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Public colleges and universities in Texas have been asked to identify which of their students are undocumented so they can be charged out-of-state tuition, The Texas Tribune reported. The move follows a district court ruling earlier this month that prohibits students who are not legal residents from paying in-state tuition.
In a letter to the state's public college presidents last week, Texas Higher Education commissioner Wynn Rosser wrote that “each institution must assess the population of students who have established eligibility for Texas resident tuition … who are not lawfully present and will therefore need to be reclassified as non-residents and charged non-resident tuition.”
The new rates will go into effect for the fall 2025 semester, Rosser wrote. The letter offered no further guidance about how institutions might comply.
Students do not need to prove they are citizens to apply for college in the U.S. In fact, Melanie Gottlieb, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, told the Tribune that colleges don’t typically track students’ status if they’re not on a visa.
“There is not a simple way for an institution to determine if a person is undocumented,” she said. “It’s a challenging question.”
After California, Texas enrolls the second most undocumented students of any state, with 57,000 enrolled in Texas colleges and universities, according to the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.
Abruptly raising the price of tuition “would make higher education unaffordable for thousands and thousands of young Texans who have been through the public school system in Texas,” Ahilan Arulanantham, professor from practice at the UCLA School of Law and co-director of the law school’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, told Inside Higher Ed earlier this month. “Texas has a huge number of long-term undocumented youth who can either be integrated into the state economy or be shut out of higher education.”
