Photo: Noah Willman

Every year, millions of people with criminal records face the unknown as they pursue education and workforce training on their way to jobs that require a license. 

That's because nearly 14,000 laws and regulations can restrict individuals with arrest and conviction histories from getting licensed in a given field. Several organizations are calling on policymakers to remove these barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated individuals.

Photo: Therese Aherne

Kathleen James-Chakraborty attended Yale University, as did her father and two great-grandfathers. Today, James-Chakraborty believes that the same legacy admissions practice that boosted her application long ago should no longer exist. 

Like James-Chakraborty, students and alumni of many colleges and universities—not just ultra-elite ones—are now wrestling with the practice of legacy admissions, a debate with far broader implications after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted race-based admissions programs and forced colleges to reconsider their criteria for accepting students.

Throughout Texas, there are 900,000 students in small- to medium-sized rural school districts. While rural students graduate at a higher rate than their urban peers, only 28 percent of rural high school graduates have college degrees compared to 41 percent of their urban counterparts.

Two organizations that focus on empowering rural school districts are working to improve those statistics.