Heterogeneous Effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on Undocumented College Students’ Educational Outcomes

We investigate why prior studies examining the effects of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on undocumented youth's college outcomes in the United States have yielded mixed findings. We draw on unique administrative data from the City University of New York at the time of DACA's implementation and utilize difference-in-difference estimation to examine DACA's effects on undocumented students’ college GPA and interruptions to their college progress. We find that DACA's effects on the educational outcomes of undocumented students enrolled in college were heterogeneous: It had a negative effect on those who, prior to the policy, were academically high performing and taking on a heavy courseload, while it had no significant impact on low academic performers and those maintaining a light courseload. We offer a plausible explanation for this finding: DACA's newfound legal employment opportunities may have incentivized undocumented youth who were previously focused on schooling to seek out employment. In contrast, DACA may have had little impact on low achievers because they were more likely to be already working. While our study is unable to directly identify employment status, our finding that academically achieving students were negatively affected by DACA suggests that the liminal legality experienced by undocumented 1.5-generation youth has a substantive impact on their educational integration and assimilation trajectories. We contend that stopgap programs like DACA that offer contingent rights do not result in unalloyed positive benefits because they do not address undocumented youth's underlying legal precarity.