The Foreign Service Journal, June 2022

90 JUNE 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT including the University of California system have not been swayed by those letters. Therefore, instead of continuing to advocate with mixed results on a state- by-state and college-by-college basis, AFSA decided last year that a nation- wide solution was needed. Working with bipartisan supporters in the Senate and House, AFSA secured the insertion of a provision on Foreign Service in-state tuition in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fis- cal Year 2022 that President Joe Biden signed into law on December 27, 2021. That provision will save some AFSA members more than $100,000 per child in nonresident supplemental tuition charges during a four-year undergradu- ate education. States have long implemented the military provision, so they should have no difficulty in applying the same law to the Foreign Service. A New Federal Provision The new law mandates that state- supported colleges grant the in-state tuition rate to Foreign Service members, their spouses and dependents in their state of domicile. It does so by adding Foreign Service families to the long- standing federal law (20 U.S.C. 1015d, see https://uscode.house.gov/ ) mandating in-state tuition for members of the armed forces and their families in two circumstances: (1) when their permanent duty station is in the state, irrespective of how long they have been physically present at that location, or (2) when that is their state of domi- cile, irrespective of how long it has been since they were last physically present there.