In 2002, I was a Utah high school student standing at rallies for House Bill 144. The bill let students who had spent years in Utah schools and graduated from them pay resident tuition, whatever their immigration status.

I remember the fight through the people in it — classmates, their parents, teachers — and through one plain question hanging over that spring: After all those years in Utah classrooms, did Utah count these kids as its own or not?

Utah answered yes. Twenty-four years later, the federal government is suing to reverse that answer.

On Sept. 10, the Justice Department sued Utah over HB144, naming the state, the Utah System of Higher Education and the state commissioner of higher education as defendants. The filing was one of four that day and the last of 25 lawsuits targeting every state that grants resident tuition to undocumented students. Six states have already lost.

I have spent my career since those rallies studying who gets into public colleges and who gets to finish. I now teach higher education at Rutgers and direct its doctoral program. Utah is still the case I know from the inside, and Utah is the case being argued badly.

House Speaker Mike Schultz responded that “Utah taxpayers should not be footing the bill for benefits extended to individuals who are here illegally” and said the Legislature will take up the issue in the 2027 General Session. Unfortunately, this framing misstates what the law does.

HB144 is an exemption from the nonresident portion of tuition. Read the statute: No appropriation, no allocation of state funds, no cap on the number of students. Utah writes no check. It declines to charge a surcharge meant for people who did not grow up here — at the University of Utah, the difference between $10,480 and $32,932 a year. What Utah gives up is the out-of-state premium on students it educated itself.

The second thing worth saying is that this is a Utah law. Republican Rep. David Ure of Kamas sponsored it. A Republican Legislature passed it and it took effect July 1, 2002. In 2015, lawmakers went further, opening privately funded college scholarships to Utah high-school graduates regardless of status. Utah did not drift into this position. It chose it, and chose it again, for a generation.

And the law asks for something specific: three or more years in a Utah high school; a Utah diploma or its equivalent; and, for students without lawful status, an affidavit committing to legalize that status as soon as they are eligible. These are not newcomers gaming a discount. They are the kids Utah taught. An estimated 5,853 undocumented students are enrolled in Utah higher education.

We also know what happens when a state makes this promise, because it has been measured.

Stephanie Potochnick, an associate professor of sociology and director of the Center for Migration and Diaspora Studies at UNC Charlotte, found that resident-tuition policies cut the high-school dropout rate among likely undocumented youth by eight percentage points, from roughly 42% to 34%. After Colorado extended resident tuition in 2013, Michel Grosz, an economist at the Federal Trade Commission, and Annie Hines, an associate at Cornerstone Research, found that affected students came back for a second year at rates 20 percentage points higher and carried 14% more credits.

Run that in reverse and you get the real cost of this lawsuit. A $22,000 swing in a single year does not make a student study harder somewhere cheaper. It ends the degree, often for someone already halfway through it — and Utah absorbs the cost of the schooling it already paid for with none of the return.

So here is what I would ask of my home state: Defend the law. The attorney general should contest this suit rather than concede it, and the Legislature should leave the statute alone in 2027 rather than do Washington’s work for it. The Utah System of Higher Education should publish what happens to enrollment and graduation as the case proceeds, so the 2027 debate runs on Utah evidence instead of slogans. And Utahns who believe a Utah diploma ought to mean something should say so to their legislators before the session opens.

Utah spends years teaching a child to read, to write, to pass a chemistry final. HB144 refuses to throw that away at the college door.

At 17, I understood that as a promise about what education could make possible in this state. I still do. The question in front of Utah is whether it intends to keep it.

Dr. Nichole M. Garcia was born and raised in Salt Lake City and advocated for HB144 as a high-school student. She is an associate professor of higher education at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and director of its Ph.D. in Higher Education program, and studies college access, Latinx/e and undocumented students. Her scholarship and public advocacy support college access for undocumented students.

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