Dreamers’ Scholarship Adapts to Hard Realities
In 2014, TheDream.US began providing full tuition college scholarships to undocumented students who qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The first press release about the scholarships has an optimistic tone:
“The program targets undocumented immigrant students who, as a result of their status, are not eligible to apply for federal financial aid to support a college education. While immigration reform may eventually address this issue, TheDream.US founders are not content to wait as the futures of these young Americans hang in the balance. Instead, they are building a fund that will allow these highly motivated students to get a college education so that they, too, can contribute to the prosperity of this nation.”
Hyein Lee, currently the director of measurement and evaluation for TheDream.US, notes that the program’s founders — Don Graham, Carlos Gutierrez, and Henry Muñoz — imagined the scholarships would become obsolete. The expectation was for Congress to pass legislation addressing the legal status of “Dreamers” whose parents had brought them to the U.S. without papers as children. Once Congress acted, Dreamers would become eligible for federal financial aid.
Nine years later, those expectations have not been realized and TheDream.US still exists. Today it actually serves far more students than it did in 2014. “Instead of scaling down, we’ve had to do the complete opposite, which is scale up at a rate and scale we hadn’t anticipated,” Lee says.
With the benefit of hindsight from 2023, it’s possible to see the expectation for immigration reform as naïve. Yet the political climate in 2014 was not as polarized as it is today. According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Republicans in 2014 favored finding a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants. In that same year, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, signed an endorsement letter in support of TheDream.US scholarships to DACA recipients. Other signers of this letter include Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, and Grover Norquist, a Republican advocate for tax reduction.
It’s quite surprising to see these names usually associated with right-wing politics on a letter supporting undocumented young people. Still, the signatures don’t indicate a bipartisan consensus on immigration during the Obama presidency. If consensus had existed, DACA wouldn’t have been needed. In 2012, Obama issued the executive order creating DACA because he was frustrated that Congress couldn’t manage to pass immigration legislation.
This executive order has provided temporary work permits and protection from deportation to over 800,000 immigrants who entered the United States without documents when they were children. The executive order specifies that DACA recipients must have continuously lived in the United States since June 15, 2007, and must have come to the United States before reaching their 16th birthday.
While DACA recipients became able to work legally, they couldn’t receive federal financial aid. But even before DACA came into existence, some undocumented students had been attending college, usually by taking just one or two classes at a time and paying for them out of pocket. According to Lee, when TheDream.US started awarding scholarships to DACA recipients in 2014, many applicants came from this group. They were often older than the average college student and were able to use the scholarship to finish the degree they had already started on their own.
In its first year, TheDream.US awarded 29 scholarships. Applicants were required have received either DACA or TPS, a program that grants non-citizen U.S. residents temporary protection from deportation for a variety of reasons. Scholarship recipients were therefore all able to get work authorization.
The number of scholarships ticked up quickly, with 476 awarded in the program’s second year. The most recent cohort, which started college in Fall 2022, includes 1,116 scholarships recipients. Altogether, 8,664 students have received scholarships since the program began. Data from the organization’s 2021 Impact Report indicate that scholarship recipients have higher persistence and graduation rates than the overall U.S. college population. Those who have already graduated work in a wide range of professional fields, including technology, health care, and social services.
But Donald Trump’s election in November 2016 made the TheDream.US rethink its application criteria, as ending DACA was one of Trump’s key campaign promises. In 2017, the program stopped requiring applicants to have DACA or TPS.
While Trump was unable to eliminate DACA, there have been numerous court challenges to Obama’s authority to create it. Right now, new DACA applications are not being processed. Moreover, undocumented high school graduates who turn 18 in 2023 are eligible for DACA only if they entered the country before they were four years old, since DACA applicants need to have come to the U.S. by 2007.
Over half of the most recent TheDream.US scholarship cohort does not have DACA or TPS, and thus lacks work authorization. These students cannot get regular college internships, and after graduation their job prospects are limited to areas where they can be paid as independent contractors.
The scholarship program has evolved to address these realities. Students now attend a career workshop the summer before they start college to learn about various types of independent contractor work and different ways to start their own businesses. According to Lee, during this workshop some scholarship recipients first realize they can’t “just apply for a job…at Facebook and Google.” The sudden realization can be traumatic for recent high school graduates looking forward to their first college semester.
The Dream.US can’t change the underlying causes of that traumatic moment. But the organization does what it can to help students navigate the challenges they face. It partners with the colleges students attend to provide counseling, and pays colleges to host events addressing topics like starting a business and getting a taxpayer identification number. It also has an internship funding program to provide students with stipends if they have unpaid internships and a fellowship program to provide stipends for students working with faculty on research projects.
“Our focus is to get as many students as we can to the finish line, to graduation,” Lee says. She adds that it can be difficult to convince some high school students without work authorization to pursue higher education.
“We always emphasize that a college degree is something that can’t be taken away from them,” she notes.
“We also feel a responsibility to educate higher ed institutions and employers about this population that is so talented, so motivated, and what we can do to better incorporate them into our workforce.”
