Ensure Immigrants’ Access to Lifelong Learning
While immigrant workers are heavily concentrated in the frontline industries fighting the pandemic, many others have lost jobs in industries that have been hard hit by the economic fallout and are unlikely to recover quickly.
In this environment, community colleges and adult education providers stand to play a vital role in helping immigrants and other affected workers pivot to gain new skills and access quality jobs. As colleges heed the call to design and implement new delivery models that accelerate completion of degrees and in-demand short-term credentials, it is critical that they build in the academic, social, and financial supports that many immigrants and English learners need to succeed in these programs. These include a remote learning infrastructure to bridge the digital divide between English learners and their peers at all ages and levels of the education system. The equity imperative has never been clearer; lack of access to technology threatens to irreparably widen these gaps.
Public funding for adult and family literacy for immigrants is also all the more critical today—in order to support multigenerational success, as many parents have been called on to play a larger role in ensuring their children’s learning stays on track amid school closures.
For immigrants who were already enrolled in higher education when the crisis hit—including the nation’s approximately 450,000 undocumented college students—financial and social support is absolutely critical to enable their persistence and completion. While the U.S. Department of Education has declared that undocumented students and those authorized by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) are ineligible to receive student emergency grants provided under the CARES Act, these restrictions are under challenge from a lawsuit brought by the California Community Colleges.
Leaders at the federal, state, and institutional levels must prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable groups of college students, including those with the most limited set of options for financial aid.