Educational Expansion for Dreamers: Undocumented Young Adults' Higher Education Trajectories

• In Event: 3429 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. Barriers and Resilience in Higher Education

Abstract

This study broadly explores how educational institutions and social policies affect the potential for immigrants to become socioeconomically integrated into a host society. In the United States, undocumented immigrants’ access to higher education, and the ability to use those credentials on the labor market, varies due to local differences in institutional and social policy. Between 2004 and 2014,the City University of New York (CUNY), as well as local, state, and federal governments, implemented various policies regarding undocumented immigrants’ access to higher education and the labor market. Such policy decisions related to tuition and financial aid, use of credentials in the workforce, and enforcement of deportation orders, to name a few. In this study I use administrative data from CUNY to analyze undocumented students’ higher education trajectories.
Preliminary findings from my research show that undocumented students in post-secondary education tend to have better high school credentials (e.g., higher final high school grades, greater number of advanced-level courses) when compared to similar students who are not undocumented. In recent years, however, a new pattern has emerged, as the final high school grades of undocumented students attending CUNY have decreased. This may indicate that a greater share of the city’s undocumented young adults are pursuing post-secondary education; post-secondary education may no longer be the purview of only high-performing, academically elite undocumented students. This trend may also indicate a shift in the perceived importance of post-secondary education and recognition of credentialism among undocumented students. This shift, which I conceptualize as a democratization in access to higher education, has occurred under micro- (e.g., institutional support for undocumented students) and macro- (e.g., the implementation of DACA) level socio-political changes. In future work on this project I will incorporate interviews with undocumented young adults in order to understand the
individual decision-making process underlying these trends.

Author

• Jennifer Catherine Sloan, The Graduate Center, City University of New York