News
Alum Profiled
Debates Persist Over Subsidies for Immigrant College Students
12.12.2007
By Joseph Berger
Go to college, we urge our children. College is the new high school, and without an undergraduate degree, they will be doomed to low-earning, second-rate lives.
Yet we send the opposite message to thousands of young people because they have been brought into this country illegally by their parents, sometimes when they were toddlers, or remained beyond their visa deadlines. About 65,000 persevere well enough every year to graduate from high school, according to the Washington-based Urban Institute, but once they do, we make going to college hard if not impossible.
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Edmond Coku, who emigrated from Albania as a political refugee in 1994, was the valedictorian of his high school in Yonkers in 1998, but he despaired that he could afford college.
Then fortune struck twice.
Richard Berman, president of Manhattanville College, a private campus in Purchase, N.Y., offered him a full scholarship, and by the time he enrolled he was granted asylum, which qualified him for government aid. He graduated in 2002, and works as an associate investment banker at Lehman Brothers, but he remembers his limbo as unsettling. “There were a lot of things I could have contributed to this country,” he said, “but at the end of the day I wasn’t a legal resident.”
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(This is an excerpt of the full article. Photo of Edmond Coku taken by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times.)