The journey to higher education by undocumented students has been one of legal, financial and informational barriers. Despite ensured equal access to primary and secondary education, federal policies addressing access to post-secondary education are non-existent – a lack of action that has motivated some states to provide additional access and others to erect further barriers. While the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme in 2012 has attenuated the transition to ‘illegality’ that many undocumented young people experienced after high school graduation, access to post-secondary education remains a challenging endeavour for most undocumented youth. The recent announcement to rescind DACA and the lack of a solution for comprehensively managing immigration further obscure the future of this constituency. Placed at the intersection of contrasting political, economic and social contexts, this chapter explores the experiences of three undocumented immigrant youth in Texas who enter adult transitions at differing levels of educational attainment. This chapter illustrates how policies, school practices and families’ legal structures continue to create conflicting educational experiences of exclusion and belonging for undocumented young people living in the United States.

This chapter looks at access to and retention in higher education of children of migrants with low levels of education across a number of Western European countries, using data of the Integration of the European Second Generation (TIES) survey. The comparative perspective shows the impact of national institutional arrangements on education. Access to and retention in higher education of children of migrants with low levels of education still show considerable gaps when compared to those of peers of native descent. Data analysis shows that socio-economic background characteristics or the migrant background is only partly responsible for the gaps between students with and without a migrant background. We zoom in on students of Turkish descent in the Dutch school system to analyse whether these gaps are the result of socio-cultural background characteristics related to their ethnic group or migration (their own or that of their parents) or whether the gap in educational outcomes can be explained by how educational institutions provide opportunities or, on the contrary, fail to cater for children of immigrants. Based on detailed information available in the Netherlands, we show how differences in the preparation for higher education that students get can lead to important differences in study success later on.