The higher educational trajectories of undocumented youth in New York City

ABSTRACT

Despite growth in the number of Latino students enrolled in U.S. colleges, foreign-born Latinos are less likely than both native-born Latinos and other immigrant groups to graduate. However, it is difficult to understand the lower educational attainment of Latino immigrants without considering variation in enrolment by legal status. Until recently, undocumented immigrants have been blocked from higher education in the United States. Drawing upon the education and immigrant illegality literature, as well as longitudinal administrative data on 35,400 college students, we examine the association between students’ legal status and their educational achievement, or GPA – an important predictor of educational attainment. We find that, despite high achievement in high school and upon first enrolling in college, undocumented students do not experience upward achievement over time, otherwise known in the education literature as educational progression. Rather, their growth is flat, and their level of achievement declines slightly, what we call an educational regression, relative to their documented and foreign-born citizen Latino peers. We identify several individual- and structural-level factors that help explain the pattern and timing of undocumented student regression. The results have implications for studies of immigrant inequality, immigrant incorporation, and immigration law in the U.S. and globally.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• incorporation
• education
• United States

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The results are robust to using non-cumulative semester GPA, although the coefficients representing the intercept are slightly larger in magnitude and consistent in significance. Results are available upon request.

2 We exclude other visa categories (e.g. international students and refugees) because their institutional context is both contingent on their legal status and entirely unique from that of undocumented students.

3 The authors did not have access to any names of students or other personally identifying information on students in the data. In other words, the administrative data that the authors used for this paper were entirely de-identified. The administrative data which do hold identifying data on students (including names and addresses) are held exclusively by the City University of New York, and those data were not shared with the authors. The authors underwent full IRB review and received IRB approval.

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful for support from the William T. Grant Foundation, as well as the NICHD (T32 HD007338).