Eideard

In a unanimous decision, the California Supreme Court ruled that illegal immigrants can be eligible for the same reduced tuition at public colleges and universities as legal residents of the state.

The ruling is the latest in a series of high-profile battles about state immigration policies. In addition to Arizona’s strict new immigration law, which the United States Department of Justice has challenged in court, nine other states have laws similar to California’s, with lawsuits pending in Nebraska and Texas.

Currently, students who attend at least three years of high school in California and graduate are eligible for in-state tuition at public schools, which can save them as much as $12,000 a year compared with students who come from other states.

Illegal immigrants remain ineligible for state or federal financial aid.

The California court ruled that the 2001 state law does not conflict with a federal prohibition on education benefits for illegal immigrants based on residency, in part because United States citizens from other states who attend high school in California may also benefit…

“This law makes higher education affordable for so many students who have the added difficulty of not being eligible for federal financial aid,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “If they are both ineligible for aid and then face higher tuition rates, it becomes virtually impossible for students to go on to higher education.”

In hard times – which is where we are at – I find it hard to reconcile decisions like this with budget-cutting for schools and education programs.

Liberal largesse is great in an economy of abundance. That has nothing to do with this chunk of economy after 8 years of Bush/Cheney corruption and theft.

Seventy-five leaders of the nation’s medical schools [.pdf] signed an ad in the Sept. 3 Washington Post urging Congress to act now to make sure that lifesaving stem cell research can continue in the wake of the Aug. 23 court decision prohibiting further federal funding.

The ad asks that legislators resolve the issue “once and for all” by passing legislation ensuring “continued federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research under the NIH’s rigorous ethical guidelines.”

Scientists and educators respond to the ideology of superstition, those who would halt federal support for stem cell research, an important and growing aspect of modern medicine.

Accounts of India’s changes focus on its economic growth, its surging migration, its skyward construction: changes in outward trappings. Less apparent, but no less momentous, is the decline and fall of the Anglicized ancien régime.

Some in the old elite saw change coming. They sold inherited businesses, learned new professions, reined in maharajah-like spending. But many did not, and now a wave of aspirations is rising from dank slums and hopeless towns, crashing at last into the delicate structures of unearned privilege.

Quietly but unmistakably, a whole country is changing hands.

In cities, middle-aged graduates of India’s leading colleges struggle to get their children into the same schools. With children of humbler backgrounds aiming higher than ever, even a 90 percent score on the entrance exam is no longer enough. This is the secret reason why, in a new age of Indian opportunity, many rich Indians still send their children abroad for college: not to escape India, but because their children are unable or unwilling to compete in an increasingly fair society.

The newspapers print photographs of those who “top” the exams. They are routinely scrawny and dark-skinned, drawn from the distant suburbs and villages, Indians whose ancestors might have cooked and cleaned for the ancestors of the students they now displace.

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