Leticia Oseguera

Professor
School of Education

May 1, 2009

Scholar Pursues Interests in Education Policy and Chicano-Latino Studies

Leticia Oseguera is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. She teaches courses and advises students in the Educational Policy and Social Context (EPSC) specialization. She also teaches courses for the UC Irvine Department of Chicano/Latino Studies.

Dr. Oseguera earned her B.A. in Sociology from UC Irvine where she was also a member of the women’s basketball team. During her tenure as an undergraduate, she earned numerous academic and athletic accolades and was inducted into the UC Irvine Athletic Hall of Fame. Dr. Oseguera then went on to pursue her Master’s and Ph.D. at UCLA. At UCLA, she served as an academic counselor for athletics, she worked as a research analyst for the Higher Education Research Institute, and she worked for the Office of Faculty Diversity. Her interests in college students and the college environment stem from her personal experiences working with the Student Academic Advancement Services at UC Irvine.

Dr. Oseguera is a quantitative researcher with a substantive focus on college access, college transitions, and college impact. Her first area of research focuses on educational policies around college access and admissions including standardized testing, financial aid, and percent plans in college admissions. In recent publications, she has evaluated pre-professional preparation programs and these programs’ influence on students’ decisions to pursue careers in those substantive areas. Her second area of research focuses on college transitions. She has published articles on the movement between high school and various postsecondary educational paths. Her third area of research focuses on the impact of college on students. In particular, she has examined college students’ agency and civic development during the undergraduate years.

Since joining the UC Irvine faculty, Dr. Oseguera has been committed to working with both undergraduate and graduate students of diverse backgrounds. Her approach to teaching reflects her experience: all students, regardless of their background, can learn, and students will rise to the challenge of high standards and expectations. Her courses on race and ethnicity, educational policies on college access, comparative Latino populations, and multicultural education in K-12 schools, all reflect a concern with understanding how gender, race, and class shape experiences and opportunities in the United States.

Dr. Oseguera (with co-PI Cynthia Feliciano) was recently awarded a 5-year $484,000 grant from UC All Campus Consortium for Diversity (ACCORD) examining 16-26 year olds who are not en route to securing postsecondary education (PSE) credentials with value in the labor market. She will portray the trajectories of multiple segments of the target population and document the opportunities and obstacles they face in the attainment of a PSE credential. She will be using multiple national datasets to provide a portrait of 16-26 years across various sectors of education, health, and the criminal justice system and will develop survey and interview protocol to be used in community case studies of Southern California cities.

This summer Dr. Oseguera will spend a week at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy’s National Poverty Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she will be using the American Community Survey to explore questions around youth poverty and access to postsecondary education. In addition to this work, Dr. Oseguera is also working on a manuscript evaluating tuition and admission policies for immigrant and undocumented students from a comparative state context.

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