By Laura Kellams (Arkansas Democrat Gazette)

LITTLE ROCK — State higher education officials have found little evidence that large numbers of illegal aliens are attending college in Arkansas, whether paying instate tuition rates or not.

The Department of Higher Education is working to set up a system to spot students’ Social Security numbers that appear to be suspicious, based on guidance for what a valid number looks like. So far, the checks at the department and at individual campuses have found relatively few instances in which students are suspected of paying the cheaper, state-subsidized in-state tuition rates when they should be required to pay more.

A department “test run” looked at Social Security numbers from the past academic year and it showed that 1,373 appeared to be invalid. That’s about 1 percent of the enrollment in Arkansas public colleges and universities. Department officials expect that only a fraction of those instances represents students who are receiving benefits they shouldn’t.

“It’s going to be an infinitesimally small number,” said Dale Ellis, the department spokesman.

For example, of those flagged by the department, 283 were at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. But when the campus checked those numbers, only five appeared to represent students who might live in Arkansas illegally, said Melissa Goff, director of admissions at UCA.

The others were international students in the United States on visas, citizens who didn’t want to hand over their Social Security numbers to the university or legal resident students whose numbers were entered into the system incorrectly, Goff said.

“It’s really very, very few” in comparison with the UCA enrollment last year of 12,619, she said.

These checks have come about since May, when Gov. Mike Beebe said he first learned that some state universities haven’t been requiring students to show proof of legal status before granting them eligibility to pay in-state tuition. Out-of-state tuition can be as much as three times that paid by Arkansas residents.

Some states allow all their in-state high school graduates — whether in the country legally or not — to attend college paying the lower rates. But Beebe, a former Arkansas attorney general, has said that’s a violation of federal law and that the state can’t allow it without granting all out-of-state residents the same benefit.

He had Jim Purcell, director of the department, send out a letter warning colleges and universities that if they don’t keep students’ valid Social Security numbers or visa numbers on file, the state won’t count them as students when determining funding help from the state.

TARGET: COMPLIANCE

Matt DeCample, Beebe’s spokesman, said last week that the governor didn’t know whether there was a widespread problem with illegal aliens attending college with in-state benefits.

“Our priority was compliance, without expectations for what that would or would not find,” DeCample said. “It wasn’t our expectation to find a low number or a high number, or any number.”

DeCample said the governor’s office has heard good things about changes in policies that will ensure compliance.

“If we’re ever asked by the feds to show them compliance, we can say we’ve done what we’re supposed to do,” DeCample said.

Bob McMath, interim provost at University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, said the campus is still working on what compliance will mean when checking out individual students’ status.

Beginning with the current summer session, the department will generate a report with the Social Security numbers that appear questionable.

The department won’t be running the numbers through an identification database of any kind; rather, the check is only whether the number appears valid based on the Social Security Administration’s guidelines. For example, those that begin with three zeros are invalid because the administration doesn’t assign numbers that begin with three zeros.

Once the UA gets that list of questionable numbers, they’ll be checked against the institution’s own records. Then it’ll be UA’s responsibility to verify whether the students are eligible to receive in-state tuition.

QUESTION IS TUITION RATE

It’s just a question of how much the students should pay to attend, not whether they can attend. Higher-education officials say no law requires colleges and universities to verify students’ legal status for admission.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security clarified that in May in answer to a question about a North Carolina community college admission policy.

“The Department of Homeland Security does not require any school to determine a student’s status…. DHS also does not require any school to request immigration status information prior to enrolling students or to report to the government if they know a student is out of status,” the department stated, adding that an exception applies if the students came into the country on visas for exchange purposes.

Ellis said the question at Arkansas institutions is strictly one of how much to charge for tuition.

“We don’t want anyone to misunderstand that we’re trying to keep anybody from going to school,” he said.

The first blank on the UA’s new online application is for a Social Security number. Next to that, prospective students can learn more by clicking on the question, “Why does the university collect my Social Security number?”

The answer provided is that it’s used to help determine immigration status for purposes of tuition, “as requested by the Arkansas Department of Higher Education,” as well as other reasons, such as for administering financial aid and compensation for any on-campus employment.

Most of the state’s institutions of higher education have had to make no changes in how they admit students or check their tuition status, according to information they’ve submitted to the department. Some have made slight changes.

NUMBERS GAME

Les Wyatt, president of Arkansas State University, had said in May that ASU already was careful in collecting Social Security numbers to ensure that only eligible students were allowed. He complained to department officials that the UA and the UCA could boost their numbers, and thereby increase their share of state funding, by admitting students as Arkansas residents who were illegal aliens.

But the department’s test of numbers in its own records checked showed that there were more questionable numbers from ASU’s flagship campus in Jonesboro, at 128, than the UA’s flagship campus in Fayetteville, at 85.

Steve Voorhies, a UA spokesman, said the university’s own preliminary check of students’ Social Security numbers showed “between 12 and 20” possibly invalid numbers, out of more than 18,000 students. That was after eliminating visa-holding international students from the list, he said.

Wyatt said he’s accepted the explanation from Higher Education Department officials that for the most part, the erroneous numbers were not necessarily connected to a student’s or anyone else’s attempt to defraud the state, but rather human error.

“I will stand corrected on that,” Wyatt said.

Beebe got involved in the discussion during debate over a proposal he opposed by Secure Arkansas, a group that pushed for an initiated act to ban certain state services from illegal aliens. In-state tuition was one.

Secure Arkansas failed to get the minimum number of signatures to qualify the initiative for the Nov. 4 ballot, but supporters are pushing for a similar proposal to be introduced in the 2009 legislative session.

Jeannie Burlwsorth of Bryant, who leads Secure Arkansas, said last week that she thinks more illegal aliens are paying in-state tuition than state officials are letting on.

“More investigating is being done,” Burlsworth said of her group’s volunteer effort. “We’ll just have to see what this investigation overturns.”

This article was published Sunday, July 20, 2008.

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