Free Ride in Chi Town

Chicago officials are surprised that illegal aliens like free college. “More than two years after Chicago launched a program that offers a swath of high school students a free ride at its community colleges, city officials are touting their growing list of students moving on to four-year universities with two years of college credit and not a dollar in debt,” Aamer Madhani reports in USA Today. “Yet another, more subtle, trend has emerged from the program known as the Star Scholarship: Chicago’s junior colleges have become an extraordinarily popular spot for high-achieving but cash-strapped undocumented immigrants to study.”

“Financial aid data reviewed by USA TODAY shows that more than one out of five of the 3,015 Star Scholarship winners who enrolled at the city colleges this fall were directed to fill out an alternative to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) because they were ineligible to apply for federal aid — which requires that students be U.S. citizens, permanent residents or other eligible non-citizen residents such as asylum grantees.”