The ruling Monday was unanimous among the California Supreme Court's seven judges. It overturns a lower court ruling that sided with opponents of the law, who argued that it unfairly favors illegal immigrants over U.S. citizens from outside California, who have to pay much higher, out-of-state tuition fees.
Paying in-state tuition rates can save students as much as a $23,000 a year in the University of California system. But illegals are still ineligible for state or federal financial aid programs.
The law allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition was passed by the California Legislature in 2001. Nine other states have similar laws, but two of them -- Nebraska and Texas -- have legal challenges pending against them, Reuters reported.
To be eligible for California's in-state fees, illegal residents are required to have attended high school in the state for at least three years and to have graduated. The same rule applies to Americans from other states, who can also qualify for in-state tuition if they do the same.
"It cannot be the case that states may never give a benefit to unlawful aliens without giving the same benefit to all American citizens," Justice Ming W. Chin, one of the court's more conservative justices, wrote in the court's opinion, excerpted by The New York Times.
But Kris Kolbach, a legal scholar who helped draft Arizona's controversial immigration law and argued the California tuition lawsuit on behalf of American students from other states, vowed to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. "I am confident this is not the last word on the subject," he told the Times.
More than 25,000 illegal immigrants attend California's public colleges, and giving them lower tuition rates costs the state more than $200 million a year, according to figures from the Immigration Reform Law Institute, cited by the Los Angeles Times. The Washington-based group was one of those that challenged the California law.
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But officials at the University of California say the real figures were much lower. At the 10 UC campuses altogether, some 2,019 students paid in-state tuition provided by the immigration law, and about 600 of those are believed to be undocumented, the Los Angeles Times quoted UC officials as saying. There are dozens of other public universities in the state, including community colleges and the Cal State chain. Monday's ruling was cheered by illegal immigrants, who say they wouldn't be able to attend university in California if they were required to pay out-of-state tuition.
"I'm breaking a lot of the barriers my family never thought it was possible to do," 23-year-old Diego Sepulveda, a fourth-year undocumented student at UCLA, told the Los Angeles Times. He hopes to attend law school next.