Some students work multiple jobs and give up extracurricular activities to supplement their financial aid. Many say it’s worth it

by Katelyn Do, Emewodesh Eshete and Mikhail Zinshteyn

CalMatters

Smaller class sizes, grassy knolls, campus idyll — for low-income college students chasing that storied experience at California’s private nonprofit colleges, the expense is high: sometimes $30,000 or more in the first year alone after all grants and scholarships are considered.

While most California college students attend a public college or university, roughly 160,000 undergraduates pursue degrees at private nonprofit universities such as Chapman University, Loyola Marymount University, Stanford and the University of Southern California.

And low-income freshmen on average paid around $21,000 to attend private campuses for just one year in 2021-22, according to a CalMatters analysis of federal college costs data using the most recent year of information available. It used to be even higher, adjusted for inflation in 2023-24 dollars: The price students pay has declined by a few thousand dollars since data-keeping began in 2008-09, the CalMatters analysis shows. For its analysis, CalMatters defined low-income as a household income below $48,000.

There are exceptions: Stanford, for example, ends up being virtually free for low-income freshmen — those with family incomes below $100,000. University of Southern California is also relatively affordable, requiring low-income students to pay an average of about $15,000 after all financial aid is factored in.

But other campuses post much steeper net prices, a term that refers to the total cost of attendance — such as tuition, housing, transportation and food — minus all the state, federal, institutional and outside grants and scholarships students receive. For example, Pepperdine University’s net price for low-income students was more than $36,000 for the 2022-23 school year.

“Every year, we speak with students and families who truly desire to choose Pepperdine, but find that it isn’t financially feasible for their family,” wrote Kristin Paredes Collins, who leads enrollment and financial aid at Pepperdine. ”Although we truly believe that Pepperdine is a worthy investment, we acknowledge that it might not be financially feasible for every admitted student.”

She added: “We remind them that they will likely be successful at whatever school they choose.” Pepperdine spent $106 million on financial aid in 2023-24.

Net price calculators that colleges host on their websites can offer more fine-tuned estimates of what students will pay that may show lower costs, including extra school aid for high test scores and high school grades, but the prices still remain relatively high.

CalMatters reporters interviewed 16 students with Pell grants, the federal financial aid grant for low- and middle-income students, across eight California private nonprofit colleges to learn their struggles and reasons for attending these more expensive institutions.

These students worked 15 to 20 hours a week or more, missed out on campus cultural events and regularly sought additional financial aid by petitioning their colleges and applying for outside support. For most students interviewed, the effort was worth it. The students were motivated by the prestige of their institutions, smaller class sizes and the specific academic programming that other colleges don’t offer. Most students CalMatters spoke with avoided taking out any loans. And quite a few lived at home to avoid costly room and board fees.

Low-income students seem to know what’s more affordable, judging by where they enroll. Only about 27 percent of the state’s private nonprofit college students received the federal Pell grant in 2022-23, CalMatters calculations of federal data show. At the University of California, a third received the grant that year; nearly half got it at California State University. Both public systems, on average, cost less.

Net price for low-income students at Cal State was around $6,000 a year and under $10,000 at the UC, on average, according to a CalMatters analysis of 2021-22 academic year data. One reason they stay more affordable than private colleges is because they receive about $10 billion annually in state taxpayer support to fund their education missions. Private colleges, beyond state financial aid for their students, don’t receive such state subsidies.

“I can’t imagine how a lower-income family can fork up over $80,000 for one student to earn a bachelor’s degree” at a private nonprofit college, said Michael Itzkowitz, a researcher on the value of college. Those private colleges, he added, “continue to be much less affordable for all students in comparison to many of the public institutions located within the state.”

The federal data has limitations: It only has estimates for full-time freshmen who took out federal loans or received federal grants. That excludes many well-off families. The federal government publishes 2022-23 net price data for individual schools, but its data for all campuses for now stops at 2021-22; CalMatters’ school-wide analysis relied on the 2021-22 data.

Why students choose private colleges

Sophomore Monserrat Herrera pays $2,000 a semester to attend Dominican University in the Bay Area — a fraction of what she’d owe had she lived on campus. Instead, she commutes about 11 miles to campus from home in Novato. Though she got into several UCs and Cal States, Dominican is closest and offers a bachelor’s nursing program that admits freshmen immediately; other schools require students to apply for the nursing program only after their sophomore year.

“I do really like how it’s a direct entry program, so I don’t have to go through applying to nursing school again,” she said.

But not all students have found the effort to afford their education as manageable. Erykah Glass worked a midnight to 6 a.m. graveyard shift to afford her on-campus housing costs during her sophomore year at the University of San Francisco. “It affected my mental health which then affected my school work,” she said.

Her top cost, tuition, was covered through the school’s Black Scholars program. Still, now in her junior year, she’ll pay around $7,000 per semester for housing, she said.

Glass has found time between work and school to join the campus’ women’s club soccer team, though the demands of her schedule means she’s only able to make practice on Mondays. She hasn’t been available to play during games.

“I went head on into this semester knowing I wouldn’t have any breaks,” Glass said.

Living at home is a cost-saver

After tuition, on-campus housing is typically the top expense for students attending private colleges. In California, the average cost of room and board at a private college over four years is $66,000 according to the federal National Center on Educational Statistics.

Still, the federal data on the net price of attending college strips a lot of nuance from what students are expected to pay. At the University of La Verne, 57 percent of full-time freshmen attending the school lived at home in 2021-22, said Laura Evans, director of financial aid at the school. Among the low-income students who receive Pell grants, 59 percent lived at home.

That probably means those students aren’t paying rent, but the federal government’s cost calculations still assume the student has a housing expense. For that reason, Evans likes to draw a distinction between realized costs and paper costs that don’t actually materialize for students.

For the students living at home, their realized costs are chiefly tuition and fees, which are about $48,000 a year at La Verne.

For the commuter students who are low-income, the financial aid they received overall in 2021-22 covered much of their actual costs — all but $9,780. That’s a relatively manageable net price for freshmen.

Evans said that to cover that lower net price, about $5,500 can come from federal student loans, leaving about $4,200 in remaining net costs. Money from part-time work could clear the difference. With minimum wage at $16.50 an hour, a student would need to work about 5 hours a week for the whole year to cover that remaining bill.

That’s all lower than the official net price for the school that the federal government publishes: Around $26,000 in 2021-22.

“That’s one of the reasons why they choose La Verne. It’s because they can afford to be commuters,” said Evans, who added that unlike many other colleges, La Verne does not require its freshmen to live on campus. In 2023, the school of 5,600 students spent about $62 million on student financial aid — more than a third of its total revenue from tuition and fees. Portions of the school’s investment returns from its endowment also help fund student scholarships.

Living at home — it’s often the secret sauce to make a private college education pencil out for low-income students. It’s what made the difference for second-year student Leandra Cardenas to afford attending Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. By residing with her dad, she attends the university practically for free because state, federal and campus grants cover tuition.  Cardenas wakes up early to spend up to two hours on the bus commuting to her 8 a.m. class from Hollywood. She drives some days, sharing a car with her father, but says the cost of gas is expensive. Living on-campus in a double at Loyola Marymount costs around $14,000 per year, the school’s website shows. “I wasn’t gonna put that financial burden” on her parents, she said.

Working makes a difference, too

It’s not just long commutes; low-income students must also work, pouring more hours of the day into jobs rather than soaking in the benefits of campus life. In her first year at USC, senior Mika Panahon only spent two days on campus so that she could work at grocery stores and fast-food restaurants. She needed to cover the cost of food and transportation even though she had almost all of her tuition covered through financial aid. “I packed my whole schedule into a 10-hour day here so that I can have more time to be at my job,” said Panahon.

Her total cost of attendance the last two academic years was $87,000 in fall 2023 and $95,000 this year. Between aid from the university, the state and federal government, the cost she was responsible for was about $15,500 each year, according to financial aid statements from USC she shared with CalMatters. The school expected her to take out loans and work part time through the federal work-study program, leaving her on the hook for $4,000 each year. To make up the difference, she had to work.

The effort is worth it

Are the long commutes, demanding work schedules and extra time in the financial aid office worth the price of a private college education? A majority of the students CalMatters spoke to said yes.

Students said that the smaller class sizes that private schools offer compared to public schools have allowed them to foster better relationships with their professors. Cardenas says Loyola Marymount gave her access to making “more personalized and individual” connections through its smaller class sizes, which originally drew her to the school.

For recent USC graduate Kelvin Nguyen, coming from a low-income household led by parents who were refugees from Vietnam, attending USC was an obvious choice. “You apply to the schools that you think would make them proud,” Nguyen said. USC gave him the “blueprint” to navigate the top-tier professional and consulting worlds of business that he wants to break into.

Even with the hardship of working three jobs simultaneously and taking out $15,000 in loans to afford to live on and near campus, Nguyen believes USC put him in the position for his success today. He’s now earning a master’s in public health at UCLA. Knowing that he was the first in his family to attend a prestigious private university, Nguyen said he “put in whatever financial or physical or mental resources to make it.”

– Data reporter Erica Yee contributed to this reporting.

One of President Trump’s first executive orders threatened to withhold federal funding from so-called sanctuary jurisdictions. California is one of them

by Ana B. Ibarra

CalMatters

Back in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump is once again trying to break a policy California Democrats adopted during his first term to protect certain undocumented immigrants from being deported.

One of his first executive orders targets the state’s so-called sanctuary law, which generally limits how local cops interact with federal immigration officers. Trump’s order, titled the “Protecting the American People Against Invasion”, would deny federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions across the country.

It’s not clear yet what kind of federal funds the Trump administration would withhold. But, for a state of 39 million people that relies heavily on federal dollars for its public programs and currently for its wildfire recovery, withholding money could be a crippling blow.

It’s worth noting that Trump attempted something similar during his first term. California sued and the courts sided with the state.

Before Trump took office, a nonprofit led by his policy adviser Stephen Miller sent letters to hundreds of local elected officials around the country warning them they faced “legal consequences” if their sanctuary policies interfered with immigration enforcement.

So what does the state’s sanctuary law do exactly and what does it mean for Trump’s mass deportation plans?

Here are five things to know about the California Values Act.

It’s about what California cops can do

In October 2017, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act, commonly referred to as the state’s sanctuary law. That law bars state and local police from investigating, interrogating, or arresting people for immigration enforcement purposes, and limits — but does not entirely prohibit — police cooperation with federal immigration officials.

Kevin De Leon, the former state Senate leader who authored the law, told NPR in 2017 that the point of the law was to make clear that the feds cannot enlist local police “as a cog in the Trump deportation machine.”

The “sanctuary” movement goes back to the 1980s when Central American refugees fled civil war and immigrated to the U.S. When they were denied asylum, they sought protection from deportation in churches and other places of worship.

Today the sanctuary law does not actually refer to a place or territory where immigrants can seek protection. Living in California alone does not shield someone from deportation.

Instead, the law clarifies what state and local law enforcement in California can and cannot do with regard to immigration. For example, the law says that local police cannot detain or keep someone in custody more than 48 hours past their release date just for immigration officials to pick them up.

The law does not restrict what the federal government can do in the state. To be clear, that means U.S Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) can still arrest and deport undocumented people living in California and other sanctuary jurisdictions.

“The federal government has a lane that they are entitled to move in, they can enforce immigration law,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said last week during a press conference in San Diego. But “They can’t conscript or force the city or the county or the state law enforcement entities to do their job for them.”

Who isn’t protected by sanctuary law

President Trump and his allies have repeatedly argued that sanctuary laws shield dangerous criminals. They have at times pointed to specific crimes committed by undocumented immigrants to argue the sanctuary law puts the greater public at risk. In 2019, for example, Trump pointed to the slaying of a police officer in Stanislaus County to criticize the sanctuary law and demand more funding for border protection.

But that’s not the whole story. The law says police can tell immigration authorities about an inmate’s upcoming release if that person has been convicted of a serious crime or felony, such as: murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery and arson, among many others.

And as some sheriffs have noted, there is nothing that stops immigration officials from using jail websites and fingerprints databases to identify people of interest.

It is up to ICE to pick up individuals on their release. Between 2018 and 2023, California jails transferred more than 4,000 individuals to immigration authorities. At the same time, ICE doesn’t always show up when someone is released from jail or prison. For example, ICE picked up about 80 percent of undocumented immigrants released from state prisons between 2017 and 2020, according to a 2022 Senate legislative analysis.

“It is an absurdity to be talking about SB 54 as preventing bad, non-citizens with serious criminal convictions from being turned over to (the Department of Homeland Security), it doesn’t do that,” said Niels Frenzen, a professor at USC’s Gould School of Law and co-director of the school’s immigration clinic. “But those facts are just not part of the political debate.”

Immigrants who are protected by the sanctuary state law are usually those who are arrested for less serious offenses, such as traffic violations and driving without a license or insurance, Frenzen said.

Courts upheld California’s sanctuary state law

After California enacted its Values Act, Trump’s Justice Department took the state to court, arguing that the state law “interferes with federal immigration authorities’ ability to carry out their responsibilities under federal law.”

Some immigration attorneys, however, have pointed out that the state law seemed to have little impact on ICE’s ability to do its job.

For example, the Justice Department in its 2018 lawsuit said that in 2017 ICE apprehended 20,201 unlawfully present people in California, which represented about 14 percent of all ICE arrests made that year.

ICE was on track to exceed that number in the following year. In the first two months of 2018 after the sanctuary law took effect, it arrested 8,588 people in California, or about 14 percent of all arrests nationwide, according to a filing in the lawsuit by Trump’s Justice Department.

In 2019, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the California Values Act did not impede enforcement of federal immigration law. When the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to review the case, it refused to do so, leaving the law as is.

In a separate fight, California sued the Trump administration for its policy to withhold federal law enforcement grants from jurisdictions with sanctuary policies. A federal judge sided with California.

Studies show no effect on crime

 Critics of the law have long claimed that the sanctuary state law harms public safety. The Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford, for example, has linked the law to the fentanyl epidemic, noting that a spike in fentanyl-related deaths started happening around 2018, soon after the sanctuary policy went into effect. Whether causation or coincidence, there isn’t much in the way of official research that proves this.

To prove such a claim, one would have to isolate the sanctuary state law’s specific impact on crime, researchers say.

A 2020 analysis of California’s law by researchers at the University of California, Irvine examined the state’s 2018 violent and property crime rates and compared them to estimated crime rates had Gov. Brown not signed the sanctuary policy. The study found that the law did not have a significant impact on either violent crime or property crime.

Charis Kubrin, who authored the study, said the takeaway of her research was that changing the state’s sanctuary status is not likely to result in major reductions in crime. “Getting rid of SB 54, for example, is not going to make crime go down because it didn’t cause crime to go up in the first place,” Kubrin said.

A separate study by researchers at Stanford and Princeton looked at sanctuary policies across the country and found that these measures reduce the overall number of deportations by one-third, but they did not reduce the number of deportations on people with violent criminal convictions.

That study also found that these policies don’t have much of a direct effect on crime.

Conflict expected in ‘sensitive areas’

During the Biden administration, the federal government had in place a “sensitive areas” order, which discouraged immigration agents from making arrests in places like schools, hospitals, churches and courthouses. Last week, the Trump administration rescinded that order.

“When ICE engages in civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses it can reduce safety risks to the public,” reads a Jan. 21 memo to staff from ICE Acting Director Caleb Vitello.

The sanctuary state law asks officials at the same places to adopt policies to limit public participation with immigration enforcement, such as requesting a warrant from ICE agents before they attempt to arrest anyone. That could create a conflict for local officials if the immigration crackdown in the new administration hits their venue, said Alvaro Huerta, director of litigation and advocacy at Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

Given Trump’s recent rule reversal, Huerta said, “the federal government may attempt some (immigration) enforcement in those spaces, but the state government is asking those spaces to require warrants.”