The miseducation of Debra Saunders

Colunist Debra Saunders put some words together on the Opinion pages of yesterday's San Francisco Gate to discuss what we here like to call Underground Undergrads.
First, she adopts the right-wing's rhetoric of calling AB540, the law that defines residency as based not only on legal status, but also on the location of each student's high school attendance, a subsidy:

Does the state have so few angry, educated people that it sees fit to spend more than $17,000 per year on tuition for UC students, more than $13,000 for California State University students and $109 per credit for some 15,000 or more community college students - so that they can be unable to get a job that requires a college degree when they graduate?

On this point, as we will examine in the future, Saunders is wrong to assume that the state must fork money that otherwise would be coming into the university system. Simply put, these students would not be going to the school at the hefty out-of -state rate, and you would thus help foment a generation of youth that does not reach their full education potential. In approving a tuition exemption for local students, the state is basically recognizing that said is an asset to the state, specially if he or she is well-educated.
She then moves on to discussing the students' situation. Her take is pretty simple: if you cannot achieve something, why try it?

I feel for those kids, whose parents broke the law and got them into this situation. But is the answer to let them pay in-state tuition - still significant at $6,769 for UC or $3,164 for CSU - for a degree that can't help them get a job?

Basically, she is saying that she feels for these kids so much, that she is willing to eradicate the in-state tuition exemption that has been their only claim to societal membership in the last 15 years.
She closes it off with a bit of self-admitted ignorance:

But UC doesn't really know what happens to these graduates. They may never become citizens, or they may work illegally - no one knows.

Well, Ms. Saunders, we know. And that is why we are committed to telling their stories here. We will take, as you did, a journalistic approach, and regardless of what we find, we are not going to hint that any of them give up on going to college and getting a degree.