The planned merger of Georgia State University and Georgia Perimeter College into Georgia’s largest university has brought new questions about the involvement of immigrants without legal status.
Students without legal status from Georgia Perimeter will be allowed to continue their classes, but not on Georgia State’s flagship campus. Whether they are allowed to participate in student government and on sports teams, along with how much tuition they are likely to pay, are all unanswered questions.
The state’s university system prevents students without legal status from attending any Georgia institution with full enrollment that has turned away qualified applicants in the previous two years. In addition to GSU, that prohibition now applies to the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia Regents University and Georgia College and State University.
The University System anticipates retaining that policy for the respective campuses after GSU's merger with Georgia Perimeter, a mainly two-year college that operates five campuses in metro Atlanta and Newton County. That means that the 420 "undocumented students" Georgia Perimeter officials report enrolled at its campuses would not be allowed to attend GSU's main campus in downtown Atlanta, which offers four-year and graduate degrees, but will be allowed to continue classes on the former Perimeter College campuses.
“I don’t think it is really fair for us,” said Georgia Perimeter student Yael Hernandez. Hernandez, a native of Mexico now living in Roswell, has received a stay of deportation through a federal program for immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children.
“All we are trying to do is go to school. We are not asking for them to pay for our school. We are just asking for the same treatment,” he said. “I have lived here most of my life. I came here when I was eight years old. I have lived all my high school, middle school and elementary school years here.”
The anxiety that has surfaced is an unintended consequence of Georgia’s attempts to respond to declining state revenues and to make its university system more efficient. The merger, which will be the sixth for the university system in the past three years, will make the new school the largest college in the state with more than 54,000 students.
Critics say that policy prevents Georgia from retaining some of its best and brightest students, many of whom are graduating from taxpayer-funded public high schools in the state. Students have regularly protested the policy at Board of Regents meetings and on university campuses. A protest and sit-in earlier this month at UGA led to nine arrests.
Supporters of the state’s admission policies say taxpayer-funded benefits should be reserved for U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.
“I’m opposed to illegal immigrants enrolling in the top universities,” said Phil Kent, a member of Georgia’s Immigration Enforcement Review Board. “It is very unfair for those who have snuck into this country to be taking these public benefits from our own folks.”
Georgia’s University System bars students like Hernandez from paying in-state college tuition rates, which are several thousand dollars below the out-of-state rates. In-state tuition at Georgia Perimeter is about $3,700 less per semester than the $5,034 out-of-state tuition cost.
In June, a Fulton County Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit seeking to reverse that policy. The 39 plaintiffs are now appealing to the Georgia Court of Appeals.
Committees working on the consolidation plan will have the next year to hash out those issues, system officials said. They anticipate a two-tiered structure of tuition rates and admissions standards for students entering the main campus versus those enrolling in associate’s programs at the two-year satellite Georgia Perimeter campuses.
Maria Carrillo Garcia of Roswell, a native of Mexico who has received a deportation deferral, is paying out-of-state tuition to attend Perimeter College. She worries about whether she will be able to finish her degree there after the merger.
“We don’t know the tuition rates — if they are going to go up any higher,” Garcia said.
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