North Carolina’s community colleges must admit illegal immigrants as long as they are 18 years old and high school graduates, a legal decision that reverses a 2004 rule that gave campuses the option to say no.
Leaders at 37 of the 58 community college campuses statewide already had agreed to permit these immigrants to enroll in their schools.
But giving colleges the discretion to deny admission based on legal status in August 2004 runs counter to the system’s open-door admissions policy, community college attorney David Sullivan wrote in a memo to all campuses earlier this month. Before 2004, undocumented people weren’t supposed to enroll in degree programs at all.
“Colleges should immediately begin admitting undocumented individuals,” Sullivan wrote.
Sullivan said in an interview the change was based on a 1997 letter by the office of then-Attorney General Mike Easley to a local campus that said the college couldn’t set nonacademic requirements before a student can enroll.
The change is good news for the children of foreign workers brought to America while they were minors and want to contribute to North Carolina society, said Melinda Wiggins, director of the Durham-based Student Action with Farmworkers.
The admissions policy is largely in line with one for University of North Carolina system campuses, also approved in 2004.
