07:15 AM CST on Wednesday, January 18, 2006

By Dave Fehling / 11 News

Many students might only hope to do as well as Wendy Morfin did in high school.

KHOU-TV

Wendy Morfin is not a U.S. citizen, but she graduated from a Houston high school and now attends the University of Houston with financial aid.

“I was in the top 10 percent,” Morfin said.  “I had like a 3.7 GPA.”

She was the perfect candidate to go on to college, but there was a problem.

“They were like, yeah, you have to go. But I’m like how? I don’t have money, I don’t have papers,” Morfin said.

Morfin is not a U.S. citizen but nonetheless graduated from a high school in Texas, at the top of her class.

Does she deserve to go to college like any other Texan?

“I’ve had cases of students coming up to me and saying, ‘my counselor told me since I’m undocumented, I don’t even have a right to ask for college,’” said University of Houston recruiter Rebeca Trevino.

“We do have some kids who believe they don’t have the right to go to college … but by law they do,” Trevino said.

And they get financial aid.

Since 2001, Texas became the first state by law to allow undocumented students into public colleges at the subsidized in-state tuition rate and make them eligible for financial aid, as long as they have lived in the state for three years and graduated from high school.

Houston now leads the state with upwards of 600 such undocumented students going to public colleges.

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t hard to find critics of the law. They say it does nothing more than encourage illegal immigration and that it gives unfair advantage to immigrant students over those who are here legally.

“Its costing the people who live here,” said Cathie Adams.

Adams is with the conservative group Texas Eagle Forum.

“There is something very broken about the system, and I think we should start looking in our backyard, taking care of our own before we start giving away the farm to those who are not even here legally,” Adams said.

They said it’s unfair for undocumented students to pay the lower in-state tuition while a legal resident from say, Louisiana, would pay the higher out-of-state rate to go to college in Texas.

They want the law repealed and funding cut to students like Morfin who, it turns out, enrolled at UH with a full scholarship.

She now volunteers for college fairs.

“We’re still residents, we live here, we pay taxes,” Morfin said. “I mean, we deserve the opportunity to study.”

Morfin is a mathematics major, and when she graduates, wants to return to school to teach.

Some said the effect of undocumented students is being overstated.

In all Texas public colleges, there are about 4,000 such students out of a total enrollment of more than 1 million.