LatinaLista — Though pundits, mainstream media and the political parties themselves have been obsessed over the push-and-pull direction of the Latino vote in this presidential election, one of the real issues that matters is being ignored — kinda.

The issue is the future of the Latino community and the nation. Not as it relates to today’s job situation or the economy or even healthcare, but education. The Schott Foundation for Public Education released today a new report, According to The Urgency of Now: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males, that finds less than 60 percent of Black (52 percent) and Latino (58 percent) male ninth-graders graduate from high school four years later.

Those numbers are alarming when compared to the graduation rate of White, non-Latino male ninth-graders which stand at 78 percent.

“We have a responsibility to provide future generations of Americans with the education and the skills needed to thrive in communities, the job market and the global economy. Yet, too many Black and Latino young boys and men are being pushed out and locked out of the U.S. education system or find themselves unable to compete in a 21st Century economy upon graduating,” said John H. Jackson, president and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education. “These graduation rates are not indicative of a character flaw in the young men, but rather evidence of an unconscionable level of willful neglect, unequal resource allocation by federal, state and local entities and the indifference of too many elected and community leaders. It’s time for a support-based reform movement.”

The basic difference in graduation rates can be due to the fact that more Latino and Black male high school students are suspended from school at higher rates than their White peers. Removed from the school campuses and placed in alternative school settings for extended periods of time leaves these students with the impression that educators don’t care about them. In the end, they ask themselves why they should care about education.

Another report released today that echoes the same sentiment finds that Latino and Black students are experiencing one of the most segregated educational systems of all times.

The Civil Rights Project’s report, E Pluribus…Separation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students reveals:

…segregation has increased seriously across the country for Latino students, who are attending more intensely segregated and impoverished schools than they have for generations. The segregation increases have been the most dramatic in the West. The typical Latino student in the region attends a school where less than a quarter of their classmates are white; nearly two-thirds are other Latinos; and two-thirds are poor. California, New York and Texas, all states that have been profoundly altered by immigration trends over the last half-century, are among the most segregated states for Latino students along multiple dimensions.

The Civil Rights Project report’s findings of deepening segregation may explain why graduation rates are so low for Latino and Black students.

The consensus of nearly sixty years of social science research on the harms of school segregation is clear: separate remains extremely unequal. Schools of concentrated poverty and segregated minority schools are strongly related to an array of factors that limit educational opportunities and outcomes. These include less experienced and less qualified teachers, high levels of teacher turnover, less successful peer groups and inadequate facilities and learning materials. There is also a mounting body of evidence indicating that desegregated schools are linked to important benefits for all children, including prejudice reduction, heightened civic engagement, more complex thinking and better learning outcomes in general.

One interesting takeaway from the Schott Foundation report was that in those schools in states that had very few Black males enrolled in their state schools, the Black students graduated at much higher rates. The thought behind the success was because these students weren’t confined to a school that was substandard, showing that a Black student given the same opportunities and school environment as their (White) peers could do as equally well, if not better.

Logic would dictate that the same would be true for Latino students.

The time to reform education, upgrade buildings and school resources has never been as imperative as it is today. It’s an issue that deserves both candidates’ full attention and not a backhanded acknowledgement. Without the proper investment today, these same students will comprise the so-called 47 percent of Americans tomorrow who will need the safety net programs derided by conservatives, not because they feel entitled but because they want to survive.

LatinaLista — Many college students across the country are beginning to settle into a routine for the new school year. For those at universities, the first football game of the season has been played which always signals that school has officially begun.

For many undocumented students, this school year signifies a milestone in their lives. Though many have been able to attend private or public colleges in the past, and some even pay in-state tuition, the authorization from the Obama administration for the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) program, which defers deportation for these students, is a long-awaited prayer answered for them.

So far, out of 82,000 applications received, 29 have been granted deferred status.

Daniela Pelaez will attend Dartmouth under new relaxed deportation rules announced by President Obama in June.
(VPR/Charlotte Albright)

Needless to say, there is a higher awareness of undocumented students and higher education among the media because of DACA and some of the harsh critics of the program. The following is a Friday round-up of some of the headlines of undocumented students and higher education:

Undocumented Immigrant Starts Classes At Dartmouth

Public College In Arizona Breaks With Governor, Offers In-State Tuition To Undocumented Immigrants

Fox News Exclusive: UCLA shuts down controversial illegal immigrant college program

Despite Obama Immigration Policy, Young Immigrants Find College Elusive

Mass. college offers undocumented immigrant scholarship

Effort tries to get undocumented immigrants college financial aid

Smoother Access to Higher Education Within Undocumented Immigrants’ Reach

California Dream Act: 9,000 undocumented college applicants qualify for state aid

LatinaLista — The 2012-2013 school year is barely underway and two separate and disturbing analyses of the nation’s public education system released today underscore that the continuing challenge facing students of color in their quest for academic success lies outside student control.

For the first time, data is available showing what schools are spending on students and on teacher salaries. Two areas that not only impact educational outcomes for students on campus but can distort the true state of a school’s effectiveness in providing the necessary services to their students.

Almost 40 percent of Latino and black children attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are nonwhite. In other words, public schools still remain segregated. This segregation is reflected in the title of the new report Unequal Education:
Federal Loophole Enables Lower Spending on Students of Color, published by the Center for American Progress.

The report’s author discovered some unsettling facts that help explain why schools whose student bodies are comprised mainly with students of color fare so much worse than white-dominant schools in the same district:

Schools with 90 percent or more students of color spend a full $733 less per student per year than schools with 90 percent or more white students. What does that add up to? On average, the high-minority schools have 605 students. This average school would see an annual increase of $443,000 in state and local spending if it were brought up to the same per-pupil spending level as those schools with very few nonwhite students. This is enough to pay the average salary for 12 additional first-year teachers or nine veteran teachers.

Having more teachers on campus would relieve over-crowded classrooms, more opportunity for students to get one-on-one attention from teachers and create a more conducive environment for learning. If more money was spent on students of color, it would allow for not only upgrading the maintenance of these schools servicing a predominantly student-of-color population but enable more textbooks to be bought, more technology to be used and truly help level the playing field between schools and school districts in creating a more equitable educational experience for all students of any district or state.

Yet, as the second report released today shows, unless educators are given the proper resources to help students-of-color academically achieve, they will always be behind.

The ACT released the report, Condition of College & Career Readiness 2012 and highlighted a disturbing find: 60 percent of 2012 high school graduates are at risk of not succeeding in college or being ready for their careers.

And who are the 60 percent?

College readiness levels remain particularly low among African American and Hispanic students. None of the four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks were met by more than half of students in those racial/ethnic groups.

Both the ACT and Center for American Progress reports are in direct contrast to what is known about the aspirations of Latino students — they want to succeed in school and they want to go to college. A recent Pew report detailed how Latinos are now the largest minority group on the nation’s college campuses.

From the two reports featured in this post, we know that the students who are starting college this school year worked against the odds to get where they are. Unfortunately, given the ACT report, their struggle to stay in college is only just beginning and will boil down to a simple case of ganas — how much they want an education because so far the system has done everything in its power to discourage them.

LatinaLista — It’s long been known that Latino and black students suffer the brunt of school suspensions and juvenile detention. Today, the Civil Rights Project released a study Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion from School which reports:

• National suspension rates show that 17%, or 1 out of every 6 Black school- children enrolled in K-12, were suspended at least once. That is much higher than the 1 in 13 (8%) risk for Native Americans; 1 in 14 (7%) for Latinos; 1 in 20 (5%) for Whites; or the 1 in 50 (2%) for Asian Americans.
• For all racial groups combined, more than 13% of students with disabilities were suspended. This is approximately twice the rate of their non-disabled peers.
• Most disturbing is the fact that one out of every four (25%) Black children with disabilities enrolled in grades K-12 was suspended at least once in 2009-2010.
• Students with disabilities and Black students were also more likely to be suspended repeatedly in a given year than to be suspended just once. The reverse was true for students without disabilities and for most other racial/ethnic groups.

This report comes on the heels of a conference in Cincinnati, Ohio last month sponsored by the Children’s Defense Fund about meeting the educational needs of children in the juvenile justice system. In the first such large-scale meeting of the child advocacy organization in a decade, panelists discussed how children in justice detention facilities had higher needs than the general child population.

These needs include disproportionately higher rates of learning disabilities, mental health disorders, and lower reading and math proficiencies. They are also disproportionately made up of African-American, Hispanic and other minority youth…

Most schools within juvenile justice centers are ill equipped to deal with these high-needs students, a challenge that is often made even harder by the presence of high security measures…

Conference speakers pointed out that in addition to not meeting the needs of these children there is a lack of public will to address the issue…

These are kids that a lot of people would rather forget about,” said David Sapp of the American Civil Liberties Union. It becomes a case of “out of sight, out of mind,” especially most people will never actually get to enter a detention facility and learn about the reality of its conditions, he said.

In the end, the children who are suspended from school lose out on getting an education and children who are in detention facilities, who are supposed to be getting another chance at an education, are losing out again. All the way around, the system is failing these children — who are being groomed to be society’s permanent underclass and perpetual throwaways of society.

LatinaLista — A New York Times article points out that in the rush to bridge the digital divide — giving low-income families access to computers and other high-tech tools to access online resources — it has created an unintended consequence, the “time-wasting gap.”

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

The article’s author says that policymakers and researchers say the reason for this growing “time-wasting gap” is because parents with limited education don’t know how to limit and monitor their children’s use of technology.

In fact, the Federal Communications Commission is so concerned that they are considering spending $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. The corps would be comprised of thousands of trainers who would go out to schools and libraries to teach “productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers.”

While there’s truth to the fact that parents do need to set limits and monitor their children’s use of technology, it’s also true that assuming these children are wasting their time is wrong. There’s a reason why children of affluent families, or families who have discretionary funds left over from a paycheck, spend less time interacting with handy tech devices.

It boils down to money.

Families with extra money can pay to enroll their kids in organized activities that keep them busy, and out of the house. Families who are cash-strapped and for whom having their kids stay indoors is preferable to being outside subjected to increasingly hot temperatures, air pollution, neighborhood trouble-makers or limited play equipment would much rather opt that their children do something constructive like being online.

For Latinos, socializing online is a constructive activity. How soon we forget that it was because of that social networking online that a young Latino teen in Dallas was able to organize one of the biggest immigrant marches in the country and the city of Dallas.

And who is to say that online gaming is a waste of time? It’s role playing. These games allow players to step outside of their environment and experience something different. The games contain important lessons as well, believe it or not, like teaching players how to stay on task, persevere to the finish, be observant, analyze surroundings, react, etc.

Instead of spending $200 million to “teach” people all that can be done with the computer, the money would be better spent understanding the Latino culture and how families, who have historically been low-income, compensate for that lack of money by using the devices at their disposal to create their own entertainment.

If policymakers and researchers were really concerned, they would use that money as seed money to finance new games, apps and web sites that not only satisfy the entertainment needs of low-income families but also feature elements of the kinds of knowledge, skills and training that tomorrow’s workforce will need to know.

The first web site that could be financed would be one that would teach everything a digital literacy corp member would teach out in the field. Instead of spending money to send out someone, the web site could be accessed by a teacher or volunteer on site who could walk people through the information, administer a simple test after it’s done and award a certificate of completion.

It is important to know how to maximize the benefits of technology but it’s wrong for one group to assume that another is just “time-wasting” because they don’t use it in the same way.

LatinaLista — Mitt Romney is doing his best these days to keep up with President Obama in reaching out to Latino voters. Obviously, someone on his campaign realized that Latino voters can be a deciding factor in who wins the election in November.

Mitt Romney speaking before The Latino Coalition. (Photo: AP)

It was announced today that Romney accepted an invitation by the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO) to speak at their annual conference in June — a conference that will also host President Obama.

As a warm-up before his appearance next month at the NALEO conference, Romney spoke today before The Latino Coalition at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. It was an easy topic — education. He stayed on message and didn’t mention immigration once. Yet, though he said all the right things about educating Latino children — and how wrong can you go with education — there were some things he didn’t say that should tickle concern in Latino communities.

Romney started off strong by declaring, “I will give the parents of every low-income and special needs student the chance to choose where their child goes to school. For the first time in history, federal education funds will be linked to a student, so that parents can send their child to any public or charter school of their choice.”

He followed it with saying that he supported keeping federally-subsidized student-loan interest rates from doubling and expanding the availability of charter schools. Yet, his campaign made it clear that he also did not support any new money for federal education programs — something he didn’t say.

While it’s great news that low-income and special needs parents will now have a choice as to where to send their children, if programs are not in place to provide extra help and support to their students what good is it?

To basically infer that all federal education programs are worthless does a disservice to those students who need that kind of attention and help to progress academically. Rather than declare no new money will be given, wouldn’t the better approach be to evaluate each program, make the necessary changes, set new goals, procedures and accountability and save what works?

If a balanced approach towards educational programs aren’t taken that the Latino community may have a bigger problem down the road with school completion rates than what it has now — and what’s a community problem is a national one.

LatinaLista — Watching the fiasco unfold between the Susan G. Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood, two organizations that each have been a friend to the Latino community, reminds me of the old adage about three things one should never discuss in order to keep peace in a family — religion, sex or politics.

The Komen and Planned Parenthood dispute was all about sex and politics because of the issue of abortion. Now, Gov. Romney has weighed in on the battle and joined his fellow nominees by taking it a step further to attack the White House on the issue of contraception.

Romney took aim at recent regulations requiring women’s contraceptive services to be covered by insurance policies under the Affordable Care Act. The Catholic Church had sought a broad exemption for the many Catholic institutions in the country to recognize its canonical opposition to artificial birth control. Instead, the Department of Health and Human Services excluded only religious employers that primarily employ members of their own faith communities.

Any discussion that features religion, sex and politics is bound to bring division rather than unity. Yet, there is one issue where the three arguments converge seamlessly and pathetically — teenage pregnancy.

Because of religion, sex and politics, Latina teens still have the dubious distinction of having more “baby mamas” walking school hallways. Though the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy’s Latino Initiative reports that the birth rate for Latina teens is at its lowest on record, unfortunately, both “Latino teen birth and pregnancy rates are almost twice the national average and have declined only half as fast as national rates.”

It’s always been easy to blame the kids and the parents, and they do share the blame, but as more and more research is done, common sense is emerging that there are outside influences that play just as big a role as parents and self-responsiblity.

For example, religion. Whether it is Catholicism, Baptist, Evangelicalism or Muslim, each religion upholds the sanctity of life so high that contraception is either considered a sin or strongly discouraged. Teens who respected their religions, or the religions of their parents, would feel more guilty about using contraception to prevent an unwanted pregnancy rather than having illicit sex. That is, if they knew about contraception.

Sexuality education has been a hit and miss among school districts and states for as long as abstinence-only curriculum has been around. Most educators, parents and even students realize that the only way students can make informed choices about having responsible sex is to know the facts.

Some school districts are willing to teach medically accurate sexuality education in their schools but there are far too many that don’t. It’s resulted in kids getting half-truths and misleading information about a very important topic. The disparity has been so great, as the Latina teen pregnancy rates revealed, that last month the National Sexuality Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K-12 was released.

The document sets national core standards for school districts to be consistent across the country in what children learn about sexuality education.

Evaluations of comprehensive sexuality education programs show that many of these programs can help youth delay the onset of sexual activity, reduce the frequency of sexual activity, reduce the number of sexual partners, and increase condom and contraceptive use. Researchers recently examined the National Survey of Family Growth to determine the impact of sexuality education on sexual risk-taking for young people ages 15-19, and found that teens who received comprehensive sexuality education were 50 percent less likely to report a pregnancy than those who received abstinence-only education.

The goal is to keep children from having children, but when politics is interjected in the discussion, the message gets even cloudier.

A new study by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis found that “states with higher religiosity rankings and greater political conservatism had higher adolescent birthrates.”

“State adolescent births vary widely, and these disparities across states should be acknowledged as a major public health concern,” Cavazos-Rehg told LiveScience. She noted the difference in birthrates among girls ages 15 to 17 in Arkansas and New Hampshire. Arkansas, with high conservatism, had the highest birthrate in this study, 34.8 per 1,000 girls in this age range. New Hampshire, with high liberalism, had the lowest birthrate, 9.7.

If ever there was an argument that sex, religion and politics don’t mix when it comes to female sexual health, it’s in the numbers of young Latinas, and others, who are having babies before they finish school, before they understand what it means to be a parent, before they’re financially and emotionally ready — and before they can even vote.

LatinaLista — 2012 is only several hours away and, yet, neighborhoods and law enforcement are bracing, not for that New York Times Square ball to drop at midnight, but for those inevitable gunshots marking the new year.

Los Angeles Police Department's holiday campaign poster to get people to not shoot their guns to celebrate the New Year.

Some people think it’s ok to shoot their guns at midnight tonight. After all, they’re not shooting at anybody — it’s just air.

Unfortunately, these are the same people who probably never took a physics class or have even given much thought to the concept of gravity. In other words, what goes up must come down — somewhere. And it comes down at a rate of 200 feet per second and have enough force to penetrate a roof or a human skull, according to experts.

Usually, the sad stories that start off the new year have to do with someone innocent getting killed by New Year’s gunfire. That’s why cities across the country — from Los Angeles and Dallas to Montgomery, Alabama and Miami — have created campaigns to get people to not fire guns at midnight.

Far from being a right to shoot — if they legally own a gun in the first place — it’s not OK to shoot in city limits. For example, in many cities it’s a felony to shoot within city limits and/or fines for shooting a gun can range anywhere from a couple thousand dollars to $4,000 plus time in jail. If that bullet comes down and kills someone then it’s murder, no matter if it was an accident.

An anti-violence group on Chicago’s West Side took tonight’s threat of New Year’s gunfire a step further. CeaseFire, the anti-violence group, hosted a pre-New Year’s Eve peace summit Friday night with three hundred African-American and Latino young men.

“We’re doing our best to promote a peaceful New Year’s Eve – and talk to these young guys about not shooting their guns on New Year’s Eve and settling up their differences with other guys. Some of these conflicts are dealing with females as well,” said Illinois Director Tio Hardiman.

Hardiman points out that too many young people are too quick to draw their guns, not because it’s a gang thing but because it starts out being interpersonal violence which then spirals into gang-related violence. The problem is interpersonal violence can be sparked by a variety of stupidity — from having a guy make a pass at another guy’s girlfriend to drunk daring one another to someone who feels they were disrespected or excluded — all scenarios that can happen at any gathering of young people —

Like on New Year’s Eve.

At the end of a year that saw so much violence in every country of the world, it’s more than ironic that people would think shooting a gun is a peaceful act. After all, the very intent of pulling that trigger is to either stop a life in its tracks or take it.

Shooting a gun should never be confused with celebrating a new year — it’s just a stark reminder of how all our days are numbered.

(Editor’s note: Latina Lista has accepted participation in the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the US media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.)

LatinaLista — If ever there was doubt of whether or not college/vocational training is worth the expense, here comes the latest in what seems like an avalanche of reports detailing just how imperative higher education/training is for today’s worker.

The latest report zeroes in on workers in California, yet the report’s authors are quick to point out that what’s happening in California is happening across the country. Fragmented Economy, Stratified Society, and the Shattered Dream, published by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, finds:

…from the northern suburbs of Los Angeles County, through the metropolitan complex along the northern border of Baja California, is a diverse area containing 24 million people, with a disproportionate percentage of Latinos and African Americans who are facing an educational and economic disaster.

What makes this report different from the usual gloomy jobs report of Latinos and African Americans is that these researchers didn’t just look at unemployment, they looked at underemployment too. When both are taken into account, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for hope.

The report details how the gap in inflation-adjusted income has been more severe in California than in the U.S. as a whole.

Since 1979, high-wage California workers reported earnings that were substantially higher than their counterparts across the nation. However, while middle wageworkers have barely kept pace with inflation, California workers on the lowest end of the wage distribution scale have lost purchasing power as their inflation-adjusted wages have dramatically declined since 1979.

The findings are equivalent to the canary in the coal mine where what’s happening to the low-income in California will be repeated, if not already, in the near future across already disenfranchised communities in the country.

Some predictors of this trend include:

• From 2007-2009, while the unemployment for Latinos increased from 5.7% to 14.3%, the underemployment rates for Latinos in L.A. County have skyrocketed from 11% to 29.2%, by far the most dramatic increase of all races.

• For African Americans without a high-school diploma, the unemployment rate in California is above 31.6%, far higher than any other race or ethnicity African American high school dropouts suffer much more severe unemployment than dropouts of other races.

• Over 59% of construction workers live in Los Angeles neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. The ethnic make-up of the construction workers in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty throughout Los Angeles is: 88% Latino, 4% Black, 4% Asian, and 3% white.

• The official unemployment rate for those without a high school diploma increased 5.7% since 2007, compared to 8.8 percent for high school graduates, and 3.6 % for those with a bachelor’s degree. On the other hand, underemployment rates for California workers without a high school diploma have jumped 18.6% since 2007, compared to 14% for high school graduates, and 6.3% for individuals with a bachelor’s degree.

LatinaLista – The future of this country takes on desperate importance with each passing day given the ongoing debt debate, the continual low educational rankings of our school children compared to their global counterparts and the rising costs of higher education.

While some would debate the value of a college degree these days, there’s no doubt that in the long run a degree is worth the investment. Among immigrant-origin youth — children who are either immigrants themselves or the US-born offspring of immigrants — the importance of having higher education is understood, though not always achievable.

According to a new study published today by the Migration Policy Institute titled UP FOR GRABS:The Gains and Prospects of First- and Second-Generation Young Adults, immigrant-origin youth, ages 16-26, comprise one in four people in the nation.

All 11.3 million of them will be the nation’s workforce in the coming years but findings of the report paint a dismal picture of just how prepared tomorrow’s workforce will be considering that there are 3.2 million second-generation Latinos within this group who still lag behind their peers in walking across that stage.

According to the report:

While Hispanic second-generation women are enrolling in college at the same rate as third-generation non-Hispanic white women, with 46 percent enrollment, they trail their white counterparts by 18 percentage points when it comes to completing an associate’s degree or higher by the age of 26 (33 percent compared to 51 percent).

Without even looking at the report, one can guess why these young women aren’t finishing school by the age of 26 as their white peers seem to be doing — family/children responsibility, jobs, school affordability.

Taken all together, these reasons have always been enough to make any student appear to be a “professional student” and prolong the quest for that degree.

Some can stay on track and graduate but for too many “life” just gets in the way.

Because Latina students don’t finish, their job opportunities aren’t as good, as not only their white peers, but even other immigrant-origin youth.

Despite the gains for Hispanic immigrant-origin young adults (first-generation immigrants and the second-generation U.S.-born children of immigrants), their non-Hispanic counterparts have better education and labor market outcomes by and large – driven in part by the strong performance of first- and second-generation Asian youth. More than 53 percent of non-Hispanic immigrant-origin young adults had at least an associate’s degree by age 26, compared to 45 percent of third-generation whites.

The study underscores the fact that while Latino immigrant-origin youth have the ganas to go to school, unlike other demographic groups, Latino youth are more willing to put their education on the backburner when it comes to fulfilling family and economic responsibilities.

Authors of the report recommend:

…these prospective students will need flexible scheduling and financial aid. Their chances to succeed educationally given competing work and family-related pressures will be greatly improved if they are offered fast-track remedial courses, counseling, and mentorship programs on college campuses.

Findings reinforce the need for accessible pathways that allow students to make the transition among adult basic education, non-credit occupation training, and for-credit postsecondary certificate and degree programs without losing credentials. States can help this transition by determining which courses and programs are fully transferable from two-year institutions to four-year institutions.

And perhaps the most important recommendation:

The educational and economic future of a large number of first-generation youth depends on legislative immigration reform. The fact that a large share of first-generation youth is unauthorized suggests that access to many postsecondary education institutions and to good jobs will require immigration reform, such as enactment of legislation like the DREAM Act or more comprehensive measures.