Aldo Mendoza has lived in Athens most of his life, graduated from its public schools and holds a worker’s permit and driver’s license through the federal policy Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
But he could not attend the University of Georgia.
And that, says a teacher, is a practical loss to the state and a moral failure. The Georgia General Assembly denies in-state tuition and Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship to undocumented immigrants and bans them from attending the state’s top five public universities, including the University of Georgia.
So, Mendoza attends the University of North Georgia, taking only two to three courses a semester because of the cost. Without qualifying for in-state tuition, he would have to pay $19,748 (out-of-state tuition) for a full academic year instead of $6,206 (in-state tuition).
That’s three times more than his high school classmates are paying, says Ashley Goodrich, a high school social studies teacher and a doctoral student at the University of Georgia in the College of Education’s Department of Educational Theory and Practice.
To read why Goodrich says this is an unfair policy and one that hurts the state as well as the students, go to the AJC Get Schooled blog.
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