Mary Grace Stevens said she felt alone after coming to UCLA as a first-generation and low-income student.

That changed when they found Samahang Pilipino Education and Retention – a student-run project devoted to increasing admission and retention rates among Filipino students. SPEAR helped them find a community away from home and provided them with counseling to assist them as they considered major options, they said.

Inspired to help other students succeed in higher education, Stevens, a UCLA alumnus, decided to become a SPEAR project director, through which she provided college and career mentorship to other students for over a year, she said.

Stevens was then laid off from her job at SPEAR on June 30. Project directors said in a July 2 letter addressed to program members that Campus Life – a division of Student Affairs overseeing UCLA’s Community Programs Office – told her the layoffs were due to federal directives that “reinterpret diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as potentially non-compliant with anti-discrimination laws.”

They are one of five project directors of student-initiated retention and access programs who were laid off by Campus Life in June, they said. UCLA Media Relations did not respond to a request for comment on the layoffs.

The retention and access programs, which are also overseen by UCLA CPO’s Student Initiated Outreach Center and Campus Retention Committee, offer individualized counseling, academic workshops and wellness programs to help students from marginalized backgrounds succeed in college, according to the CPO’s website.

The Trump administration has called on universities to end their DEI initiatives, threatening to initiate investigations into and cut funding from institutions with such programs. The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health also said they would deny grants to organizations with DEI programs, although the NIH’s directive was temporarily struck down by a federal judge in June.

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Ryan Factora, the former retention coordinator for SPEAR and UCLA alumnus, said he believes Trump’s DEI attacks have put pressure on UCLA, which is already experiencing a budget deficit.

“They are hiding the true impacts of Trump’s DEI attacks and just exactly how much pressure they’re under,” he said. “Instead, they just unexpectedly pulled in the project coordinators, told them they’re fired.”

Samone Anderson, who was laid off from her role as project director of the Academic Supports Program, said the university has failed to provide any policy evidence that supports Campus Life’s claim that the current retention programs’ structure is “non-compliant” with DEI regulations. ASP is a program under the Afrikan Student Union, which aims to foster the growth of students within the Afrikan diaspora, according to its website.

Lalo Velazquez, the project director for Students Organizing and Nourishing Academic Retention, which offers internship opportunities and academic peer counseling to Latino students, said Campus Life previously told him that his contract was extended to July 31. But, in June, the office informed the UCLA alumnus that his contract would not be renewed come July 31 after over two years in the role, he said.

Campus Life deemed a “complete restructuring” of all student-run SIOC and CRC programs necessary so that the university can distribute funding in a way that is “more equal” across all student-initiated projects on campus in compliance with federal guidelines, project directors said in the letter.

“These projects don’t just ‘support’ our communities, they are our communities,” they said in the letter.

Project directors added in the letter that while Campus Life said they are “fairly certain” that student staff – a position underneath project directors – would be able to work during the summer, the office did not provide guidance about the long-term future of the projects and whether student staff would be able to continue their roles during the academic year.

Anderson said she believes that reduced funding to student-initiated retention and access programs could lead to decreased graduation rates for students from marginalized backgrounds.

Prior to SPEAR’s founding in the 1980s, the four-year graduation rate for Filipinos at UCLA was 16%, Factora said. This percentage has since grown to over 80%, he added.

SPEAR provides its students with internships through the Samahang Teaching Through Experience Program, where students gain hands-on experience with understanding and addressing barriers to retention for Filipino students.

“If we take these programs away, if we take the opportunity and the chance for these students to step into leadership roles that they would have never imagined themselves being in, … that’s only going to harm the future generation of leaders,” Stevens said.

Stevens said she is now unsure about the future of her job security, while Velazquez said his role was one of two jobs he worked to sustain himself after his father passed away in June.

“The university is showing that they don’t care about their students, they don’t care about the people they serve and the people that are employed by them,” he said. “They ultimately care about their bottom line and what makes them the most money.”

In response to the layoffs, Factora said they are launching the Hands Off Student Initiated Projects social media campaign to demand the extension of current project director contracts to January, as well as ensure the continuation of student staff hiring, retention of access coordinators and continuation of summer staff payroll.

“For decades, they (retention and access programs) really have been at the forefront of creating progressive change at UCLA,” Factora said. “A lot of that has also been possible due to the full-fledged participation of allies who may not be part of these communities or who may not even be part of these organizations, but they see the value that they bring to the campus community.”

Anderson said the impact of these anti-DEI directives extends beyond UCLA, setting a precedent for more policies that hurt students of color across the country.

She added that student organizing is key in resisting attacks on DEI and strengthening retention and access programs.

“The students don’t have to look for the answer because they are the answer,” she said. “The only thing that’s going to protect these programs is the same thing that’s been protecting them, the same thing that started them – it’s the ability for students to come together.”