The Brief

With the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Thursday that race-conscious admissions are unlawful, colleges and universities across the country hoping to enroll diverse student bodies will need to turn to different strategies to do so.

For ideas, those institutions could look to California, where public colleges haven’t considered race in admissions since voters in 1996 approved a ballot measure banning it.

The University of California has since turned to holistic review practices to make admissions decisions in an effort to maintain a diverse student body. Rather than only looking at a student’s grades or test scores, UC campuses have considered a range of factors including the location of an applicant’s school, an applicant’s socioeconomic status and an applicant’s achievements relative to the opportunities available at their high school. UC over the years has also ramped up its outreach to low-income students and students enrolled at underserved high schools.

Those efforts have been far from perfect, however.

In fact, UC officials acknowledged in a brief submitted to the Supreme Court last fall that it has failed to enroll a sufficiently diverse student body or one that is representative of the state’s demographics. But in the absence of being able to consider race, experts and college officials say UC’s strategies may be at least somewhat helpful in promoting racial diversity on campuses.

Without being able to consider race in admissions, universities will be forced to “work much harder to identify and address the root causes of societal inequities that hinder diverse students in pursuing and achieving a higher education,” said Michael Drake, UC’s systemwide president, in a statement Thursday.

For colleges that will now for the first time enter a world without race-conscious admissions, Drake added that UC is prepared to help.

“We stand ready to share our expertise and lessons learned as we collaborate with our partners to achieve a higher education landscape that reflects the rich diversity of our nation,” he said.

Among the institutions that may have something to learn from UC are the dozens of private colleges and universities in California, which unlike California’s public colleges, have previously been free to consider race in admissions but will now be outlawed from doing so. Many of them are likely to seek UC’s guidance when it comes to developing new student outreach programs, refining their own holistic review processes and potentially investing more in admission staffs, said Kristen Soares, president of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities. 

“We’ll have a lot to learn from them,” Soares said.

About 27 years after Proposition 209 banned the consideration of race in admissions, the racial makeup of UC’s student body doesn’t come close to matching the diversity of the state. For example, in fall 2022, UC’s incoming first-year students were 26.7% Latino. The state’s high school seniors in 2022 were 55.7% Latino.

But the university maintains that holistic review, introduced in 2001, has allowed the system to make some gains. In the two decades from fall 2002 to fall 2022, the percentage of undergraduate Latino students enrolled across UC has increased from 13% to 25%, though some of that is likely also due to demographic changes in the state, as Latinos now make up a larger share of high school seniors. The share of Black students has also increased from 3% to 4.4%, while the percentage of white students has decreased from 36.5% to 20.7%. White students made up 21.2% of high school seniors last year and Black students accounted for 4.9%.

“Holistic review can be a powerful tool to ensure that students are really getting a fair shot at being reviewed in a much more equitable fashion,” said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, an organization based in Los Angeles that advocates for more equitable access to college.

In a webinar hosted Friday by Siqueiros’ organization, speakers noted that the Supreme Court did not say colleges could not collect additional information about a student in order to gain a more holistic perspective.

“This is not a mandate of race ignorance in the university admissions process,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Some speakers highlighted how this decision could lead to rethinking admissions and recruiting, particularly among students attending the community colleges in California.

“Actively recruit community college transfer students and students seeking to resume their studies after an extended pause because nearly 50% of community college students are students of color and 45% are from families making less than $25,000 per year,” said Mamie Voight, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonpartisan research, policy, and advocacy organization.

Voight provided additional potential solutions, including increasing recruitment efforts in communities of color, awarding financial aid based on student need, ending legacy admissions policies, and ending the consideration of students’ criminal records during admissions.

In the Supreme Court’s majority opinion issued Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts said universities can consider factors consistent with holistic review, such as a student’s socioeconomic status, status as a first-generation college student or an essay describing how their race or ethnicity has impacted their life experiences.

One concern, however, is whether students of color will even apply to competitive universities now that affirmative action has been banned in admissions.

“I worry about how this might change the behavior of students and that students will be discouraged from applying to selective institutions,” said Maricela Martinez, the vice president of enrollment management at Occidental College, a selective liberal arts college in northeast Los Angeles.

In UC’s case, the system has tried to deal with that by increasing its outreach programs aimed at students from low-income families, such as its Early Academic Outreach program aimed at students from underserved high schools. UC has a total of 13 of those types of programs, and they collectively reach more than 200,000 students, the university told the Supreme Court in the brief it filed last year. UC said those programs haven’t been particularly effective reaching Black or Native American students but that Latino students have benefited.

UC in 2020 also eliminated standardized test scores from admissions. That was followed by a big increase in applications to the university, including among Black and Latino students. Experts attributed that partly to the elimination of those tests, saying students likely felt more optimistic about their chances of being admitted.

“I think there’s a lot that UC has learned, and can teach others across the country about admissions and how to do it in a much more thoughtful fashion,” Siqueiros said.

EdSource reporter Betty Márquez Rosales contributed to this article.

The Los Angeles City Council has officially delayed minimum wage increases for tourism workers. The council made the final vote Tuesday, pushing back a boost to $30 an hour for airport and hotel workers from 2028 to 2030.

The controversial move comes after L.A. faced major pressure from business interests, which had gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the November ballot to repeal the business tax. That effort could have financially ruined the city if it passed.

After the City Council voted to delay the wage from the November ballot, the leaders behind that ballot measure withdrew it.

It's a maneuver hotel workers have called a "shakedown." Originally celebrated as an "Olympic Wage," the $30 minimum was pegged to the arrival of the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. But a battle to upend it started as soon as the City Council passed it last year.

Workers who had counted on the increases aren't happy.

" I would expect my councilmember to stand up for working Angelenos, not help giant companies take money out of our pockets," Jordan Long, a bartender at LAX, said at a recent council meeting.

Stuart Waldman with the Valley Industry & Commerce Association told LAist that business groups decided to advance their ballot measure after unions wouldn't broker a deal with them directly.

"The business community has taken a page out of the union playbook to play hardball," he said.

Council members Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martinez voted against the motion to finalize the wage delay Tuesday.

The Trump administration has mass-deleted information about prosecutions tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including cases of defendants who assaulted police officers. The removals mark the latest phase of President Donald Trump's effort to rewrite the history of the violent riot.

Justice Department news releases that detailed guilty pleas, jury verdicts and prison sentences abruptly disappeared from government websites last week.

On social media, the Justice Department defended the move, saying, "We are proud to reverse the DOJ's weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ's website of partisan propaganda."

A review by NPR found that the deleted material included information about some of the most serious assaults on law enforcement that occurred that day. NPR maintains the most complete database and visual archive of the Jan. 6 prosecutions.

The purged news releases covered cases including:

• Daniel Rodriguez, who pleaded guilty to driving an electroshock device into the neck of former Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone, and who was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. 
• Albuquerque Head, who pleaded guilty to assaulting police and grabbing Fanone by the neck and pulling him into the mob of rioters while yelling, "I got one!" Head was sentenced to more than seven years in prison. 
• Thomas Webster, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting law enforcement with a metal flagpole, tackling a police officer to the ground and trying to remove the officer's gas mask. Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison. 
• Christopher Alberts, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting police with a wooden pallet and carrying a loaded handgun on Capitol grounds. Alberts was sentenced to seven years in prison.
• Peter Schwartz, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting police officers with pepper spray and throwing a metal chair at law enforcement. Schwartz was sentenced to 14 years in prison. 
  

The previously accessible news releases now lead to a "Page not found" message.

The mass deletion of government information about the riot, in which a mob of Trump supporters injured 140 police officers and threatened the lives of members of Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence, follows a broader effort by the Trump administration to whitewash the attack.

Trump granted clemency to every Jan. 6 defendant, including full pardons for all the most violent rioters and the erasure of seditious conspiracy convictions for members of extremist groups. The Justice Department fired dozens of prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and hired a former riot defendant who was seen on video urging the mob to "kill" police. The administration settled a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the estate of rioter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed while storming the Capitol, for nearly $5 million. On the fifth anniversary of the riot, the White House created a website that distorts that day's events, describing the rioters as "patriots" and blaming police for causing "chaos." And just last week, the administration announced a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund," indicating that even rioters who assaulted police may be eligible for payouts.

When speaking about the attack, Trump consistently describes his supporters as victims rather than perpetrators of violence.

"I pardoned people that were assaulted themselves. They were assaulted by our government," Trump said last year. "They didn't assault. They were assaulted."

Police officers who were violently assaulted on Jan. 6 have described suffering lifelong physical and psychological injuries.

"I have been sentenced to a lifetime of medical issues that include physical pain and mental and emotional distress," former Capitol Police Sgt. Federico Ruiz said in a victim impact statement filed in a Jan. 6 case. "There is not a day that goes by that pain, discomfort, and/or a mental health issue do not flare up to remind me of that day."

Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who worked on Jan. 6 cases, told NPR in a recent interview that the administration's effort to flip the story of the riot is part of a broader effort to attack democratic institutions.

"It's clear there is an ongoing fight to rewrite the history of Jan. 6, because these people know if they can successfully get people to forget about Jan. 6 — or worse yet, condone it — then they will be able to convince people to accept any attack on democracy," said Ballou.

Ballou currently represents two police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 and are suing to prevent payouts from the Anti-Weaponization Fund.

While the government continues to remove information on the attack, NPR's database and visual archive of the attack remains accessible. NPR's work has been used by prosecutors, defendants, academic researchers and the general public.

The searchable database covers all the nearly 1,600 criminal cases, including charges, convictions and sentencing outcomes. The archive also includes a timeline of the day's events and makes accessible hundreds of videos from police body cameras, Capitol surveillance footage and other sources. NPR is currently taking legal action to obtain additional video evidence held by the government, which has not been previously disclosed.
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