The Higher Education Act (HEA) was supposed to have been renewed in 2013, but after the PROSPER Act H.R. 4508 passed the House Education and Work Force Committee on Dec. 13, 2017, the relatively small 600 page proposal has all but stopped. What with DACA shutting down budget deliberations in Congress twice in January and February, and the omnibus budget bill being the focus of March, there’s little time for the House (no less the Senate) to vote on the HEA prior to May. Republicans focus on new loan repayment benchmark for colleges, as well as a graduation-rate requirement for minority institutions. The American Council on Education may push that the focus be on diversity, inclusion and safety—the major issues of their three-day conference in Washington D.C.,  that took place March 10-13.

Expanded DREAM Act Could Encourage Visa “Overstayers”

The basic requirement for a DACA/DREAMer as stated in the DACA order and in the DREAM Act legislative proposals is anyone who “came in the United States before the age of 16.”  They have to have graduated from high school or the equivalent before the age of 31. (In Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s “Dream Act of 2017” S1615, the age of entry is 18 with no upper limit).  Most Americans are sympathetic about giving permanent legal status to young people brought in illegally by their parents as innocent small children.  But most Americans don’t know that DREAMers can have come in legally as well—as a tourist, a school exchange student or with their parents on a  temporary visas—and then decide as adults to overstay the visa in order to qualify for DREAMer status. In fact, a growing percentage of the estimated two-to-four million DACA DREAMers today, did just that.

That number could grow.  A rush of new high schools like the Whittle Studios are coming to cities like Washington, D.C.; they specifically recruit thousands of wealthy Chinese teenagers to get their high school diplomas and stay on for college—some on the temporary F1 foreign student visa, some not.  But there is almost no enforcement of time limits for foreign students to get a degree and have years of “practical training.”  Raids of high tech employers who hire former foreign students whose visas have expired are exceedingly rare.  Over a million foreign students currently study in the U.S. today—the numbers are rising even if the percentage of growth is not. An expanded DREAM Act would allow tens of thousands of millennials who entered the country on temporary visas as teenagers to go around the immigration system by staying on illegally and qualifying for a DREAMer green card.

Campus Police Now Facing Death?

It was a bit of a shock on Wednesday, March 15, to attend D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s “State of the District” speech (known as SOD by capital journalists) at the University of the District Columbia and be escorted to seats through a line of armed police in bulky black uniforms that obviously covered thick bulletproof vests. Not even the annual State of the Union speech (known as SOTUS by journalists who love acronyms) in the national capital in front of most all the leaders of the U.S. government from members of Congress to cabinet members, justices of the Supreme Court (known as SCOTUS by the way), the military joint chiefs of staff and the president (POTUS) and first lady (FLOTUS) have as much in-your-face SWAT policing. Campus demonstrations and speeches by political outsiders across the country are increasingly confined to small fenced-off  “free speech” areas or canceled due to protection concerns. “I’ve had so much contra-violence training, I’m dreaming training,” a UDC police office said. “Now we know we can die on this job.”  This was not exactly what 1960s University of California alumni like myself ever thought the FSM (free speech movement) would come to.

Crowds of conservative students including  “Hispanics for Trump” were visible and vocal at the three-day February gathering in D.C. of CPAC – the Conservative Political Action Committee.  CPAC was considered an outlier organization until President Trump won the 2016 election.  Now the press is taking notice of the conservative activists.  The remarkable number of young people at CPAC always surprises. But those in the know have been following since 2009 the growing campaign for “Campus Reform” funded by the Leadership Institute (LI) in Arlington, Va.  LI recruits, cultivates and pays conservative student journalists all across the country to investigate and report specific incidences of liberal abuses, biases and indoctrination on college campuses. Most U.S. colleges acknowledge a very low percentage of conservative faculty members (less than 15 percent).  Campus Reform reporters are trained to record and report blatant contempt of conservative ideas in classrooms and evidence of systematic exclusion and persecution of conservative students and speakers. They also report on what they call  “political correctness gone mad” including use of so-called pronoun guides (like Latinx) and prohibition of U.S. military recruiters and Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs on campus. Increasingly, the MSN carries their reports. •