Bill Would Give Tuition Break to Undocumented Students
Published in the Herald-Republic on Thursday, January 17, 2002
By TOM ROEDER
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC
OLYMPIA -- Some students who are not U.S. citizens may get a big financial boost to attend college under a bill proposed in the state House.
The measure, HB 2330, would give students without U.S. citizenship state resident status for college if they are seeking legal residency, had graduated from high school in Washington and lived here for at least three years.
Now students without U.S. citizenship must obtain a student visa and pay costly out-of-state tuition to attend four-year schools and community colleges in the state.
"The title may scare people off because it says undocumented," said the bill's sponsor, Rep. Phyllis Gutierrez-Kenney, a Seattle Democrat. "But these are people who have lived here and worked here, contributing their taxes and their labors to make our state a better place."
She said the bill substantially cuts the price of college for undocumented students by giving them resident rates and encourages many to attend who now don't possess the paperwork they need to even apply for admission.
For instance, at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, tuition and fees for someone applying as a resident full-time undergraduate is $3,348 a year as opposed to out-of-state tuition costs of $11,085. That equates to a saving of more than $7,700 for a student who applies as a state resident.
The bill doesn't change requirements for state and federal financial aid, which demand recipients to be citizens.
A Wapato native, Gutierrez-Kenney said the measure would spur enrollments from the Yakima Valley, where the Hispanics, including those who entered the country without permission, make up 37 percent of the population.
But Gutierrez-Kenney doesn't know how many potential college students could wind up in state schools under her proposal. The state doesn't track which students in public schools are citizens.
But in the Yakima Valley, numbers aren't needed to show that Gutierrez-Kenney's bill would help students move on to college, said Jim Rigney, coordinator of migrant and bilingual programs at Yakima's Davis High School.
"These are students who are products of our system," Rigney said. "I have watched us produce magnificent kids and waste that resource."
Rigney said a number of Yakima students who have made it through high school with good grades are turned away at college because of citizenship problems.
"These are kids with 3.8 and 3.9 averages," he said. "These kids are never going back to Mexico. They are our kids."
In the past few years, California and Texas have adopted similar changes.
But the change isn't without opponents.
Ephrata's Republican Rep. Joyce Mulliken said citizenship requirements should remain on the books.
"If people want the benefits of the state, they need to be legal," she said. "Education is in the top of my list of priorities but let's take care of citizenship first and college second."
Zillah's Republican Rep. Barb Lisk was warmer to the proposal.
"If these people would be actively seeking legal status while in college, then I would listen to the bill," she said.
Yakima's Rep. Mary Skinner, another Republican, said she was withholding judgment until she gets more details on Gutierrez-Kenney's plan.
"I need to look at all the particulars," she said.
The bill and other legislative information can be found on the Internet at www.leg.wa.gov.
Internet-connected computers can be found at most Central Washington public libraries.