The effect of in-state resident tuition policies on the college enrollment of undocumented Latino students in Texas and the United States

As the number of undocumented students in the United States increased over the last few decades, concerns about their educational outcomes once again became a matter of state well-being. In 2001, with overwhelming support, the Texas legislature passed House Bill 1403, which grants undocumented immigrant students the same in-state discount for public college tuition that Texas residents receive if they meet specific residency and graduation requirements. Although Texas was the first state in the nation to implement a state tuition policy, the state's two largest community college systems, Dallas and Houston, preceded the state tuition bill with in-district tuition policies targeted at the same population beginning in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Since 2001, nine other states have implemented variations of in-state resident tuition bills. There is no empirical evidence to date of the impact of the tuition policies at the local, state, or national level on the college-enrollment rates of undocumented students. This dissertation examines the effect of in-state resident tuition eligibility on the college decisions of the estimated population of undocumented Latino immigrant students in Texas and at the national level using Foreign-Born Non-Citizen (FBNC) Latino students as a proxy for undocumented status. I employ a differences-in-differences strategy to estimate the effect of eligibility for the tuition policy and use institutional data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and individual-level data from the U.S. Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Groups for the years 1998 to 2005. I find that older FBNC Latino high school graduates in Texas are 4.84 times more likely to have enrolled in college after the tuition policy was implemented in Texas than their counterparts in the Southwest. At the national level, I find that FBNC Latinos living in the states with a tuition policy were 1.54 times more likely to have enrolled in college after the enactment of the policies than those in states without such legislation. At the local level, the introduction of individual district policies yielded mixed results, with significant increases in the share of Latino enrollment in Dallas but not in Houston during the time period examined.