Editorial: Region moves forward as tuition discrimination ends in junior college district

St. Louis Post-Dispatch - January 3, 2014

Until now, there was a group of students who graduated from Missouri high schools, lived in the state and attended St. Louis Community College but were still stuck with paying higher out-of-state tuition.

Those students were undocumented immigrants. They often were brought here by their parents as youngsters, even babies, and grew up as Americans in everything but the privileges of citizenship.

But when it came time to continue their educations — as they had been taught was important for success in the land of opportunity — they found themselves being discriminated against in the tuition arena.

That’s changing this month thanks to a decision by the community college board to calculate tuition for undocumented students with Missouri high school diplomas the same way it calculates tuition for all other state high school graduates.

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