California Dreamin’: DACA’s Decline and Undocumented College Student Enrollment in the Golden State

ABSTRACT

With congressional efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform mired in gridlock, over the past dozen years the federal effort to provide relief to undocumented young adults has been through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA may go before the U.S. Supreme Court for the second time in 2025. There is surprisingly little concrete and comprehensive recent data on undocumented and “DACA-mented” college student enrollment patterns.

This is the first article to report hard data on contemporary enrollment trends for undocumented college students, an era marked by increasing constrictions of DACA. Our first main finding is that between 2016-17 (just prior to the partial DACA rescission) to 2022-23, newly enrolled low-income undocumented students declined by half at University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) campuses. Our second main finding is that for UC and CSU low-income undocumented students overall (new and continuing students) there was a 30% decline between 2018 and 2019 and 2022 and 2023 (the second finding reflects a delayed impact as earlier large cohorts took time to graduate). Our third finding is that there were no notable declines over the same period in our “control” groups other low- and lower-middle income students at UC and CSU with similar academic profiles which supports our inference about the causal role of DACA’s decline on decreasing undocumented student enrollments.

Part III pivots to several ongoing areas of promising reforms and mitigation strategies that can be pursued by public universities with an interest in supporting undocumented student success. These are strategies to consider regardless of how DACA fares in the Supreme Court. We analyze relevant case law regarding the “Opportunity for All” campaign in the UC, which is based on the claim that public universities may lawfully employ undocumented students. We also summarize innovative public-private partnerships for scholarships and other support for undocumented students and immigrant rights.

INTRODUCTION

In the landmark 1982 ruling in Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court held that a Texas statute authorizing K-12 public schools to deny enrollment to undocumented children violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although stopping just shy of holding education to be a right, the Court declared that “education has a fundamental role in maintaining the fabric of our society.” Years spent in U.S. elementary schools, junior highs, and high schools interweave the strands of undocumented students’ identities into the fabric of our (and their) American society. Some learn along the way that American society will not be experienced as a seamless fabric, but rather as a patchwork of inclusionary and exclusionary encounters, such as learning that one cannot participate in the federally funded academic preparation program at their middle school. Many U.S. undocumented students who aspire to go to college first learned of their immigration status when they were applying for college and financial aid, as high school graduation marks the abrupt transition from the K-12 educational world protected by Plyer to the liminal world of higher education that is the focus of this article, with its broad possibilities and also “transitions to illegality” that vary greatly according to the state where one resides and whether one has Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) relief.

Challenges to DACA have been percolating in the lower courts for several years. As the Supreme Court may rule on the legal merits of DACA as soon as next year, what are the educational outcomes of thousands of undocumented students who enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities in recent years, some with DACA and some without DACA? In fact, we will show that this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.

Officials at U.S. public universities and higher education boards making administrative choices about collecting data on undocumented students must navigate between competing hazards. Most public university systems have chosen (or defaulted to) procedures and policies that absorb some known degree of harm in order to avoid the risk of catastrophic harm. More specifically, most university systems with sizeable numbers of undocumented students knowingly forego the potential educational benefits of being able to integrate undocumented status with their financial aid and registration record systems because there are offsetting ethical concerns. By not collecting data, universities protect undocumented students’ identities in the face of the sensitive nature of immigration status and negative contingencies such as future hostile subpoenas or other coercive data disclosure obligations.

As we show in Part II, the three states known to have the largest numbers of undocumented college students in the United States-California, Texas, and Florida-do not directly provide contemporary enrollment counts or estimates about undocumented college students. The experiences of these three states with the largest relevant populations underscore that data nationwide about undocumented college students that could otherwise inform judicial and policy-maker judgments is not available. Given this patchwork of partial and fuzzy estimates of undocumented students for some but not all states and with incongruous methodologies and various years reported, it necessarily follows that there are not national figures for undocumented college student enrollments from the typical sources used more generally (e.g., federal IPEDS [Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System] data). In lieu of hard data at the national level, the best national estimates we have come from a series of reports utilizing a population-based estimation methodology anchored to the American Community Survey (ACS), but as we show in Section II, there are limitations to these national estimates.

I. THE RISE AND DECLINE OF DACA

After a decade of unsuccessful efforts by Congress and the U.S. Senate to pass versions of a Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act or other comprehensive immigration reform, the Obama administration took executive action in 2012 through **DACA**. That policy formalized a long-standing practice of prosecutorial discretion. **DACA** meant eligible undocumented immigrants would be spared the government’s removal/immigration enforcement efforts for two years with renewals possible. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has interpreted **DACA** as conferring a temporary form of lawful presence, even though that is distinct from lawful status. For reasons detailed below in this part, the substantive legality of **DACA** may be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court next year.

Moreover, in several states, **DACA** interacted with state laws and administrative practices and thereby opened up additional important benefits such as access to driver’s licenses, eligibility for in-state tuition and financial aid, and more favorable conditions for professional licenses and credentials (e.g., lawyers, doctors, school teachers, etc.). In Virginia, for example, soon after **DACA** the State Attorney General advised that **DACA** (and only **DACA**) students could be eligible for waivers to pay in-state tuition at colleges and universities in the Commonwealth.

Under the Trump administration, in 2017 the DHS attempted to **rescind DACA**, which began a slow strangulation of the program (i.e., no new **DACA** requests were being accepted). In a 5-4 ruling in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 held that the Trump administration DHS’ rescission of **DACA** was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and vacated the rescission of **DACA**. The Court found the Trump administration failed to consider the reliance interests of **DACA** recipients and others that had accumulated since the program began in 2012. The Court majority did not reach the legality of **DACA**.

The Trump administration defied the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Binding federal court rulings should have returned treatment of **DACA** applications to the status quo ante before the September 2017 unlawful rescission of **DACA**. However, Acting DHS Secretary Wolf issued a new memorandum directing the agency “to take all appropriate actions to reject all pending and future initial requests for **DACA**, to reject all pending and future applications for advance parole absent exceptional circumstances, and to shorten **DACA** renewals consistent with the parameters established in this memorandum.”

Upon taking office in January 2021 President Biden issued a directive to preserve and fortify **DACA**, with DHS announcing that it would move forward with a notice of proposed rulemaking process to fashion new **DACA** regulations. The Biden DHS issued proposed regulations in September 2021 that in key respects maintained the status quo with **DACA**.

While the Biden administration’s rulemaking process for **DACA** was underway, district court judge Hanen ruled that **DACA** violates the APA. He issued a nationwide injunction blocking DHS from processing any new **DACA** applications while permitting the continued processing of current **DACA** renewals.

Texas v. United States was assigned to a conservative Fifth Circuit panel, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision, but directed Judge Hanen to now review and consider the final regulations codifying **DACA** that were promulgated while the litigation appeal was pending. The Fifth Circuit also reaffirmed continuation of a partial stay covering existing **DACA** recipients. Judge Hanen found that the final **DACA** regulations did nothing to improve infirmities that he and the Fifth Circuit identified in the original 2012 DHS Secretary Napolitano memorandum: [T]he easy response to the assignment given to this Court on remand is: there are no material differences between the Final Rule and the 2012 **DACA** Memorandum, and while the record underlying the Final Rule certainly supports the argument that **DACA** has been beneficial for the **DACA** recipients and that the **DACA** recipients are, with certain exceptions, beneficial to the country, DHS did nothing to change or resolve the substantive problems found by this Court or the Fifth Circuit.

In his most recent district court ruling Judge Hanen focused on advance parole and the planned indefinite nature of **DACA** as two problem areas with the final **DACA** regulations. The Texas v. United States case then went before the Fifth Circuit a second time, with the court addressing jurisdiction, standing, and the substantive merits of **DACA** in a January 2025 ruling. Regarding jurisdiction, the Fifth Circuit ruled that jurisdiction was appropriate under the APA, rejecting the argument by the Biden administration that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) limited judicial review to noncitizens exclusively. With respect to standing, the court found that that the State of Texas’s financial injuries were “concrete” and “real,” that the costs were linked to **DACA** and would be redressed by the elimination of **DACA**, and that the Fifth Circuit’s earlier standing precedents relied upon by the district court were not clearly overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Immigration Priorities ruling. The Fifth Circuit, with respect to the substantive legality of **DACA**, ruled that the DHS final rule on **DACA** that was for the most part identical to the 2012 Secretary Napolitano memorandum was not consistent with the INA’s comprehensive classification scheme for noncitizens. In total, the Fifth Circuit struck down the work authorization and “lawful presence” pillars of **DACA**, but acknowledging the severability clause in the Biden DHS regulations, the Fifth Circuit (reversing the district court) held that the **DACA**’s policy of forbearance from removal should not be disturbed. The Fifth Circuit also narrowed the district court’s injunction to Texas because other states aligned with Texas had not proven a pocketbook injury, and the court took into account that New Jersey intervened to defend **DACA** and twenty-two states filed an amicus brief in support of **DACA**. If the Fifth Circuit’s latest ruling is appealed and if certiorari is granted, the **DACA** case would likely be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2025 Term.

Figure 1 displays annual **DACA** intakes that were approved by the DHS between 2012 and 2023, separated into new approvals and approved renewals. These data cover all **DACA** recipients rather than the subset who are college students (which DHS and other federal agencies do not report separately). Starting in fall 2017 during the Trump administration, approval of new **DACA** applications basically ended. After a minor uptick in the first half of 2021 when almost eight thousand were approved under the Biden administration before the Texas v. United States district court’s national injunction in July 2021 prohibited further processing of new **DACA** intakes, in 2022 and 2023 combined there were only three new **DACA** applications approved by DHS.

Consequently, the population still being approved to have “DACA-mented” status are those who are renewing their previously approved **DACA** applications, a group of Millennials and older Generation Z individuals who have now largely aged out of high participation rates in undergraduate education. Today an eighteen year-old high school graduate who is undocumented and aspires to go to college will almost invariably not be able to participate in **DACA**. In fact, potential college students today face multiple overlapping barriers: (1) nearly all eighteen year-old undocumented high school graduates by 2024 did not arrive in the United States by **DACA**’s 2007 cut-off; and (2) even those in their twenties who would have become **DACA** eligible, but only after the date of the attempted rescission of **DACA** in September 2017, were eligible in theory only because the processing of new applications was halted except for the brief small-level reopening in 2021 referenced above.

At the time of this writing the second Trump administration returning to the executive branch in 2025 adds substantial uncertainty and precarity for college students with **DACA**, for undocumented college students without **DACA**, and for their families. For instance, DHS may attempt to lawfully rescind the **DACA** executive order before there is a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the pending Texas v. United States case, which underscores our discussion of post-**DACA** pathways and reforms in Part III.

II. MEASURABLE ENROLLMENT DECLINES SINCE DACA’S DEMISE

Here we provide “hard numbers” on actual enrollment trends for the two public university systems in California. For reasons detailed in the Appendix, our data are a good measure of enrollment trends for undocumented students, yet they come from the California Student Aid Commission (CSAC) and cannot be linked back with enrollment records of individual students on each university campuses that could place those undocumented individuals at risk of removal from the United States.

As a “level set” to aid readers in understanding the meaning and context of our findings further below, Table 1 categorizes all fifty states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as of 2024 in a continuum from most restrictive to most supportive/accessible policies for in-state tuition and state financial aid eligibility. These categories and ratings are from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal by the Presidents Alliance based on measurable definitions. This is a very dynamic space because of changes to state laws, so while Table 1 is a snapshot as of April 2024, the states that shifted categories compared to April 2021 are shaded in grey. To emphasize the point about changes in state law, in February 2025 Florida reversed course and passed a new law prohibiting undocumented students who attended Florida public high schools from eligibility for waivers of out-of-state tuition.

The degree of variation in Table 1 calls to mind the line in Grutter v. Bollinger that “States may perform their role as laboratories for experimentation to devise various solutions where the best solution is far from clear.” However, here we add the proviso that congressional inaction on immigration reform such as a DREAM Act over the past two decades is the “but for” cause for why the best solution is far from clear.

TABLE 1: State Tuition and Financial Aid Policies for Undocumented College Students in 2024

The importance of our present findings is underscored by the absence of official and contemporary counts for public university systems in California, Texas, and Florida, home to the largest populations of interest. In California the most commonly cited estimates for undocumented students are from six years ago or more, when it was estimated there were about **4000** undocumented students enrolled at the University of California (UC) and **10,000 to 12,000** enrolled at the California State University (CSU). These estimates were cited in the run-up to the **DACA** litigation culminating in the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in which UC relied on data counts for those filing California Dream Act financial aid applications (a data source not integrated with the University’s internal enrollment records) to arrive at a figure of **4200** undocumented students at UC and then applied “additional criteria to approximate the subset of **1,700** students who [then] appear[ed] to have **DACA** work authorization.” Due to the absence of updated reporting elsewhere, these same figures get repeated in the press. Similarly, the CSU Chancellor’s office estimated in 2019 that there were **9500** undocumented students in the CSU and has not reported updated estimates in the five years since.

Likewise, in Texas (estimated to have the second largest population of undocumented college students), comprehensive enrollment statistics on public university students who are eligible for the in-state tuition waiver (and who sign a related affidavit, a group that is mostly but not entirely undocumented) were last estimated in 2017. Financial aid data for undocumented college students in Texas are not tracked by their higher education board. In Florida (estimated to have the third largest population of undocumented college students), undocumented students are ineligible for state financial aid but are eligible for in-state tuition rates under certain conditions. The Florida Board of Governors overseeing its public universities report system and campus headcount data on “non-resident” tuition waiver students, and the same goes for the State’s Division of Florida Colleges that oversees its community colleges, but the “non-resident” category is mostly but not entirely made up of undocumented students (this category also includes a slice of citizen students who temporarily lost their Florida residency). The scholarly research on undocumented students has not focused on Florida in part because of the more difficult financial aid environment and absence of better data.

As further context for our findings about California universities, the best national estimates are in a series of reports by the American Immigration Council and the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. The latest report in this series estimated that there are approximately **408,000 undocumented college students in the United States in 2021**, with the most (one-fifth of the national total) in **California (83,000)**, followed by **Texas (59,000)**, **Florida (40,000)**, **New York (30,000)**, **Illinois (20,000)**, and **New Jersey (19,000)**. However, even the best population-based estimation methodologies have limits. For example, the data in the Presidents’ Alliance estimates are not granular enough to specify the proportion of students likely enrolled in community colleges versus four-year public institutions; and for the 23% of undocumented students estimated to be at private institutions, it is not known what proportion attend for-profit career/trade colleges versus non-profit (including religiously affiliated) institutions many of which provide a high quality undergraduate education and have solid alumni networks.

California is in the “**comprehensive access**” group in Table 1, and even within that category is toward the high end of access based on the extent of financial aid available to both citizen and undocumented students. Our data for this article come from CSAC, which administers the Cal Grant and Dream Act financial aid awards in California in partnership with university and college campuses. Table 2 provides an overview of average financial aid awards for a low-income student who is a California resident. Cal Grants are one of three “**legs of the stool**” of need-based financial aid, along with federal Pell Grants and UC Grants (University funds earmarked for return to aid) such that a low-income student’s tuition and fees can be covered by a Cal Grant (**$13,000**), and the total cost of attendance of **$38,000** can be covered by the combination of a Cal Grant, Pell Grant, and UC Grant plus a modest part-time employment or loans to cover the remaining **$8,000**. The basic structure of CSU financial aid is similar, but with Cal Grants and CSU institutional aid amounts being lower to sync with CSU’s lower tuition and costs of attendance.

TABLE 2: Typical UC Financial Aid Packages in 2022-23 Covering Average Total Cost of Attendance (In-State Student with On-Campus Housing) of $38,000

In the right column of Table 2 (and likewise in the CSU), **undocumented students are not eligible for federal Pell Grants**, which underscores the importance of access to Dream Act awards (the equivalent to other Cal Grant awards) and UC Grants by virtue of a series of California laws (A.B. 130, 131 et seq.). If an undocumented student has **DACA**, it opens up authorized work opportunities on campus and off-campus that are not available to undocumented students without **DACA** (and both groups are restricted from federally subsidized work-study jobs on campus). There are also some funds for Dream Loans under California law (which contrasts with undocumented students’ ineligibility for federal Stafford Loans), but the take-up rate on Dream Loans is modest given the loan aversion choices by undocumented students and their families in the current liminal environment. Undocumented students are more likely to adopt other cost-saving strategies out of financial necessity that place additional stressors on their educational learning (e.g., food insecurity, living at home with a lengthy commute to campus).

The 2022 study by Gurantz and Obadan using CSAC Dream Act data is the closest in the scholarly literature to the data we use for this article (their data are more fine-grained but focus on older 2013-14 and 2014-15 cohorts of students). We also obtained campus-level data that heretofore have not been publicly reported from the CSAC on California Dream Act awards. Dream Act awards do not robustly capture all undocumented students, but they are a good measure of **low-income undocumented students** who typically have lived in California for much/most of their lives and attended California high schools (the numerically predominant group of undocumented students of greatest interest to most policy makers) inclusive of transfers from the California community colleges. Again, our data cannot be linked back to individual identifiable enrolled students on campuses based on immigration status.

Of additional comparative relevance for the data in this article is another pocket of high-quality data that exist on undocumented students in the two-year and four-year colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY) system. However, the CUNY data may not be generalizable in terms of student demographics, state law characteristics, college profiles, and local labor markets. Moreover, research on these CUNY undocumented students has tended to focus on years leading up to the initial introduction of **DACA** over a decade ago. The same is true in California focusing on the early days of **DACA** and California’s Dream Act financial aid.

We report Dream Act recipient data on all nine UC campuses with undergraduates and at fifteen of the CSU campuses where 89.6% of the CSU system’s Dream Act students enrolled in 2022-23 (the other eight CSU campuses represent only 10.4% combined). As detailed in the Appendix, we erred on the side of not separately reporting Dream Act data for these campuses with smaller numbers of undocumented students. We also report UC and CSU systemwide totals.

We adopt a social science “**difference-in-difference**” analytic strategy that compares enrollment changes for undocumented Dream Act students with the corresponding pattern for a closely matched group of non-undocumented students. For this we use CSAC data on the low-income Cal Grant awardees at UC and CSU, respectively (see Appendix). These control groups of students going to UC and CSU are also coming from California high schools and have similar grade point averages (GPAs) and age distributions etc. The control group comparisons help address alternative hypotheses and confounders impacting low-income students more generally (e.g., impact of a budget downturn or COVID-related shift in available financial aid). At the same time, we caution that we do not have the granular data to perform a robust causal model that eliminates confounders in a more systematic way. Most notably, the Cal Grant comparison groups are not a strategy for assessing the possible confounder of change over time in the population of undocumented high school graduates in California that is the rootstock for those undocumented students going on to enroll at UC and CSU (though ways of assessing that possibility are discussed further below in the Appendix). We also cannot empirically deny the possibility of unique indirect effects of COVID impacting undocumented students’ likelihood of enrolling at California universities in the past couple years (e.g., disproportionate impact of job losses among undocumented student’s family members in 2020 and 2021; greater high school learning losses in 2020 and 2021 for those without reliable internet access or computers at home).

A. University of California Campuses

Our main focus further below is on the overall undocumented student population at UC (and CSU), but we begin by looking at the smaller numbers of **new Dream Act awardees** each year at UC because it provides interpretative context for the data discussion that follows. Figure 2 documents an alarming **linear downward trend** in UC’s newly enrolled low-income undocumented students. In 2016-17 there were 1181 new Dream Act awardees at UC, compared to 579 in 2022-23, **a decline of 51.0%**. By comparison, new Cal Grant awardees to (non-undocumented) low-income students at UC were relatively stable over this period, declining only 3.3% between 2016 and 2017 and 2022 and 2023. The 51% drop in UC’s new Dream Act awards compared to UC’s other new Cal Grant awards is statistically significant. The latest data for the UC system confirms that this downward trend in new Dream Act awards at UC continues somewhat in 2023-24.

Recall from Part I that **2016-17 represented the last year that meaningfully large numbers of new DACA applications were approved by DHS**, with the Trump administration halting new **DACA** approvals in fall 2017. Also keep in mind in that Figure 2 includes both incoming freshmen and transfers with Dream Act awards, though freshmen outnumbered transfers four-to-one.

FIGURE 2: New California Dream Act Recipients at UC

The data above in Figure 2 sets the stage for understanding two overall trends for Dream Act awardees at UC (Figures 3-4 and Table 1). The first trend might seem paradoxical or counterintuitive, especially if presented absent the context about a linear decline in new undocumented students at UC. This first trend was also underappreciated at the time for reasons likely connected to the absence of data reporting mentioned earlier. We find that low-income undocumented student enrollments at UC actually **climbed by nearly one thousand between 2015 and 2016** (late Obama era) and the peak period of **2018 to 2019**, even in the face of the “existential threat” posed by the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies and efforts to **rescind DACA**. UC’s Cal Dream Act awardees increased 35.4% between 2015 and 2016 and 2018 and 2019, far outpacing the 4.8% increase in other Cal Grant (FAFSA) awardees at UC during the same period.

The explanation underlying this paradox is that UC undocumented Dream Act freshmen (a much larger group than transfers) who entered UC in the peak years for **DACA** purposes of 2014-16 in the late Obama years then progressed through the University as juniors and seniors during the Trump administration years. In 2017, UC estimated that 40% or more of its enrolled undocumented students had work authorization from **DACA**. Many of those students had or could get **DACA** renewals and were not in that way impacted by the Trump administration’s efforts to **rescind DACA** beginning in mid-2017. Thus, even though new Dream Act students at UC were very much in decline by 2017-18, for a time those enrollment losses were being offset by the large cohorts of continuing Dream Act students making progress toward graduation amidst the tumult in our national politics over immigration in 2017-19.

Underpinning the trend of overall Dream Act increases up to 2018-19 (driven by an upward trend of new Dream Act student enrollment several years earlier) was a constellation of powerful community support and activism within California universities for and with undocumented students during the Trump era (discussed more below in Part III). Thus, the holistic explanation has to do with the increased awareness and routinization of the Dream Act application process, growth, and maturity in tandem with UC undocumented student support centers and the UC Immigrant Legal Services Center (centrally run from the UC Davis School of Law but with immigration attorneys available on site at other UC campuses; UC Berkeley separately provided similar services).

Figure 3: California Dream Act Recipients at UC Campuses

The second trend at UC evident in Figures 3-4 and Table 1, which is our primary focus for policy makers given the current state of affairs, is the troublesome **decline in UC Dream Act awardees since 2018-19** (we use 2018-19 and 2019-20 as benchmarks because those years represented the high water mark for Dream Act enrollments in both the UC and CSU). The data in Table 3 shows that compared to 2018-19, UC Dream Act awardees at UC dropped by **31.4%** by 2022-23 (and by 30.9% comparing 2019-20 with 2022-23). There are declines of **40% or more** at UCLA, UC Merced, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Cruz (Figure 4). Essentially, this is turning back the clock a full decade in terms of opportunities for low-income undocumented students at UC, notwithstanding all of the earlier efforts in state law and university programs to support undocumented students.

The data at the far right side of Figure 4 shows other Cal Grant awardees at UC (FAFSA filers) as a “**control group**” to help lessen confounding patterns and shore up our focus on the recent worsening of **DACA** inaccessibility as causing (or being a lead cause of) the decline. As detailed in the Appendix, students at UC who receive Dream Act awards have virtually identical high school grade profiles as those other low-income students receiving Cal Grant awards, making the latter a reasonably matched “natural experiment” control group. At UC there was a 1.3% increase in other Cal Grant awardees between 2018 and 2019 and 2022 and 2023 (74,714 versus 75,665) and a 1.0% drop between 2019 and 20 and 2022 and 23 (76,428 versus 75,665). Thus, the pattern of decline at UC since 2018-19 is **unique among undocumented low-income students**. These drops in UC Dream Act awards compared to UC other Cal Grant awards are also statistically significant. Looking at all undergraduate enrollment, at UC between fall 2019 and fall 2023 overall undergraduate enrollment increased by 3%.

TABLE 3: California Dream Act Recipients at UC Campuses

The latest UC data for 2023-24 (not shown because we only have the system and not campus-level data) shows that overall UC Dream Act awards continued to decline but at a slower pace (to 2308) at the same time that other Cal Grant awards to UC students climbed to record high in 2023-24.

B. California State University Campuses

The same large-scale patterns for low-income undocumented students evident within the UC system are also found within the CSU system. Figure 5 documents an alarming **downward trend** in CSU’s newly enrolled low-income undocumented students. In 2016-17 there were **2219** new Dream Act awardees at CSU, compared to **1148** in 2022-23, **a decline of 48.3%**. By comparison, new Cal Grant awardees to CSU low-income students were flat (+0.6%) between 2016 and 2017 and 2022 and 2023. The drop in CSU’s new Dream Act awards compared to CSU’s other new Cal Grant awards are again statistically significant. Additional data (not displayed in Figure 5) confirms that this downward trend continued in 2023-24 with new CSU Dream Act awards dropping to $1008$. As noted earlier, **2016-17 corresponds with the last year that meaningfully large numbers of new DACA applications were approved by DHS**.

Figure 5: New Cal Dream Act Recipients at CSU

As with UC, the CSU data in Figure 5 set the stage for understanding two overall trends for Dream Act awardees at CSU (Figure 6 and Table 4). The first trend is that low-income undocumented student enrollments at CSU climbed by about thousand (a gain of 41.2%) between 2015 and 2016 (late Obama era) and the peak period of 2018-19. Again, this reflects how relatively large cohorts of low-income undocumented freshmen entered CSU during the peak **DACA** years of 2014-16, then later as continuing junior and seniors those students were (for a few years) offsetting the declines in new undocumented enrollment evident in Figure 5. These overall gains at CSU outpaced the 6.0% increase in other Cal Grant (FAFSA) awardees at CSU during the same period.

The second trend at CSU is that after the peak in 2019-20, the CSU system experienced a decline of **30%** (almost two thousand undocumented students) by 2022-23. This pattern is fairly consistent among all fifteen CSU campuses shown in Table 4 (all fifteen CSU campuses had fewer Dream Act students in 2022-23 than in 2019-20, though there is some variation in the degree of decline and CSU Dominquez Hills is somewhat of an outlier in that it was the only campus to have peak Dream Act enrollments in 2020-21 before declining thereafter). Looking again at the same “control group” analysis as before, at CSU there was a 0.0% change in other Cal Grant awardees between 2018 and 2019 and 2022 and 2023 (133,128 versus 133,257) and a 5.0% drop between 2019 and 2020 and 2022 and 2023 (140,325 versus 133,257). Given such large samples, these drops in CSU’s Dream Act awards compared to CSU’s other Cal Grant awards are statistically significant. Placing things in perspective, the **30% drop in low income-undocumented students at CSU since 2019-20 is six times larger** than the drop for other Cal Grant awardees at CSU, a pattern that is consistent with our hypothesis that the shrinkage in **DACA** participation among today’s incoming college students likely explains more of the overall pattern in enrollment declines for undocumented students. The recent 5.0% decline in Cal Grant awardees at CSU mirrors a 6.5% drop in total undergraduate enrollment at CSU between fall 2019 and fall 2023 (several Bay Area campuses encountered the greatest declines).

Figure 6: California Dream Act Recipients at CSU Campuses

The latest CSU data for 2023-24 (not shown in Table 4 and Figure 6 because we only have the system and not campus-level data) indicate that overall CSU Dream Act awards continued to decline (to 3839, down 40.5% from the peak in 2018-19) at the same time that other Cal Grant awards to CSU students barely declined in 2023-24.

Our findings of a 48% drop in new CSU Dream Act awardees since 2016-17 and an overall 30% drop in CSU Dream Act awardees since 2019-20 comes amidst new threats to support programs for CSU undocumented students due to shortfalls in California’s budget. In 2018-19, hard-fought political efforts that were years in the making resulted in securing State funding for CSU’s Immigration Legal Services Project that provides free immigration legal services to students at CSU campuses and their family members. But this year the Governor’s budget proposal would slash funding for this vital program by 75% (from $7.0M to $1.8M annually) of the State’s budget funding. At a campus like Fresno State, which has already seen a drop of 28% in Cal Dream Act awardees since 2019-20 according to our Table 4 data, such budget cuts threaten to dramatically reduce the quality and timeliness of legal services run through Fresno State’s Dream Success Center, thereby exacerbating access barriers for undocumented students at a time of heightened vulnerability. In a final agreement between the Governor and the Legislature this funding for CSU was restored, but this issue is likely to reoccur in the near future if the State budget does not improve.

TABLE 4: California Dream Act Recipients at CSU Campuses

C. An Encouraging Sign in Discouraging Data?

The data we reviewed earlier (Figure 4 and Table 3) show that the decline in Dream Act awards at **UC Berkeley** was significantly (statistically and practically) **smaller than at any other UC or CSU campus in our sample**. Our data set does not allow us to establish the cause(s) of this difference, but we note that there is a substantial body of qualitative analysis indicating that UC Berkeley is widely recognized for being an **early innovator in developing a robust set of institutional commitments and practices to support the success of its undocumented students**. In partnership with private philanthropy (discussed in Part III.C), the qualitative data suggests UC Berkeley is among the national leaders in developing scholarship support for undocumented students in tandem with an Undocumented Student Program (USP) that coordinates comprehensive services and support. Through the UC Berkeley School of Law, via its human rights clinic and later via its community-based clinic, the East Bay Community Law Center, UC Berkeley was one of the first to secure full-time on-campus immigration attorney services for undocumented students. In Figure 7 we highlight some key elements of UC Berkeley’s holistic model to support undocumented students through the USP.

While policy makers (and university leaders) should not be naïve about the ease with which all elements of the robust UC Berkeley USP model scale-up at other campuses with more systemic resource constraints (and without a law school) and different campus cultures, the value of **holistic and intentional support services rooted in authentic and durable community partnerships** is worth emphasizing.

III. PROMISING PATHWAYS AND POLICY REFORMS TO BRIDGE TO THE FUTURE

Part III turns to policy recommendations in a post-**DACA** environment. We analyze the “Opportunity for All” Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) employment issue that is currently under evaluation by university leaders and California lawmakers. We then outline in a more abbreviated way a few other innovative pathways worthy of consideration now and after a final ruling on **DACA** by the Fifth Circuit and/or the Supreme Court.

A. Opportunity for All: Does IRCA Apply to State Universities like UC?

In partnership with the “Opportunity for All” campaign by UC undocumented student organizers, in fall 2022 faculty and immigrant rights attorneys with the UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy issued a legal memorandum signed by dozens of leading U.S. immigration and constitutional law scholars arguing that IRCA-which makes it “**unlawful for a person or other entity to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States**” unauthorized individuals-does **not apply to state entities like UC**. The 2022 legal memorandum is buttressed by a new article by Arulanantham and Hairapetian analyzing these legal arguments in greater detail.

For purposes of the question of federal legislation (IRCA or otherwise) and sovereign immunity, UC is unquestionably an arm of the State. The text of IRCA does not define “entity” and perhaps even more telling, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) that amended IRCA added specific language that an “entity” “**includes an entity in any branch of the Federal Government**” but IIRIRA was again silent on applicability to the states. The immigration and constitutional law scholars providing the legal analysis that was the foundation for the “Opportunity for All” campaign argue that the question of a state university system’s **sovereign immunity from IRCA is an unexplored legal question** that has been “hidden in plain sight” for many years.

Most recently, the “Opportunity for All” campaign led to proposed legislation introduced by California Assemblymember Alvarez, Assembly Bill 2586, that would codify the same principles in state law about not excluding undocumented students from being hired at California’s public universities and community colleges. In September 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the Opportunity for All bill, citing concerns that state employees could be found in violation of federal laws for employing undocumented students.

There are two related doctrinal questions here. First, does the IRCA statute reveal a clear indication of Congress’s intent to overcome the states’ (and thus public universities’) Eleventh Amendment immunity from IRCA lawsuits? Second, does the IRCA law even apply to state governments when they act as employers (unlike private sector employers)? We pose the two questions in this order (others might reverse the sequence) because strong statutory and case law evidence of Congress choosing to override the states’ sovereign immunity would also be solid evidence that IRCA applies to state governmental entities acting as employers. Conversely (and as we show below), the absence of case law confirming that IRCA waived sovereign immunity represents important (but not sufficient) disconfirmation evidence about the underlying question of the applicability of IRCA to state governmental employers.

Relevant in both abrogation contexts and more broadly regarding the regulation of state governments (discussed further below), the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly declared, “**The standard for finding a congressional abrogation is stringent. Congress, this Court has often held, must make its intent to abrogate sovereign immunity ‘unmistakably clear in the language of the statute**.’” This clear statement standard is satisfied “in only two situations. The first is when a statute says in so many words that it is stripping immunity from a sovereign entity. The second is when a statute creates a cause of action and authorizes suit against a government on that claim.” The immigration and constitutional law scholars supporting “Opportunity for All” argue that **IRCA fails the clear statement rule**, unlike several other statutes that satisfy the clear statement rule about the intent to abrogate the states’ sovereign immunity by defining entities or persons in such a way as to bind the states, including the 1972 amendments to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 1966 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), and the Rehabilitation Act.

This clear statement rule requires Congress to invoke that abrogation of sovereign immunity must be “**unmistakably clear in the language of the statute**.” Passage of IRCA in 1986 was the year after the Supreme Court’s clear statement rule that was part of the holding of Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon.

We highlight IRCA-related Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity legal cases not mentioned in the Opportunity for All legal scholars’ memorandum nor in Fishman’s critique. This small body of cases addresses the question of whether public universities and other state agencies have Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity from private lawsuits brought under IRCA’s protection against employers discriminating based on national origin and/or citizenship status. An important case in this regard is Hensel v. Office of Chief Administrative Hearing Officer, in which the Tenth Circuit held that **IRCA had not waived the states’ Eleventh Amendment immunity**, resulting in the dismissal of Hensel’s claims against the University of Oklahoma. The Tenth Circuit’s ruling closely tracks the aforementioned immigration and constitutional law scholars’ arguments, citing Atascadero State Hospital.

More recently in 2023 (after the immigration and constitutional law scholars’ memorandum) the federal district court in Hossain v. Job Service North Dakota reached a similar conclusion in rejecting plaintiff’s claim that a state agency/department he previously worked for had waived its Eleventh Amendment immunity vis-a-vis IRCA (citing Hensel): Hossain asserts that JSND has generally waived its sovereign immunity because it has accepted federal funds. However, given the explicitness Congress has employed with respect to other statutes, Hossain has not shown that Congress unequivocally intended to abrogate the Eleventh Amendment in IRCA. IRCA is devoid of any textual support by definition or reference for the proposition that a “person” or “entity” includes the State. Absent explicit language, the court cannot find that IRCA was intended to subject the state to suit in federal court.

The district court’s ruling in Hossain was recently affirmed without comment by the Eighth Circuit. While the Ninth Circuit did not reach the exact state agency IRCA question referenced above in Hensel and Hossain, it did apply parallel reasoning in General Dynamics Corp. v. United States in rejecting the party’s implied waiver argument about IRCA and federal sovereign immunity.

In addition to the above cases, neither the “Opportunity for All” immigration and constitutional law scholars’ memo nor the critique by Mr. Fishman delve into administrative law rulings that reach questions of IRCA and Eleventh Amendment-based state sovereign immunity. As we show below in Table 5, the **strong preponderance of these administrative law rulings provide support for the “Opportunity for All” advocates** in the same way as the Hensel and Hossain cases discussed above-by finding that public universities and other branches of state government have Eleventh Amendment immunity from private lawsuits brought under section1324b of IRCA.

TABLE 5: Adminstrative Law Judge (ALJ) Rulings on IRCA Section1324b Finding State Entities Have Immunity

We did not identify ALJ cases where public university systems were deemed not to have immunity from IRCA. However, unlike the ALJ cases in the table above, we did find three ALJ cases where either a city or a community college were public entities not deemed to be an arm of the state, and thus other ALJ rulings find those entities do not have sovereign immunity from IRCA lawsuits. In the Ninth Circuit, community colleges are often regarded as “dependent instrumentalities” of the state for Eleventh Amendment immunity purposes, but there may be more variation on that question nationwide. For these reasons, there is more nuance to the question of community colleges-which may be relevant in a state like California should there be future legislative efforts along the lines of the A.B. 2586 “Opportunity for All” bill that was vetoed in 2024.

The aforementioned cases regarding IRCA and the absence of abrogation of sovereign immunity are relevant disconfirmation evidence grappling with the text and statutory intent of IRCA but are not dispositive evidence regarding the underlying question of IRCA’s application to state governmental entities as employers. Regarding this second question we reiterate that the text of the IRCA statute does not specify that it applies to state governments even though that should be obligatory under the Supreme Court’s long-standing “clear statement” rule, that there is not (and should not be) what might be called an “anti-immigration ex ante policy preference exception” to the clear statement rule, and we refer readers to the recent article by Arulanantham and Hairapetian for a detailed analysis of these legal arguments.

The fact that the 1987 IRCA regulations define “entity” as including “**governmental body**” (without specifying state governments) is not persuasive because a federals agency’s interpretive gloss in the regulation (not derived from the statutory text and contra the “clear statement” rule) simply begs the question about whether the DHS agency’s reliance on such an interpretation amounts to exceeding its statutory authority (including because of the 1996 IIRIRA’s amended definition that “entity” for IRCA purposes included the federal government but once again was silent about state governments). Consistent with the arguments about IRCA by the Opportunity for All immigration and constitutional law scholars, the 1986 House Report for IRCA does not contain clear indications that IRCA was intended to apply to state governments as employers. Finally, after the Court’s recent repudiation of the *Chevron* doctrine (troublesome in a host of other administrative law areas where an agency’s scientific expertise matters more than here) courts are not permitted to defer to an agency’s interpretation simply because a statute is ambiguous.

B. Private-ish Activism: Voluntary Fee to Unlock Private Matching Funds

The idea in this section carries less legal risk compared to the sovereign immunity argument in Part IV.A but also has not yet been tried at public universities in California or elsewhere. The core idea here-which is detailed in a separate article by one of us is a campus-level scholarship fundraising model that (1) starts with undocumented students and allies organizing support for a **voluntary student fee** to support undocumented students and (2) attempts to build private philanthropy and community matching support so that the cumulative dollars raised ends up being much larger. This voluntary fee-matching fund concept is informed by several design principles, especially organizing around undocumented college students’ strengths and resilience in social justice organizing/leadership and human capital.

The main legal strategy attraction of this proposal is that because the fee is **voluntary at the individual student level**, opponents should fail to satisfy federal court standing requirements even if one is clear-eyed that the conservative judicial movement over the years has “moved the goalpost” in other areas related to standing. A completely voluntary fee inherently does not generate standing opportunities for those students who are merely invited to pay such a fee. Here, students and groups or associations of students and their parents-who choose not to pay a voluntary fee would not have a “**concrete and particularized**” injury-in-fact. In *Day v. Bond* the Tenth Circuit found that out-of-state students did not have federal standing to challenge in-state tuition for undocumented students under a tuition cross-subsidy theory of harm/injury, and the logic of *Day v. Bond* would apply *a fortiori* here because a voluntary fee policy (which many public universities have) like UC’s PACAOS 90 expressly directs that the “**actual costs**” (i.e., overhead costs of collecting the fee via the University billing system) are to be “**borne by the Registered Campus Organization**” so there is not a cross-subsidy of University funds. Along somewhat similar lines, in Marderosian Trust, the estate of a donor’s private scholarship fund administered through the University of Illinois’s foundation sought to exclude undocumented students with a very attenuated claim of standing in an effort to enjoin the Illinois in-state tuition law for Dreamers, and the district court dismissed for lack of standing.

Conversely, if other students were to tactically choose to pay a voluntary fee they really opposed in an attempt to preserve federal court standing, the cases from the Supreme Court, within the Ninth Circuit and elsewhere, indicate that such students would **lack standing for having created a self-inflicted injury** (i.e., one not “fairly traceable” to the conduct of the university or student organization raising funds). The core requirements of federal standing-injury in fact, causation by defendant and redressability-were reinforced in the Supreme Court’s latest ruling related to mifepristone (the pregnancy termination drug), FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.

Turning to state law in California, there are more permissive standing requirements than in federal court, but it is also true that there are more favorable substantive law rulings in California and other state courts that have reached relevant questions related to PRWORA and IIRIRA.

C. Partnering with Progressive Philanthropy Matters

Given the gridlock at the federal legislative level with respect to immigration reform and the legal difficulties of **DACA** in the current legal environment, one important area to look at (as part of an ensemble of strategies) to improve prospects for undocumented college students is **progressive philanthropy acting as “institutional entrepreneurs**” that advance change via community investments and partnerships. As Cass Sunstein observed many years ago, learning from “norm entrepreneurs” and the processes by which norms can change (sometimes rapidly) is an important ingredient in the successful change of law and policy. The role of progressive philanthropy in partnering with community and undocumented student/ally activists and with university administrators to advance the larger social movement for undocumented student rights in higher education is an underanalyzed area of scholarship; Kyle Southern’s doctoral dissertation, discussed below, is a notable exception.

Southern found manifestations of institutional entrepreneurship in two case studies, including a single former foundation program officer who had disproportionate influence in founding a multistate network of community colleges dedicated to growing the movement to support undocumented students and a different partnership modality, a leading flagship public research university (clearly UC Berkeley, though anonymized), that “didn’t have any’ internal dollars for this work when it began; the institution’s chief executive officer elevated student experiences in a way that compelled an initial grant investment to make Undocumented Student Services possible” in tandem with “a set of on-campus institutional entrepreneurs who brought their personal identities and professional values to bear to establish an undocumented student resource center. Without a willing national foundation partner, they ‘hustled’ their way toward building a comprehensive model that larger foundations eventually sought out as a potential grant recipient.” More recently the $40 Million California Campus Catalyst Fund carried forward this work of expanding undocumented student services centers, as do no-profits like FWD.US. Such efforts tend to focus investment where there is “**skin in the game**” in matched institutional commitment, and where there are ground conditions of student and community activism and networks sharing best practices.

Some in progressive philanthropy distinguish between foundations investing in “**retail**” (direct scholarship assistance) versus activities at the “**wholesale**” (community service grants to groups close to the point of activity), but this dichotomy is somewhat of an oversimplification. For example, **TheDream.US is the largest private scholarship program for undocumented college students** and presently awards substantial scholarships covering tuition and fees to several thousand (freshman-to-senior) students at American universities and colleges. TheDREAM.US affiliates with scores of partner colleges where selected undocumented scholarship recipients may enroll, and partner colleges go through a benchmarking and strategic assessment process with the fund in order to assess strengths and weaknesses in order to build up their profile of support services and characteristics for undocumented students.

A half-dozen of the CSU and UC campuses in Northern California included in our data set had scholarship partnerships with TheDream.US in the late 2010s, until 2020 when TheDream.US made the difficult decision to sunset new scholarships with California and Washington universities and to redeploy those funds to states where undocumented students face even larger challenges and lack of financial aid. We did not have the granular data on the number and duration of TheDream.US scholarships to test if this decline in private scholarships was a contributing factor (less salient than the fall of **DACA**) for our results in Part II, but the magnitude of UC and CSU new Dream Act awards declining by half since 2016-17 poses the policy question of whether as a matter of comparative return on investment (i.e., “moving the needle” on number of students reaching graduation per dollar expended) if it would be sound fund stewardship to have some kind of successor/different scholarship partnership program for some public universities in California (even if smaller on a per student basis than what is being offered in “red states” without financial aid).

In a financial support environment without **DACA** and without comprehensive immigration reform or a federal Dream Act, **progressive philanthropy dollars could make a difference with seed funding to scale up campus centers** that effectively train and position undocumented students for entrepreneurial success after graduation.

IV. CONCLUSION

For nearly a quarter-century as efforts to pass versions of a federal DREAM Act ultimately failed to become law, experimentation at the state level took on greater significance in response to gridlock at the federal level. For example, the first state to figure out how to pass a law that overcame the legal restrictions of the 1996 immigration laws (IIRIRA and PRWORA) and provided in-state college tuition rates for long-time residents who are undocumented was **Texas in 2001** (in an era of greater legislative bipartisanship). Over the years, other states followed suit, and today about half of the states have some kind of out-of-state tuition waiver law for which some undocumented students are eligible.

California is an **upper bound test case** with the strongest, longest, and arguably most robust set of state laws and university-level aid policies to support undocumented college students, including in the realm of financial aid. Even so, given the gradual demise of **DACA** for recent cohorts of young Gen Z undocumented students hoping for access to quality higher education opportunities, the data in this article are the first to show that **new California Dream Act awards dropped by half at UC and CSU campuses between 2016-17 and 2022-23**. We make reasonable efforts to use “**difference in difference**” methods to support the inference that the demise of **DACA** is most likely the main cause, but with the caveat that we do not have the granular data to definitively establish the causal role of **DACA**’s decline in worsening enrollment outcomes for undocumented students at California public universities.

If **DACA is nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court**, that will only reinforce the need to once again seek experimentation and solutions at the state and university/college level until federal legislative reform in this area can finally become a reality. After all, the Supreme Court observed not too long ago that “public universities, like the States themselves, can serve as ‘laboratories for experimentation.” In Part III we outline several innovative pathways for further reform in support of undocumented students, including ideas that may make some university trustees and administrative leaders uncomfortable, and areas where progressive philanthropy could make some seed funding investments that can be leveraged for larger impact. For both state-level reforms and for federal advocacy efforts with Congress and with **DACA**, the groundswell of undocumented student activism has always been a central part of the story, and this vital work by young people fighting for the inclusion of their dreams and aspirations as part of the fabric of American society will no doubt continue in the years ahead regardless of the legal fate of **DACA**.

APPENDIX: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON OUR DATA SET AND METHODS

A. Empirical Methods and Choices

As noted earlier, we employ a social science “**difference-in-difference**” analytic strategy that compares enrollment changes for undocumented Dream Act students with the corresponding pattern for a reasonably matched group of non-undocumented students, which are the low-income Cal Grant awardees at UC and CSU, respectively, over an eight-year span. Appendix Tables 1 and 2 provide an overall profile of the subset of Dream Act recipients in 2022-23 who were new (rather than continuing) awardees. These profile data are for those offered Dream Act and Cal Grant awards (about 11% of this group at UC choose not to accept the award).

Appendix Tables 1 and 2 show that undocumented students to UC have **3.66 high school GPAs**, which are equivalent to the **3.67 GPAs** for other UC freshmen receiving Cal Grants. Those at CSU have **3.24 high school GPAs**, similar to the **3.30 GPAs** for other CSU freshmen receiving Cal Grants. The average ages are very similar. Dream Act students come from somewhat larger families and have lower family incomes in Appendix Tables 1 and 2, though if more of their parents’ work is in the informal economy compared to Cal Grant recipients, then the magnitude of the family income gap might be somewhat overstated. At the upper end of the distributions (e.g., eightieth and ninetieth percentiles), there will be a larger gap in family income reflective of the lower-middle income status of many Cal Grant award recipients as compared to Dream Act undocumented award recipients.

Comparison data like Appendix Tables 1 and 2 but for earlier years are substantially equivalent, confirming that these Dream Act and Cal Grant students are reasonably well matched academically. It is theoretically possible that there are “**selection on unobservable**” differences between Dream Act and Cal Grant students with equivalent academic credentials, but we are not able (and there is scant data in the national literature) to robustly test such possibilities. However, our data indirectly address that concern by including students at a fairly broad distribution of institutions ranging from large hyperselective research universities like UC Berkeley and UCLA to smaller and modestly selective regionally focused teaching universities like CSU Stanislaus and CSU San Marcos.

APPENDIX TABLE 1: UC Profile Comparisons of Newly Offered Dream Act Awardees and Cal Grant (FAFSA Filer) Awardees in 2022-23

APPENDIX TABLE 2: CSU Profile Comparisons of Newly Offered Dream Act Awardees and Cal Grant (FAFSA Filer) Awardees in 2022-23

In other circumstances where difference-in-difference methods are employed with undocumented students what is being studied are before-and-after a decisive point in time (e.g., an increase in tuition or the date a new in-state tuition law takes effect), but here we have the challenge that we seek to assess impacts from the **gradual strangulation of college students with DACA over a span of several years** (see Figure 1). We address this to some extent by looking at both overall Dream Act counts as well as new Dream Act awardees. Relatedly, difference-in-difference strategies can be limited when adopting a one-versus-one period/group framework, so empirical scholars instead encourage testing multiple bandwidths to evaluate whether results are sensitive to the width of the analytic window. We were able to address that concern in a limited way by measuring UC and CSU campus declines from two starting points (2018-19 and 2019-20).

Given our focus on **DACA** as an explanatory factor, we note there is **convergent evidence nationally** using a different enrollment estimation methodology. The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration estimated that there were approximately **408,000 undocumented college students in the United States in 2021 and 2022**, which represents a drop compared to 427,000 undocumented college students in 2019 and 450,000 in 2018. (more recent national estimates are forthcoming, but not available at the time of this writing.)

Unlike our data set on low-income undocumented students, some other difference-in-difference studies must use proxy measures for college students who are undocumented. Still other surveys of California undocumented college students must rely on networking outreach strategies to connect with participants and thus pose the challenges of unrepresentative sampling that is inherent in scholarly research with precarious undocumented students.

The extent to which our data set shows there are many more undocumented Dream Act students enrolling from California high schools (i.e., freshmen) compared to transfers from California community colleges (4:1 ratio at UC and 2.2:1 ratio at CSU in Appendix Tables 1 and 2) may surprise or otherwise be of interest to policy makers. These data patterns reflect the ambitions and choice patterns of undocumented students.

B. Additional Information on our Data Set of California Dream Act Awardees

We characterize our figures overall on California Dream Act awardees as “**lower-middle**” estimates for the number of enrolled undocumented students at UC and CSU. These numbers have sufficient reliability and internal consistency over time as to be a trustworthy measure of the real trends in the undocumented student population at California public universities, though patterns may be different in other states given differences in state laws and local conditions.

In California the A.B. 540 in-state tuition bill can lead to the intuition that studying “A.B. 540 students” would be empirically preferable. We disagree because it is too often overlooked that California’s A.B. 540 nonresident tuition waiver law (by legislative design) includes both undocumented students as well as a significant plurality of “**California-ish**” documented/citizen students who lost their California residency. Thus, A.B. 540 *per se* is an unsatisfactory proxy for undocumented student status unless it is linked with, for example, filing a Dream Act application.

Our Dream Act award data set from CSAC do not include the following types of undocumented students:

• Undergraduates who previously had a Dream Act award but no longer have one because they exhausted their four years of eligibility (e.g., fifth-year seniors). This also applies to undocumented transfer students age twenty-eight and older. This group of previously eligible students likely accounts for a large share of the gap (discussed below) between Dream Act applicants and awardees.
• Very small numbers of undocumented students who are from middle-income families and thus did not apply for a Dream Act award or applied and were not eligible.
• Small-middle but growing numbers of graduate and professional school students.

As a practical example integrating some of the points above, recall UC’s aforementioned estimate in the run-up to the **DACA** case that there were approximately 4200 undocumented students at UC in 2016-17. With that context, here is why we report a lower figure of 3316 undocumented students in 2016-17 when both we and UC were relying on similar strategies tethered to data from the CSAC:

• The **4200** figure refers to the number of UC students who filed Dream Act applications;
• Of that number about **3641** were offered Dream Act awards because they met eligibility criteria (of those 500+ who were not eligible, most are low-income undocumented students who missed age/year and other eligibility cut-offs);
• Of that number **3316** UC students were actually paid Dream Act awards (the drop-offs at each stage are similar in other years).

From correspondence with the UC system’s financial aid director, of those who submitted Dream Act applications, he believes that approximately 95% either get a Dream Act or a UC Grant award, and thus are low-income students. Moreover, among Dream Act/CADAA filers at UC there are very few who are not undocumented students (e.g., those who filed this application by mistake).

Because the Student Aid Commission’s data are reported with breakdowns by subtype of Dream Act (Cal Grant A, Cal Grant B), in our campus data request we asked that small samples (below ten) be masked in order to facilitate access to the data and to protect the privacy interests of undocumented students (i.e., to prevent imputed identification of individual undocumented students). This data limitation did not impact reporting precision for any of the nine UC system campuses with undergraduates. Note the caveat that we do not have data on UCSF, the tenth UC campus focused on health science graduate education that has a very small population of undocumented students.

This data masking of samples below ten did impact reporting precision for a small number of CSU campuses and was handled as described herein. The CSU campuses had small numbers of Dream Act students under Cal Grant A and large numbers under Cal Grant B (the reverse of UC). Thus, if in a given year a smaller CSU campus had 135 Cal Grant B undocumented students and its number of Cal Grant A students was masked because it was less than ten but not zero, we made the simplifying assumption that the number was five so that the total Dream Act awardees for that campus in that year would be estimated as $140 (135+5)$. These small imprecisions in our estimates for some CSU campuses would have been more prevalent if we listed data for all twenty-three CSU campuses. Instead, for data privacy and other reasons, we made a prudential choice to report separate data only for the fifteen CSU campuses with the largest number (89.6% of CSU’s total) of undocumented students attended by applying a threshold of reporting campuses if there were at least 150 undocumented students during the peak years in our data set. We did not separately report on eight CSU campuses with smaller numbers of undocumented students (representing 10.4% of CSU’s total).

C. A Closer Look at Alternative Hypotheses

This article attempts a “**first pass**” analysis of very recent data on trends with low-income undocumented students at California universities and the possible relationship with the slow demise of **DACA**. We do not utilize the type of granular individual student records researchers preferred when studying undocumented student enrollments many years in the past. Our “**difference in difference**” control groups of other UC and CSU Cal Grant students are important in likely disconfirming some kinds of rival hypotheses, but are not sufficient for other kinds of alternative hypotheses for which trends for citizen/resident high school or college students are not relevant.

One competing (or partly competing) hypothesis we take seriously is that the recent decline in UC and CSU Dream Act students could be partly a reflection of **declines in college-ready undocumented students graduating from high schools in California**. This question weaves together two strands-one parallels our **DACA**-decline hypothesis but is beyond our direct measurement, and one is a genuine alternative hypothesis.

Regarding the former, multiple studies show that the introduction of **DACA** over a decade ago had a net positive effect on inducing undocumented youth to achieve higher high school graduation rates, so the gradual constriction of **DACA** in more recent years poses the converse question about weakening undocumented students’ high school graduation rates. Likewise, immigration enforcement actions and arrests by ICE, which accelerated during the Trump era, correlate with greater absenteeism and lower academic achievement by K-12 undocumented students (which can dampen the number of high school graduates years later).

The second strand of this question is whether a possible decline in undocumented high school graduates reflects **decreased immigration patterns from earlier years**, which is a genuine alternative hypothesis. This question is more difficult to assess directly than one might suppose for a combination of reasons: (1) The Presidents Alliance’s (and similar) estimates of undocumented high school graduates only go back a few years, and the ACS microdata sample from 2021 (showing much lower totals in California than in 2019) used for these estimates are better at the national level and tend to become more “choppy” when using thin slices of cohort data at the state level; (2) the Presidents’ Alliance relied on MPI estimates from the ACS for 2019 but switched to FWD.US estimates (using a similar methodology) for 2021; (3) California’s Department of Education and other official sources do not longitudinally track undocumented high school graduates *per se*; (4) undocumented high school graduates in California are of course heterogenous with respect to when they came to the United States (age of two, seven, eleven, etc.) so that broader estimates on the total population of undocumented people living in the United States and California are only indirectly informative for this question of interest.

We can triangulate data around this question and thereby provide some sense of its plausibility and parameters. One test is by widening our focus beyond UC and CSU to also look at new Dream Act Awards for students in the California community colleges (CCCs). Appendix Figure 1 displays new Dream Act awardees at the CCCs alongside our earlier findings on UC and CSU. Unlike the 51% and 48% declines at UC and CSU, there was only a **5.3% decline for the larger group of CCC Dream Act awards** between 2016 and 2017 and 2022 and 23 (with a larger one-year dip in 2020-21, likely due to the educational and economic hardships of COVID). Such Dream Act awards are open to students going directly to the CCCs out of high school (and recent high school graduates). Thus, the CCC data in Appendix Figure 1 do not suggest major declines in undocumented high school graduates in California.

On the other hand, the total number of new California Dream Act applications (driven by the larger numbers at the CCCs) were relatively stable in 2015-16 to 2019-20 but then declined in more recent years (again, this may be partly related to COVID but it continued in 2023-24). Concurrently, the percentage of CCC Dream Act offerees who accept these awards has increased substantially (from 61.5% in 2016-17 to 88.8% in 2022-23), which helps to explain the smaller net decline in those receiving CCC Dream Act awards.

Relatedly, it is possible in theory that a higher share of undocumented students in recent years are choosing the CCCs over UC and CSU based on affordability perceptions and ability to lower expenses by staying at home. However, there are large differences in the average high school grades of the CCC Dream Act students (2.97 GPAs) compared to the Dream Act students at UC (3.67 GPAs) and CSU (3.24 GPAs), and the convergence in those average profiles compared to 2016-17 is modest, which do not fit with that “**cascade to community colleges**” hypothesis (although we do not have granular data) to test this idea further.

Appendix Figure 1: New California Dream Act Recipients at UC, CSU and CCC

A second data source that is longitudinally tracked by the California Department of Education is English Learners by grade, here focusing on twelfth graders because high school graduates are not reported (English Learners includes both documented and undocumented students, but the CCC and English Learner data can be thought of as two bookends, one underinclusive and one overinclusive). Here, too, the English Learner data for twelfth graders in California (see Appendix Table 3 below) do not suggest there was likely a major downward trend in California undocumented high school students, as the twelfth grade English Learner totals were stable in 2015-16 through 2019-20, dipped for one year in 2020-21 (again, likely COVID related), and then reached new highs in 2021-22 and 2022-23.

APPENDIX TABLE 3: Twelfth Grade English Language Learners in California

All told, the evidence reviewed above about alternative hypotheses are mixed. There is some suggestion of decline in California undocumented high school graduates (particularly the Presidents Alliance’s microdata estimate for 2021, which may be subject to wider error bands for COVID and other reasons) but not good evidence of dramatic declines, and some of that decline is presumably **DACA** decline related. More and better data are needed on this question, which will take more time to accumulate.