In December of last year, Eastern Michigan University approved giving in-state tuition to non-citizens as long as they had attended at least three years of high school in Michigan. The university also approved in-state tuition to honorably discharged veterans who had served at least one-year active duty. While I have no complaints at all with the university’s decision to afford veterans the privilege, I do take issue with affording the same privilege to non-citizens, and for one reason: Eastern Michigan University is a public university.
It is often said that education is a right. A statement like this is ripe for confusion as fewer and fewer people today seem to have any idea what a “right” actually is short of “a good thing.” A right is not something that must be given; it is something that cannot be taken away. A “right” to an education, therefore, is the right to be an autodidact – to teach oneself. Education (excluding auto-didacticism) is better understood as a service, one which may be provided either privately or publicly.
At the risk of overgeneralizing, my position on private universities is that they should be allowed to do what they wish with their money, to provide whatever service they wish to whomever they wish. Public universities, on the other hand, cannot do what they wish with their money because government has no money of its own. Every cent spent by the government must come from somewhere else, namely tax revenues. It seems only fitting to me that citizenship be a prerequisite for taking advantage of public services.
If Eastern Michigan were to change its decision and say that non-citizens were not to be allowed in-state tuition or to attend at all, I would put money on Plyler v. Doe being brought up. On June 15, 1982, in a five to four ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas statute that denied public education to non-citizens, saying that the statue violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In the majority opinion, Justice William J. Brennan wrote that “[t]he Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens…These provisions are universal in their application, to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality...” recalling Justice Stephen J. Field’s words, from over a century ago, that “[t]he term ‘person,’ used in the Fifth Amendment, is broad enough to include any and every human being within the jurisdiction of the republic. A resident, alien born, is entitled to the same protection under the laws that a citizen is entitled to.”
In modern parlance, anyone and everyone in the United States is protected by U.S. law, regardless of citizenship. If citizenship offers no additional protections under U.S. law, what’s the use in having it? The idea that the provisions of any law should be universal in their application should worry us greatly. My working definition of an ideal government is one which I may most easily leave. With universally-applied laws, such a government is impossible.
In the dissenting opinion, Justice Warren E. Burger wrote that “[t]he Equal Protection Clause protects against arbitrary and irrational classifications…stemming from prejudice and hostility; it is not an all-encompassing ‘equalizer’ [of] every distinction for which persons are not ‘responsible’.…[T]here can, of course, be no presumption that a state has a constitutional duty to include illegal aliens among the recipients of its governmental benefits.”
If public education existed solely on the state-wide level, I would have no problem with Michigan deciding who their public universities would extend services to; there are forty-nine other state for me to choose from. If Eastern Michigan University was a private university, who they do business with would be none of my business.
Public services exist for citizens. Private services exist for anyone.
