Every day about 500 students cross the border between Mexico and the United States to attend classes at the University of Texas at El Paso. But when officials there worry about college access, the main barrier they see isn’t the 30-foot-high wall that President Trump has pledged to build. It’s the scaffolding of student-support programs, from financial aid to middle-school mentoring to job training, that he wants to tear down.
Both the beefed up spending for border security and the scaled-down support for student services are mentioned in the “skinny budget” Mr. Trump released last week.
The proposal, which is the starting point for what is bound to be a contentious fight over spending priorities in the 2018 fiscal year, included more than $2 billion to jump-start a border wall that would span the nearly 2,000 miles of national border. To help pay for the wall, which a CNBC analysis estimated could cost up to $25 billion, the budget would slash support for a variety of programs that help low-income people attend college and train for jobs.
They’re the kinds of programs that many rely on in the impoverished region where UTEP recruits. About 80 percent of the university’s 24,000 students are Hispanic, and 43 percent of undergraduates who apply for financial aid report an annual family income of $20,000 or less.
The president’s proposed budget, while keeping Pell Grants intact, would eliminate the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, which supports the neediest college students. It would make “significant” cuts in Federal Work-Study, which employs hundreds of El Paso students in campus jobs.
And it would take a sizable bite out of the $29 million in federal support the El Paso university receives each year for outreach efforts like the Gear Up program, which Mr. Trump has pledged to cut by a third, and TRIO programs. Both take students beginning in seventh grade and, over the next six years, offer support like mentoring, tutoring, financial-aid help, and college visits.
In his proposal, the president suggested that some of those programs were ineffective or poorly targeted. Even supporters of the programs agree there are inefficiencies.
Students in these programs are much more likely to succeed and to graduate.
But Gary Edens, vice president for student affairs at UTEP, said they are worth saving.
“Over the years, we’ve been able to prove that students in these programs are much more likely to succeed and to graduate,” he said.
Because Gear Up is a matching program, the money is supplemented with private donations. “It’s a complete and total community effort,” said Mr. Edens.
The Importance of a Pipeline
Amanda C. Haynes caught the science bug in seventh grade, when Gear Up invited her entire grade to a presentation by William H. Robertson, a professor of science and technology education at UTEP who uses skateboarding to teach physics.
Coverage of how the president’s executive order barring all refugees and citizens of six Muslim countries from entering the United States affects higher education.
“He did a bunch of cool tricks and explained the physics behind them,” she said.
It was the beginning of a six-year relationship with advisers and a cohort of students who increasingly saw themselves as bound for college.
The summer after her sophomore year, Gear Up offered a session that capitalized on teenagers’ obsession with the Angry Birds video game. She and her teammates built a tower out of Styrofoam, duct tape, and string, and calculated the trajectory of an angry bird’s flight when catapulted across the classroom.
Later that summer, they took a road trip to visit colleges. Ms. Haynes, whose parents didn’t graduate from college, doubled down on science and engineering classes, graduated as valedictorian, and enrolled at UTEP, where she’s now a senior majoring in mechanical engineering.
“The Angry Birds crash course made me realize how much I enjoy building things, and the entire experience gave me so much confidence,” she said.
Preserving a pipeline for students like Ms. Haynes is far more important to UTEP, said Mr. Edens, than ramping up border security to keep criminals out. El Paso already has a border fence that skirts its campus; slats allow glimpses of life on either side of the border. It’s a heftier version of the fence that borders the Brownsville campus of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where officials are also eyeing the border-wall plans warily.
It’s anyone’s guess whether El Paso’s fence will satisfy the Trump administration, which last week put out requests for proposals for 30-foot-tall concrete walls. The El Paso area is one of the places the administration wants to start construction, but some observers are guessing the focus will be on filling in gaps in the fence, not making the existing barriers taller.
Students who are accustomed to being stopped by Border Patrol agents say they dread the stepped-up enforcement the president has promised.
What would be much harder to adjust to is if a student couldn’t come to class because he couldn’t afford it.
Still, walls and immigration checks are just part of life on the border, said Mr. Edens. “We’re used to that,” he said. “What would be much harder to adjust to is if a student couldn’t come to class because he couldn’t afford it.”
The university has developed its own procedures for handling the back-and-forth traffic between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, its sister city across the border. Back in 2010, at the height of violence between rival drug cartels, UTEP suspended many of its educational and cultural exchanges because it was too dangerous to cross the border.
Since then, as the violence has eased somewhat, the university been able to resume many of those activities. Faculty and staff members and students who wish to cross the border go through an extensive approval process that includes identifying the safety precautions they’re taking.
Even during the height of the violence in Ciudad Juárez, El Paso’s crime rate was extremely low, UTEP officials are quick to point out.
Creating the perception of a militarized, dangerous border region while cutting off supports for the neediest students could make recruiting a bigger challenge.
University officials don’t want to get involved in border politics. That said, “we’re not fans of the wall,” Mr. Eden said. “We think the resources could be used more wisely.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
