NEW HANOVER COUNTY — A bill in the state legislature and sponsored by Sen. Michael Lee (R-New Hanover) would remove in-state tuition barriers for some undocumented college applicants.
Senate Bill 683 grants in-state college tuition, reserved for residents of North Carolina, to people that meet the following criteria:
- The person graduated and received a high school diploma from a public school within North Carolina.
- The person enrolled in the institution of higher education in the school year immediately following his or her graduation and receipt of a high school diploma.
- The person attended North Carolina public or nonpublic schools for a minimum of four consecutive years immediately prior to high school graduation and receipt of a high school diploma.
- The person holds an unexpired North Carolina drivers license or special identification card.
- The person has received a social security number and card from the United
States Social Security Administration.
“If you if you meet all these requirements, you have necessarily DACA status in the United States,” Lee said to port City Daily on Monday.
He was referring to the federal government’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a highly-debated policy that protects children raised in the United State by undocumented immigrant parents from deportation.
As of Oct. 31, 2022, the United States is no longer granting DACA status to applicants, yet those that gained it before will still have the same protections.
“You’ve gone to high school here, you may have been living in our area for 18 years, you have a social security card, you’re paying taxes,” Lee said. “You should be able to pay in state tuition at our community colleges and UNC schools.”
According to Lee, one of the biggest arguments to allowing in-state tuition to this group was concern that it would “box out” North Carolina residents or somehow impair them to get in to a UNC System school.
In response, Lee and his fellow primary sponsors — Sen. Vickie Sawyer (R-Iredell, Mecklenburg), Sen. Julie Mayfield (D-Buncombe) — clarified qualifying for in-state tuition rates did not also mean this group of students were in-state applicants. This is important for colleges that accept a certain amount of in-state applicants; this expanded group of students would not count toward that total.
The UNC system maintains a 18% cap on non-resident freshman admits to all schools except its historically Black institutions.
“This in-state tuition will not impact, exclude, or otherwise impair any other North Carolina resident from getting into UNC school,” Lee said.
According to the bill’s text, the legislation is aimed at the state’s economy and employment needs. It maintains just a 1 percentage point increase in the post-secondary attainment rate would have resulted in over $500 million per year in economic growth.
The bill also states 80% of the state’s employers report having trouble finding employees with industry-valued credentials.
This is not the first time the state legislature has taken up the issue of in-state tuition for DACA recipients, which totals nearly 33,000 people in North Carolina.
In 2021, a bill was filed by three Democratic senators with similar requirements, yet lacked a specification on whether the DACA recipients would count toward non-resident caps. The bill stalled in committee.
S.B. 683 was referred to the Senate’s rules committee on April 10, where it remains.
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