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Growing up in Washington, D.C., Maria Ayala-Flores didn’t know much about her legal status. She knew she was born in El Salvador and that she and her parents had to renew their paperwork every 18 months. She also knew the United States was her home and had been since she came here as an infant.
She dreamed of going to college to pursue her own goals and to pursue opportunities her parents didn’t have. “I wanted to make my parents proud,” she said.
What she didn’t know was how tenuous her life in the U.S. was — or how her legal status would stand directly in the way of her college plans.
An estimated 11% of all students in American colleges and universities are immigrants, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute. About half of these 1.9 million students are naturalized citizens, while the other half hold a variety of non-citizen statuses. About 400,000 are undocumented, and more than 500,000 have legal status of some sort. Some are legal permanent residents. Others are refugees, asylum-seekers, and recipients of humanitarian parole. Some have temporary protected status because their countries of origin are too dangerous to return to.
For many immigrant students, the American higher education system is a beacon of hope, one they hope will open the doors to a career and provide a sense of safety and stability. But these students face numerous barriers to accessing higher education, from the application process through enrollment and securing financial aid. These barriers mean these young people, many of whom are authorized to live and work here, find themselves shut out of many professions and struggling to meet their full potential.
With the number of immigrants holding these statuses steadily growing, some states are taking steps to open doors for these students. But others are keeping doors shut by restricting in-state tuition to citizens and green card holders. Now, with Donald Trump about to start a second term as president, immigrant students face even more uncertainty. Trump has vowed to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, something he attempted to do during his first term. For TPS holders like Ayala-Flores who have relied on the program for decades, these threats to the program are deeply unstabilizing.
“I started advocating for TPS since 2017, when I first heard that Trump was planning on terminating it completely,” said Ayala-Flores. She and her family became plaintiffs in a lawsuit that ultimately blocked the first Trump administration’s efforts to end the program. While she was proud to use her voice to advocate for her community, it also had a huge effect on her studies. She graduated from high school in 2016, shortly before Trump’s first term, and she wanted to feel like a normal college student.
“I felt bad because I have a voice and I can use it, but at the same time, I really wanted to focus on my personal life and what I want to do with school and what I want to do with my career,” Ayala-Flores said.
Immigration status can affect financial aid options
Ayala-Flores, now 26, and her parents have had TPS since 2001, when an earthquake made it unsafe for them to return to El Salvador. TPS has allowed her family to stay and work legally in the U.S.
For most of her life, Ayala-Flores didn’t think much of it. That changed in 2015, when she was 17 and started applying to college. In conversations with her high school’s college counselor, it quickly became apparent that neither Ayala-Flores, nor her parents, nor her counselor knew much about the intricacies of TPS, including whether or not she would qualify for financial aid.
Many immigrants hold a variety of non-resident statuses, meaning that they cannot apply for legal permanent residency, more commonly referred to as a green card, or U.S. citizenship. These statuses allow them to stay, and often work, in the U.S. legally for a predetermined amount of time, sometimes with the possibility to extend, but they do not not put the holder on a pathway to permanence. TPS is one of these legal statuses. In the eyes of the federal government, holders of TPS status are not “eligible non-citizens” and cannot apply for federal financial aid.
So while Ayala-Flores could still apply to colleges, she would need to rely on private scholarships, savings, and loans to pay for school. Despite getting a small scholarship, Ayala-Flores and her family couldn’t cobble together enough to attend a four-year university. Instead, after graduating from high school, she enrolled in nearby Montgomery College, a community college close to home.
It would take Ayala-Flores seven years to cross some of the hurdles. By the time she finally earned her associate degree in 2023, she was no longer a teenager but a young adult with the dreams of a bachelor’s degree still just out of reach. As a first-generation college student, Ayala-Flores always believed that a bachelor’s degree was the key to future success. She wanted to study math and considered being a teacher, but she wasn’t sure what she could do with just an associate degree.
Immigrants fleeing political upheaval struggle with paperwork requirements
In August 2021, at the age of 19, Farahnaz Ibrahimi escaped from Afghanistan as American forces withdrew and the Taliban took control. Ibrahami was an athlete: a champion martial artist, and an accomplished mountain climber. An American organization called Ascend had taught her how to climb, and Ibrahimi feared that her affiliation with Americans would put her in danger.
She wasn’t sure what life would look like under Taliban rule, but she knew that girls’ participation in sports and school would likely come to an end. When Ascend offered help to leave Afghanistan, Ibrahimi took it, hopeful that her life in the U.S. would mean more freedom to follow her passions.
Ibrahimi landed in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a type of visa called humanitarian parole. It allowed her to live and work legally in the U.S. while she applied for asylum, but, much like TPS, parole itself would not put her on a pathway to permanent residency. Ascend volunteers had organized a “sponsor circle,” or a group of families that offered to host Afghan parolees. The organizer of that circle, Anne McLaughlin, is a professor at North Carolina State University, and soon after arriving in Raleigh, Ibrahimi began working on her college application. Her eyes set on one school: NC State. But Ibrahimi’s application ground to a halt when the school required a copy of her high school transcript.
This standard request was impossible for Ibrahimi. Even if there was reliable internet, the Taliban had completely shut down her high school back in Kabul, and there was no way to access her transcript. Ibrahimi thought that if she could just explain the situation to the admissions office at NC State, they would see why she couldn’t provide her transcripts. But, she says, they would not budge.
Jon Westover, associate vice provost and director of admissions at NC State, confirmed that the Office of Undergraduate Admissions does require all first-year applicants to provide official high school transcripts. But, he added, they often point refugee and displaced applicants to resources such as the World Education Services (WES) Gateway Program, which helps applicants create records of their education when official transcripts aren’t available.
Unfortunately, WES services didn’t help Ibrahimi. When she left Afghanistan, she took nothing with her: no records, no diplomas, no documents. She had to make a split-second decision, leaving with just the clothes on her back.
Instead, Ibrahimi started looking at private colleges, hoping smaller universities would be able to make more individualized decisions. That’s exactly what she found at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts. Ibrahimi said the school had worked with displaced students, including other Afghans, before, and with fewer than 2,000 undergraduate students, she felt that she received more help and attention on her application. The college awarded her a private scholarship, and Ibrahimi was thrilled.
But moving to Massachusetts was hard. The community she’d established in the United States was all in North Carolina, and when she developed health problems, she knew she couldn’t stay there. She moved back to Raleigh to figure out her next step.
NC State still wouldn’t grant her any exceptions, so after a semester at Bard, Ibrahimi turned to community college, as Ayala-Flores had done. She enrolled at Wake Tech Community College in the spring of 2023 without her high school transcripts, but because she couldn’t prove she had taken any classes, she needed to start over, taking math and science classes that she had already taken in Afghanistan. It felt like a big waste of time – and money.
Ibrahimi, like Ayala-Flores, also struggled with financial aid. As a humanitarian parolee, she was not eligible for in-state tuition in North Carolina, but she was eligible for federal aid. However, to receive that aid, FAFSA required her parents’ bank account information and their signatures.
That was impossible. Ibrahimi’s parents have never had a bank account, her mother is illiterate, and with the unreliability of the internet across Afghanistan, Ibrahimi was barely in touch with her family once a month. She had no idea how she could get them to sign forms about their finances. “Here everything is about paper,” Ibahimi said. “They don’t trust you if you don’t show them a paper.”
Many immigrants don’t qualify for in-state tuition
The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a group of college and university leaders, is working to increase understanding of how immigration policy affects students through its digital project, the Higher Ed Immigration Portal. Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Alliance, said the barriers Ayala-Flores and Ibrahimi have faced are common among displaced and refugee students who often struggle to access reliable information about how their status affects their college applications.
The latest report from the Alliance concludes that “providing comprehensive training to counselors working with undocumented, refugee, asylee and other non-immigrant student populations could affect the rates at which they enroll in higher education programs across states.” High school counselors and college admissions offices are often unprepared for unique cases, making it difficult for students to know who to turn to for help.
For both Ayala-Flores and Ibrahimi, their inability to access financial assistance was the biggest barrier. Every state can determine for itself which statuses are “eligible non-citizen statuses” in terms of residency, which can affect access to state grants and scholarships but also the cost of college. In North Carolina, where Ibrahimi has been living, no matter how long she’s lived there, as long as she has humanitarian parole, she cannot be considered for in-state tuition and has to pay the much more expensive out-of-state rate. For Ayala-Flores in Washington, D.C., her status means she is ineligible for the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant.
According to the Alliance, 25 states in the U.S. provide in-state tuition for all students who reside in that state regardless of their status, including those who are undocumented. And while many states continue to limit access for undocumented students, some are finding ways to include students on temporary statuses, such as TPS and humanitarian parole. Kentucky created a new scholarship program to support immigrant students. Students with TPS and humanitarian parole, in addition to other temporary statuses, can now access separate funding to help offset the cost of their tuition.
But immigrant students must also overcome indirect barriers, Feldblum said. Some states allow people with a range of immigration statuses to get driver’s licenses and obtain occupational and professional licenses. Others limit access — and with it, the educational and professional opportunities of immigrant students.
Finally, knowing just how many students are in these complicated situations would help educators, counselors, and advocates make informed decisions about the best ways to help their students. Currently, however, no data is collected on exactly how many students with each type of visa are trying to enroll in higher education. There are estimates for how many are enrolled, but the data doesn’t account for how many are trying, but failing, to get there.
Step by painful step, students try to finish bachelor’s degrees
Ayala-Flores’ experience with community college was difficult. After first enrolling as a full-time student, she soon felt confused about what, exactly, she was doing there and how community college would help her reach her goals. Concerns about whether the first Trump administration would eliminate Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans made it difficult to focus on her studies. Amid the lawsuit and protesting on behalf of TPS recipients, she took a break before finishing her associate degree.
She hopes that isn’t the end of her educational journey. Her younger siblings were born in the U.S., and as she watched them go off to four-year universities to study mechanical engineering, it was hard not to feel jealous of the opportunities afforded to them by the location of their birth — opportunities Ayala-Flores had dreamed of, but could not have.
Still, Ayala-Flores doesn’t like to dwell on what could have been. Instead, she’s looking ahead, applying to four-year universities, focusing on her applications, and figuring out what financial aid might be available. It’s been difficult to find work with just her associate degree, she said, and she believes a bachelor’s degree will help her find more meaningful work, perhaps as a teacher.
For Ibrahimi, community college has been both helpful and frustrating. Because she couldn’t complete the financial aid application requirements, she’s been taking out loans to pay for her classes. Recently, she’s been able to prove her independence from her parents, which will help her access financial aid. She hopes to finish her associate degree in the fall of 2025 and then try, again, to transfer to NC State in pursuit of her bachelor’s degree.
When she first arrived in the U.S., Ibrahimi wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to study, but she knew she wanted to build things. Now, she’s eager to study engineering, and she’s working as an employee at NC State studying the impacts of distraction on students’ learning. But even as an NC State employee, she still cannot enroll as a student.
The biggest change has been the approval of her asylum application. Being an asylee means that she can become an in-state resident in the eyes of North Carolina and hopefully, eventually transfer to North Carolina State University. She’s determined to get her degree, despite all the setbacks.
“I wanted to see how it feels to study in peace,” Ibrahimi said, “to go without thinking if I will be alive after class.”
Lauren DeLaunay Miller is a freelance reporter and California Local News Fellow covering immigration, health, and the environment. You can reach her at lauren_d_miller@berkeley.edu.