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

Here is an article in the Journal of College and University Law that Bill Kidder and I did on the impacts of the slow demise of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy in college and university enrollments.

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 2018-19 and 2022-23 (the second finding reflects a delayed impact as earlier large cohorts took time to graduate).  Our third finding is that there were not 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.

KJ