growing field in terms of domestic student enrolments (up 56% over the same period, compared to 16% for universities as a whole). So, compared with a world where engineering enrolments stayed steady between 2006-07 and 2024-25, an extra 22,000 people voluntarily enrolled in a field of study which was both more expensive (compared to science, average engineering tuition is about $2500 higher) and increasingly so every year. Again, a little back-of-the-envelope math shows that this phenomenon was responsible for between 10 and 11% of the growth in overall average tuition.
So, let’s add all that up: about a quarter of all the real growth in tuition over the past 20 years (which, as we noted at the outset wasn’t all that much to begin with) was due to tuition growth in the country’s most expensive programs. These are programs which are either growing rapidly or have long waiting lists, so I think the argument that these tuition increases have deterred enrolment is a bit far-fetched. And it means that the vast majority of students are seeing tuition fees which are well below the “average”. In fact, by my calculations, the actual increase in real dollars for that portion of the student body in first-degree programs – bar engineering – is somewhere around $625 in eighteen years.
For students and their families, a university education is a massive investment of time and, often, money. To make a wise and informed decision about that investment, prospective students need full and timely financial transparency about that cost. The state of Florida has made that impossible for this year’s new out-of-state students.
As a married academic couple, we were excited for our oldest daughter to begin her college journey. Starting her sophomore year of high school, she carefully analyzed her options along many dimensions, from location and program offerings to student life and academic rigor. After she developed a short list of about 20 universities, we created a spreadsheet that categorized colleges on anything that could be quantified. As offers and acceptance letters began rolling in, yet another spreadsheet carefully tracked tuition, room and board, and scholarships.
After this careful analytic work, 13 on-campus visits and countless hours of conversation, our daughter chose the University of Florida. It was a tough decision; she had offers from other good colleges, including in- and out-of-state options that were more financially competitive. In the end, she valued UF’s high academic rigor and reputation combined with a relatively affordable cost. She made her choice about two weeks before the national May 1 decision deadline, and we began to prepare for her move to Gainesville. Of course, that planning included how we would pay for it. Based on numbers provided publicly on the university’s website, we thought we had that figured out.
Then the state of Florida changed the financial picture.
On June 18, the state of Florida’s Board of Governors permitted public universities to increase out-of-state student fees by 10 percent for the 2025–26 academic year (though called “fees,” this is in effect Florida’s term for the differential tuition costs paid by out-of-staters). And on July 23—more than two months after the national decision deadline, and less than a month before the start of the fall semester—the University of Florida’s Board of Trustees unanimously decided to do just that, hiking the per-credit cost for an out-of-state undergraduate by about $70 per credit, or about $2,000 for a full-time course load for the year. According to The Gainesville Sun, this decision was “in response to a budget shortfall of about $130 million due to a loss in state appropriations.”
Both of us lead university units with tight budgets. Therefore, we have empathy for the tough fiscal decisions that higher education professionals sometimes must make. Perhaps the hardest financial decision university leaders face is when and by how much to increase tuition—in other words, when to pass the financial burden on to the students that we serve. That decision also increases young adults’ student loan debt, a matter of national concern addressed in many higher education articles, books and podcasts.
But because of timing, what the state of Florida has done is different and much worse than a simple tuition/fee increase. If the university had announced the 2025–26 increase in fall 2024, we could have planned for that increase ahead of time. I do not think that would have changed our daughter’s decision, but it might have. Instead, by raising tuition so late in the game, Florida has created a classic example of a bait-and-switch: lure students in with the low cost, then dramatically increase it after their other options are gone.
We remain excited about our daughter’s future at the University of Florida—and, most importantly, our daughter remains excited, too, despite this financial bump in the road. However, this last-minute change in price generated additional stress and uncertainty around her transition to college. When we spoke with one of the university’s financial aid advisers in late July, he was empathetic. He pointed us to the university’s scholarship portal—but of course, those scholarship deadlines passed long ago, serving as further evidence that Florida’s tuition increase came much too late.
We have little doubt that this tuition approach has created stress for other students, too. With widespread concern for student mental health, increasing tuition costs just weeks before classes begin may add to students’ anxiety before they even set foot on campus. Student affairs professionals could see more requests for basic needs assistance, as students make tough choices between paying the higher tuition costs and other bills. University counseling centers are often already running at or above capacity and do not need such additional caseload.
Ultimately, this pricing practice fails the test of scalability. If every university increased tuition well after the decision deadline, it would be chaos. Students and their families would have no way to plan. Particularly given significant public concern about the high cost of higher education and burgeoning student loan debt, this is unacceptable.
Despite much debate within and beyond academia, the financial burden faced by young college students is a problem with no obvious solution in sight. But perhaps we can all agree on this: In order to make a wise financial decision, incoming students need complete and accurate information about the cost of college at least a few weeks ahead of the national decision deadline. Federal policy should preclude universities from making changes to their tuition and fees for the upcoming year after a certain point (say, two weeks prior to the decision deadline). Such a policy would provide transparency for students and fiscal accountability for higher education institutions.
Andrew M. Ledbetter is a professor and chair in the Department of Communication Studies atTexas Christian University.
Jessica L. Ledbetter is assistant dean of students at the University of Texas at Arlington.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued Illinois on Tuesday over its policy to allow in-state tuition rates for undocumented students. Illinois is the fifth state targeted by such a lawsuit.
The DOJ filed a complaint in the Southern District of Illinois against the state, Gov. JB Pritzker, the state attorney general and boards of trustees of state universities. The complaint argues that it’s illegal to offer lower tuition rates to undocumented students if out-of-state citizens can’t also benefit.
Illinois passed a law in 2003 that grants in-state tuition to undocumented students who meet certain criteria. To qualify, students need to reside and attend high school in the state for three years, graduate from an Illinois high school, and sign an affidavit promising to apply to become a permanent resident as soon as possible. Pritzker then signed a bill into law last year that would loosen these criteria, starting in July 2026. Students will be able to pay in-state tuition rates if they meet one of two sets of requirements, including attending an Illinois high school for at least two years or a combination of high school and community college in the state for at least three years.
“Under federal law, schools cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a news release. “This Department of Justice has already filed multiple lawsuits to prevent U.S. students from being treated like second-class citizens—Illinois now joins the list of states where we are relentlessly fighting to vindicate federal law.”
In Texas and Oklahoma, the DOJ successfully ended in-state tuition for undocumented students; attorneys general in the two red states swiftly sided with the federal government’s legal challenges. Lawsuits against Kentucky and Minnesota are still ongoing.
This latest lawsuit will likely escalate the Trump administration’s battle with the state of Illinois. President Donald Trump has said he wants to send the National Guard to Chicago, a move that Pritzker forcefully pushed back on. Since Trump took office, Pritzker has been an outspoken critic.
April McLaren, deputy press secretary for the Illinois attorney general’s office, said officials are reviewing the case and have “no further comment.” Representatives at Eastern Illinois University, Northeastern Illinois University and Southern Illinois University, whose boards were among those named in the lawsuit, similarly told Inside Higher Ed that they can’t comment on pending litigation.
A spokesperson for the governor’s office defended the state’s policy and called the lawsuit “yet another blatant attempt to strip Illinoisans of resources and opportunities.”
“While the Trump Administration strips away federal resources from all Americans, Illinois provides consistent and inclusive educational pathways for all students—including immigrants and first-generation students—to access support and contribute to our state,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “All Illinoisans deserve a fair shot to obtain an education, and our programs and policies are consistent with federal laws.”
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Dive Brief:
The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Illinois over state laws allowing certain undocumented college students to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges and receive state-administered scholarships.
Under Illinois law, an undocumented student is eligible for in-state tuition if they attended a high school in the state for at least three years, graduated from high school or earned a GED in Illinois, and sign an affidavit saying they will apply to become a permanent U.S. resident as soon as possible.
U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi on Tuesday argued that in-state tuition rates for undocumented students illegally provide benefits not offered to all U.S. citizens. A spokesperson for Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s office defended the policy on Wednesday, saying it is consistent with federal law.
Dive Insight:
As of May, Illinois was one of at least 25 states that, along with Washington, D.C., had policies making undocumented students eligible to pay in-state rates at some or all public colleges.
Over 27,600 undocumented students attended Illinois colleges in 2023, according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal.
Illinois has had its in-state tuition policy for eligible undocumented students in place since 2003. And in 2011, the state General Assembly established the Illinois DREAM Fund Commission, which raises private donations to fund scholarships for those students.
Since June, the DOJ has sued at least five states, including Illinois, over the practice.
The same day the DOJ filed a lawsuit against Texas, the state attorney general’s office partnered with the department to ask the court to strike down the policy.A federal judge declared it unconstitutional shortly afterward,though civil rights groups are seeking to intervene and challenge the ruling.
In Oklahoma, the state attorney general similarly worked with the DOJ to end its policy, a request approved by a federal judge on Friday.Florida repealed its policy through legislation this year independent of federal intervention.
“This Department of Justice has already filed multiple lawsuits to prevent U.S. students from being treated like second-class citizens — Illinois now joins the list of states where we are relentlessly fighting to vindicate federal law,” Bondi said in a Tuesday statement.
Steven Weinhoeft, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, similarly alleged that Illinois’ law unlawfully disadvantages the state’s citizens and uses tax funding to incentivize illegal immigration.
“Illinois has an apparent desire to win a ‘race to the bottom’ as the country’s leading sanctuary state,” he said in a statement. “Illinois citizens deserve better.”
Sanctuary jurisdictions, such as cities and states, are generally considered areas with policieslimiting local authorities’ cooperation with federal immigration enforcement efforts. Bondi has promised to “eradicate” such policies across the country.
Weinhoeft in February took over as the district’s attorney for Rachelle Aud Crowe, following Trump’s promise to fire all U.S. attorneys appointed by former President Joe Biden.
Unlike Texas and Oklahoma, Illinois is a solidly blue state, with Democratic control over the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the Legislature.And Pritzker has been one of the most outspoken opponents of President Donald Trump.
A spokesperson for the governor’s office called the lawsuit “yet another blatant attempt to strip Illinoisans of resources and opportunities.”
“While the Trump Administration strips away federal resources from all Americans, Illinois provides consistent and inclusive educational pathways for all students — including immigrants and first-generation students — to access support and contribute to our state,” the spokesperson said in an email Wednesday. “All Illinoisans deserve a fair shot to obtain an education, and our programs and policies are consistent with federal laws.”
The DOJ’s lawsuit names as defendants:
The state of Illinois.
Pritzker.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul.
Southern Illinois University’s board of trustees.
Rend Lake College’s board of trustees.
The University of Illinois’ board of trustees.
Chicago State University’s board of trustees.
Eastern Illinois University’s board of trustees.
Illinois State University’s board of trustees.
Northeastern Illinois University’s board of trustees.
Illinois Student Assistance Commission.
Illinois DREAM Fund Commission.
The University of Illinois system said Wednesday it is reviewing the complaint and had no comment. Chicago State said it does not comment on pending litigation. And Rend Lake declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing ongoing talks with its legal counsel.
The remaining colleges did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
The difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition can be substantial.
In-state students who enrolled full time at Illinois State in fall 2025 paid $12,066 for a year of tuition.For out-of-state students, the cost was $24,132.
At Chicago State, new in-state students paid $352 per credit hour, while incoming out-of-state students paid $697.
The 18-year-old from Houston was going to start college in the fall at the University of Texas at Tyler, where she had been awarded $10,000 a year in scholarships. That, she hoped, would set her up for her dream: a Ph.D. in chemistry, followed by a career as a professor or researcher.
“And then the change to in-state tuition happened, and that’s when I knew for sure that I had to pivot,” said Ximena, who was born in Mexico but attended schools stateside since kindergarten. (The Hechinger Report is referring to her by only her first name because she fears retaliation for her immigration status.)
In June, the Texas attorney general’s office and the Trump administration worked together to end the provisions in a state law that had offered thousands of undocumented students like her lower in-state tuition rates at Texas public colleges. State and federal officials successfully argued in court that the long-standing policy discriminated against U.S. citizens from other states who paid a higher rate. That rationale has now been replicated in similar lawsuits against Kentucky, Oklahoma and Minnesota — part of a broader offensive against immigrants’ access to public education.
At UT Tyler, in-state tuition and fees for the upcoming academic year total $9,736, compared to more than $25,000 for out-of-state students. Ximena and her family couldn’t afford the higher tuition bill, so she withdrew. Instead, she enrolled at Houston Community College, where out-of-state costs are $227 per semester hour, nearly three times the in-district rate. The school offers only basic college-level chemistry classes, so to set herself up for a doctorate or original research, Ximena will still need to find a way to pay for a four-year university down the line.
Her predicament is exactly what state lawmakers from both political parties had hoped to avoid when they passed the Texas Dream Act, 2001 legislation that not only opened doors to higher education for undocumented students but was also meant to bolster Texas’s economy and its workforce long-term. With that law, Texas became the first of more than two dozen states to implement in-state tuition for undocumented students, and for nearly 24 years, the landmark policy remained intact. Conservative lawmakers repeatedly proposed to repeal it, but despite years of single-party control in the state legislature, not enough Republicans embraced repeal even as recently as this spring, days before the Texas attorney general’s office and the federal Department of Justice moved to end it.
Now, as the fall semester approaches, immigrant students are weighing whether to disenroll from their courses or await clarity on how the consent agreement entered into by the state and DOJ affects them.
Immigration advocates are worried that Texas colleges and universities are boxing out potential attendees who are lawfully present and still qualify for in-state tuition despite the court ruling — including recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, asylum applicants and Temporary Protected Status holders — because university personnel lack immigration expertise and haven’t been given clear guidelines on exactly who needs to pay the higher tuition rate.
At Austin Community College, which serves an area as large as Connecticut, members of the board of trustees are unsure how to accurately implement the ruling. As they await answers, they’ve so far decided against sending letters asking their students for sensitive information in order to determine tuition rates.
“This confusion will inevitably harm students because what we find is that in the absence of information and in the presence of fear and anxiety, students will opt to not continue higher education,” said Manuel Gonzalez, vice chair of the ACC board of trustees.
A billboard promoting Austin Community College in Spanish sits on a highway that leads to Lockhart, Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Hechinger Report
Policy experts, meanwhile, warn that Texas’s workforce could suffer as talented young people, many of whom have spent their entire education in the state’s public school system, will no longer be able to afford the associate’s and bachelor’s degrees that would allow them to pursue careers that would help propel their local economies. Under the Texas Dream Act, beneficiaries were required to commit to applying for lawful permanent residence as soon as possible, giving them the opportunity to hold down jobs related to their degrees. Without resident status, it’s likely they’ll still work — just more in lower-paying, under-the-radar jobs.
“It’s so short-sighted in terms of the welfare of the state of Texas,”said Barbara Hines, a former law school professor who helped legislators craft the Texas Dream Act.
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For retired Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Rick Noriega, a Democrat who served in the Texas Legislature at the time, that reality hit close to home when he learned of a young yard worker in his district who wanted to enroll at the local community college for aviation mechanics but couldn’t afford out-of-state tuition.
Noriega called the school chancellor’s office, which was able to provide funding for the student to attend. But that experience led him to wonder: How many more kids in his district were running up against the same barriers to higher education?
So he worked with a sociologist to poll students at local high schools about the problem, which turned out to be widespread. And Noriega’s district wasn’t an outlier. In a state that has long had one of the nation’s largest unauthorized immigrant populations, politicians across the partisan divide knew affected constituents, friends or family members and wanted to help. Once Noriega decided to propose legislation, a Republican, Fred Hill, asked to serve as a joint author on the bill.
To proponents of the Texas Dream Act, the best argument in support of in-state tuition for undocumented students was an economic one. After the state had already invested in these students during K-12 public schooling, it made sense to continue developing them so they could eventually help meet Texas’ workforce needs.
“We’d spent all this money on these kids, and they’d done everything that we asked them to do — in many instances superstars and valedictorians and the like — and then they hit this wall, which was higher education that was cost prohibitive,” said Noriega.
The legislation easily passed the Texas House of Representatives, which was Democratic-controlled at the time, but the Republican-led Senate was less accommodating.
“I couldn’t even get a hearing,’” said Leticia Van de Putte, the then-state senator who sponsored the legislation in her chamber.
To persuade her Republican colleagues, she added several restrictions, including requiring undocumented students to live in Texas for three years before finishing high school or receiving a GED. (Three years was estimated as the average time it would take a family to pay enough in state taxes to make up the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition.) She also included the clause mandating that undocumented students who accessed in-state tuition sign an affidavit pledging to pursue green cards as soon as they were able.
Van de Putte also turned to Texas business groups to hammer home the economic case for the bill. And she convinced the business community to pay for buses to bring Latino evangelical conservative pastors from Dallas, San Antonio, Houston and other areas of the state to Austin, so they could knock on doors in support of the legislation and pray with Republican senators and their staff.
After that, the Texas Dream Act overwhelmingly passed the state Senate in May 2001, and then-Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, signed it into law the following month.
Yet by 2007, even as immigrant rights advocates, faith-based groups and business associations formed a coalition to defend immigrants against harmful state policies, the Texas legislature was starting to introduce a wave of generally anti-immigrant proposals. In 2010, polling suggested Texans overwhelmingly opposed allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates.
By 2012, a new slew of right-wing politicians was elected to office, many philosophically opposed to the law — and loud about it. Perry’s defense of the policy had come back to haunt him during the 2012 Republican presidential primary, when his campaign was dogged by criticism after he told opponents of tuition equity during a debate, “I don’t think you have a heart.”
Still, none of the many bills introduced over the years to repeal the Texas Dream Act were successful. And even Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican border hawk, at times equivocated on the policy, with his spokesperson saying in 2013 that Abbott believed “the objective” of in-state tuition regardless of immigration status was “noble.”
Legislative observers say that some Republicans in the state continue to support the policy. “It’s a bipartisan issue. There are Republicans in support of in-state tuition,” said Luis Figueroa, senior director of legislative affairs at the public policy research and advocacy nonprofit Every Texan. “They cannot publicly state it.”
Meanwhile, as the topic became more politically charged in Texas, the Texas Dream Act ended up amplifying a larger conversation that eventually led to the creation of DACA, the Obama-era program that has given some undocumented immigrants access to deportation protections and work permits.
Even before DACA, many immigrants worked, and those who remain undocumented often still do, either as independent contractors for employers that turn a blind eye to their immigration status or by starting their own businesses. A study from May 2020 found that unauthorized residents make up 8.2 percent of the state’s workforce, and for every dollar spent toward public services for them, the state of Texas recouped $1.21 in revenue.
But without the immediate legal permission to work, undocumented college graduates who had benefited from the Texas Dream Act found themselves limited despite their degrees. As the fight for tuition equity spread to other states, so did the fight for a legal solution to support the students it benefited.
When these young people — affectionately dubbed Dreamers — took center stage to more publicly advocate for themselves, their plight proved sympathetic. By 2017, the same year Trump began his first term, polling had flipped to show a plurality of Texans in support of in-state tuition for undocumented students. More recently, research has indicated time and time again that Americans support a pathway to legal status for undocumented residents brought to the U.S. as children.
But arguments against in-state tuition regardless of immigration status also grew in popularity: Critics contended that the policy is unfair to U.S. citizens from other states who have to pay higher rates, or that undocumented students are taking spots at competitive schools that could be filled by documented Americans.
The DOJ leaned on similar rhetoric in the lawsuit that killed tuition equity in Texas, saying the state law is superseded by 1996 federal legislation banning undocumented immigrants from getting in-state tuition based on residency. That argument has become a template as the Trump administration has sued to dismantle other states’ in-state tuition policies for undocumented residents.
In Kentucky, state Attorney General Russell Coleman, a Republican, has followed in Texas’ footsteps, recommending that the state council overseeing higher education withdraw its regulation allowing for access to in-state tuition instead of fighting to defend it in court.
At the same time, the Trump administration has found other ways to cut back on higher education opportunities for undocumented students, rescinding a policy that had helped them participate in career, technical and adult education programs and investigating universities for offering them scholarships.
Back in Texas, the sudden policy change regarding in-state tuition is causing chaos. Even the state’s two largest universities, Texas A&M and the University of Texas, are using different guidelines to decide which students must pay out-of-state rates.
Clouds fill the sky behind the tower at the University of Texas. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Washington Post via Getty Images
“Universities, I think, are the ones that are put in this really difficult position,” Figueroa said. “They are not immigration experts. They’ve received very little guidance about how to interpret the consent decree.”
Amid so much confusion, Figueroa predicted, future lawsuits will likely crop up. Already, affected students and organizations have filed motions in court seeking to belatedly defend the Texas Dream Act against the DOJ.
In the meantime, young scholars are facing difficult choices. One student, who asked to remain anonymous because of her undocumented immigration status, was scrolling through the news on her phone before bed when she saw a headline about the outcome of the DOJ court case.
“I burst in tears because, you know, as someone who’s been fighting to get ahead in their education, right now that I’m in higher education, it’s been a complete blessing,” she said. “So the first thing that I just thought of is ‘What am I going to do now? Where is my future heading?’ The plans that I have had going for me, are they going to have to come to a complete halt?’”
The young woman, who has lived in San Antonio since she was 9 months old, had enrolled in six courses for the fall at Texas A&M-San Antonio and wasn’t sure whether to drop them. It would be her final semester before earning her psychology and sociology degrees, but she couldn’t fathom paying for out-of-state tuition.
“I’m in the unknown,” she said, like “many students in this moment.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued the state of Oklahoma Tuesday over a state law that allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates. Oklahoma is now the fourth state the DOJ has sued for having such a policy.
The state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, swiftly sided with the federal government and filed a joint motion in support of quashing the law. He said in a statement that it’s “discriminatory and unlawful” to offer noncitizens lower in-state tuition rates “that are not made available to out-of-state Americans.”
“Today marks the end of a longstanding exploitation of Oklahoma taxpayers, who for many years have subsidized colleges and universities as they provide unlawful benefits to illegal immigrants in the form of in-state tuition,” Drummond said.
Now the state and the DOJ await a ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma’s quick support for the legal challenge is reminiscent of what happened in Texas when the DOJ sued the state in June: Within hours of the lawsuit, Texas sided with the Justice Department and a judge ruled in favor of a permanent injunction, ending in-state tuition for noncitizens. The DOJ then filed similar lawsuits against Kentucky and Minnesota, though those legal fights are still ongoing.
The lawsuits follow an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in April calling for a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities and state laws unlawfully “favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens,” citing in-state tuition benefits for noncitizens as an example.
