Jeff Taylor at Meck Deck points out The Charlotte Observer‘s biased and inaccurate coverage of the brouhaha surrounding the banning of illegal immigrants from the state’s community colleges. Here’s his main point:
[T]he ban only applies to the 297,000 students in degree-tract programs, which is only about 35 percent of the system’s total enrollment of over 800,000. The state, to my knowledge, has never indicated how many total undocumented students it has admitted to the system. As we noted last year, CPCC has a separate “undocumented†check-box for citizenship status, so the number cannot be inconsequential.
In any event, the new-new partial ban policy still leaves illegal immigrants free to take all of the “workforce development†classes they desire — learn how to operate a forklift or automotive repair or become a certified bank teller or learn about iPods (I am not making that up.)
Coverage of the issue in both The Observer and its sister McClatchy paper The News & Observer in Raleigh leave the impression that all illegals are banned from all community college curricula. The N&O gave itself some cover by using the words “seeking degrees” in its front-page story today, but the headline (“Colleges shut out illegal aliens”) overshadowed those qualifying words.
In any event, neither MSM outlet provides the kind of clarity on who is affected that Jeff does in his blog post. And he doesn’t even have editors.
