Immigration reform is one of the centerpieces of an increasingly polarized political debate in the United States. This debate has partly focused on the adjustment of status of unauthorized immigrants that have resided in the country from a young age and for extended periods of time. Institutionally, this immigrant subgroup resides in a unique limbo: on the one hand they face many institutional constraints given their lack of status – for instance, being ineligible for employment and the social safety net. On the other hand, federal law mandates public schools to serve this subgroup, and several government entities (both at the state and federal level) have recently initiated efforts to alleviate institutional constraints for them. One the key movements of this recent trend is the enactment of tuition equity reforms by state legislatures. As of 2015, eighteen states in the nation had enacted tuition equity laws granting resident tuition rates to qualifying undocumented students.1 The state of Texas was the pioneer of this movement, approving House Bill 1403 in July of 2001. The initiative came to be known as the ’Texas Dream Act’ (henceforth, TDA). It granted a large reduction in the cost of college attendance for undocumented students, moving them from out-of-state to in-state status in terms of tuition and fees. The complex institutional environment faced by the affected population, however, hinders our ability to predict the effect of this reform on education attainment on purely theoretical grounds. On the one hand, this group is forbidden from participating in the formal labor market. Thus, while the expected return to higher education for this group is difficult to assess, it is likely lower than that of natives, and may or may not be higher than the value starting to earn at an earlier age.2 On the other hand, college education may have consumption value in and of itself for undocumented immigrants, not just due to its intrinsic value but also because academic institutions have been identified as a partial safe haven from the duress of lack of immigration status once adulthood has been reached, including a reduced risk of deportation (Gonzales, 2010). Thus, the effect of tuition equity reforms on the postsecondary educational attainment of undocumented immigrant students is theoretically ambiguous, and better studied empirically.