Dr. María C. Ledesma

Dr. María C. Ledesma is a Professor and serves as Department Chair of the Higher Education Leadership Master’s Degree Program at San José State University. Prior to joining San José State in the fall of 2020, Dr. Ledesma was an Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in Undergraduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Utah’s College of Education. As a first-generation college student, she earned her Ph.D. in education from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has previous experience as an undergraduate admissions reader for her undergraduate alma mater, UC Berkeley, and sat as the graduate student representative for the University of California’s faculty senate committee on undergraduate admissions—The Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools. As a doctoral student María was selected to sit as the 32nd Student Regent for the University of California, the first Latina to hold this post. She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

As a critical race scholar, Dr. Ledesma’s research broadly examines the sociology of race-conscious policy in higher education. She is most concerned with historicizing and contextualizing race-conscious affirmative action policy and practice with the goal of advancing and expanding educational access and opportunity for historically minoritized students of color into higher education. Her work is interdisciplinary, reaching across the social sciences, borrowing from communications, ethnic studies, history, public policy, sociology, as well as law, to encourage equity oriented critical policy analysis for praxis. She is also interested in exploring the experiences of faculty of color who identify as first-generation. Her work has appeared in the Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, Equity and Excellence in Education, Review of Higher Education, and Qualitative Inquiry. Dr. Ledesma is the recipient of the 2017 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Scholars of Color Early Career Contribution Award.