Giving undocumented young people protection from deportation came with a big education bonus: It made them more likely to finish high school and enter college, according to a study released earlier this week.

It’s new evidence suggesting that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, benefits individual students as well as society as a whole — and comes as Congress continues to debate the fate of DACA recipients. Education advocates from a variety of perspectives have called for extending the program for both human rights and educational reasons.

"America is a nation that welcomes Dreamers and their many talents," the National Education Association’s head Lily Eskelsen García said late last year. "When we embrace their contributions, the future is brighter for all of us."

The paper, released through the National Bureau of Economic Research, examined the effects of the DACA program. Put in place by President Obama in 2012, DACA offered work permit eligibility and protection from deportation to certain undocumented immigrants who had entered the country as children. (The move was also criticized at the time as an overreach of executive power.)

DACA’s existence led to a number of benefits, the researchers find. In some cases, they appeared immediately.

High school graduation rates increased by nearly 4 percentage points among all non-citizens and nearly 11 percentage points among Hispanic students. College enrollment among Hispanic non-citizens jumped by over 7 percentage points — a more surprising finding, since DACA directly encouraged high school graduation but not college enrollment.

Read the full article about the study showing DACA's effect on undocumented students by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat.