UCLA’s Rogelio Salazar Wins CSU Chancellor’s Award

Prestigious program provides comprehensive support to emerging scholars

“Rogelio has been a rock star in our PhD program. The lived experiences that he brings to his research and to his teaching pedagogy are just remarkably powerful,” said Professor Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, chair of the UCLA Department of Education. “Rogelio’s story is a story of resilience, lucha, and community. He is a builder and a strategic thinker that continues to show up for those students who need him the most. I am very proud of him, and beyond excited for what is to come for Rogelio. The CDIP fellowship is a great opportunity for him to continue shining.” 

Salazar’s research interests are focused on exploring how educational policies shape and constrain higher education opportunities, as he puts it, “from a racialized lens, who is being included in college-going, community college transfer including completion conversations, and while looking at it closely, who is being left out by cause of systemic inequalities, flawed policies, and organizational conditions.” 

That framing has led Salazar to engage in research on the racialized implementation of dual enrollment and on California’s community colleges, examining how institutional routines, state, and federal policies shape equity-driven practices and outcomes. This includes, nationally examining the design and implementation of state-level college promise programs and their policies intended to expand access, as well as the unintended consequences these policies may create for racially minoritized and underrepresented students in the community college during the free-college era. His dissertation in progress explores the underrepresentation of Black and Latinx students in California’s dual enrollment programs. In his multiple case study, he is examining the state’s top four highest enrolled Black and Latinx serving dual enrollment programs and their high school partners, seeking to understand how racial equity is being interpreted and enacted at these sites.  

Among other papers, Salazar has published ,  “Working Towards An Equitable Future In California Dual Enrollment Programs,” published by the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, and, “An analysis of statewide college promise programs: Towards a racially equitable future,” featured in New Direction for Community Colleges. In addition, he has contributed to “Quantity and quality: Equity considerations for the funding of categorical programs in community colleges,” co-authored by Jeremy Wright-Kim and Jaime Ramirez Mendoza and published by the Journal of Higher Education. 

While at UCLA, Salazar has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Equity & Inclusion Student Fellowship from the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management; the Summer Scholars Program Fellowship with Just Education Policy; and the Wheelhouse Summer Scholar Fellowship with the UC Davis Wheelhouse Center for Community College Leadership and Research. He was recently selected for the Faculty First Look program with New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and has also been awarded the Graduate Research Mentorship Fellowship, the Graduate Council Diversity Fellowship, and a dissertation grant from the CCHALES Research Collective. 

Salazar’s promise as an emerging scholar however has not always been assured.  His own experiences closely reflect those students at the heart of his research, those too often left out and left behind, closed off from the opportunities that access to education can provide. Salazar is the first in his family to attend college, let alone pursue graduate study. 

We talk briefly here with Salazar about the CSU Chancellor’s Award, his educational journey, and his research interests. 

UCLA Ed&IS: Congratulations on the CSU Chancellor’s Award. What does this mean for you?

Rogelio Salazar: I’m excited, it’s a very big deal. This award will give me time to expand my research and hone my skills as a pedagogue. While research is important, so is teaching, and this will help me with my teaching and position me for applying for faculty jobs.

As an instructor at San Diego State, I’ll get to work closely with my colleague, Professor Eric R. Felix to deepen my research on dual enrollment and be able to share out timely and relevant policy implications to improve these offerings. I’ll also get to develop my skills and refine my instructional practices through mentorship and instruction and through co-teaching graduate level courses. I view teaching as a science, but also as an art and I am looking forward to practicing this art through inquiry that develops how I support first generation, low-income and racially minoritized students.

The award is an affirmation of my commitment to educational equity and the students I serve. It mirrors what I foster in the classroom for my former students when I center their experiences, stories, and their communities into my teaching. It’s also a reflection of what my mentors have poured into me, of the faculty and staff at Cal State San Marcos who poured into me as a young first-generation undergraduate, leading to my growth as a scholar. I want to continue doing the same with the students I’ll get to interact with this fall. 

UCLA Ed&IS: Were you always interested in education, did you plan to become an academic scholar?

Salazar: Growing up in North County San Diego in Oceanside, I never gave much thought to education, and certainly never envisioned pursuing a PhD. My only hope was finishing high school or getting a GED. I had my first encounter with the police when I was seven. Growing up during the height of gang violence in Southern California in the 1990s, led me to being criminalized at a very young age. 

These experiences deeply distanced me from valuing my K-12 education and one-day considering college. While K–12 education can be a transformative space, it has also been a site of harm for boys of color, marked by harsh zero-tolerance discipline policies, along with enduring microaggressions and the effects of the school-to-prison pipeline, realities that I, my peers, and many others have faced, and that youth continue to experience, in both blatant and invisible ways. Those events made me cognizant to how discipline policies and tracking practices produce racialized outcomes, shaping access to advanced coursework, college and career counseling, and ultimately post-secondary opportunities. 

UCLA Ed&IS: What changed your path?

Salazar: I was basically a high school pushout, but I figured it out after a while. One of my cousins, someone I hung out with a lot and looked up to, was active in the neighborhood, and he got arrested, incarcerated and then deported. In my last interaction with my cousin, he told me that I needed to do something with my life – it was a wakeup call for me. 

At that point I was already 17, and I had to make up three year’s worth of high school credit. Somehow, I managed to qualify for Migrant Education, a program that supports students from families that work in agriculture. There, I was lucky to have a unique interaction with someone who genuinely cared for my success. That in that itself was something I wasn’t quite familiar with, but I built trust with them, and they helped me make up three years-worth of coursework through online credit recovery. 

Then, one day she asked me if I wanted to go to college. I didn’t make much of it, because I was already considering working full-time as a mechanic with my dad after high school, but I was like, yeah, sure, without making much of it. She helped me sign up for the SAT and then I applied to Cal State San Marcos, and I got in through special admission.

Even though I got into San Marcos, I struggled because I didn’t come in with much of an academic background or with the best study skills. I was placed on academic probation. But I didn’t give up. I concurrently enrolled at MiraCosta College to complete the lower-division credits I was missing. 

Somehow, I met a mentor of color. Without knowing them, as I was trying to put on a tie, I went up to him and asked him how to tie a tie, because I didn’t know how, that’s not something I grew up doing. That relationship grew into a very strong mentorship. Then I met a professor in my department [of] human development, who was the first Chicano faculty member I ever met. He validated my experience as a high school push out, as a first-generation Chicano. In my interactions with him, he would call me a ‘scholar,’ recognizing that I showed keen interest in engaging with theory and using it to make sense of youth outcomes. 

After changing my major three times, I pursued human development because I wanted to work with youth who had experienced similar things as me. I spent about six years working with youth in K-12, programs like TRIO Upward Bound, GEAR UP, and doing mentorship work independently at my former middle school and a few alternative high schools across North County San Diego. 

Then I decided I wanted to get a master’s degree, because I wanted to do college counseling, and I did that. But I thought I had lot to share from my personal and professional background with up-and-coming teachers and counselors. I didn’t really know what education policy was, but I knew that the next step was going to be research to do more impactful work. Shortly after, I spent time at Cal State San Marcos and MiraCosta College. While at the community college, I observed and supported faculty and staff-led initiatives grounded in community, aimed at serving the campus’s broad spectrum of students. 

I got connected with the faculty at San Diego State, with Professor Eric Felix, who leads the CCHALES Research Collective, a research group focused in examining community colleges and generating equity-driven policy and practice-focused research. That was really my first exposure to education policy and getting research training. It’s where I learned that conducting research comes with the responsibility of telling the stories of those on the front lines serving students, and advocating for them through policy reforms and more equitable conditions to support the wide range of community college students —not just writing about them but working alongside them. That’s where I later learned about UCLA and Dr. Cecilia Rios-Aguilar and started to read more about her work. I decided I wanted to work with her and so I applied to the PhD program at UCLA in 2020. 

Before starting my program, I spent time with the Public Policy Institute of California and the Education Trust–West, where I engaged in and learned about the intersection of policy making, research, and advocacy. Those experiences taught me to track the full policy cycle—from initial design and movement through the legislature, to implementation and evaluation—and to identify where well-intended equity policies fall short in practice or become diluted from their original intent to serve underrepresented students.

UCLA Ed&IS: What has your experience been like at UCLA?

Salazar: It’s been transformational. I came into this program thinking that I would just focus on P-16 policy implementation, but I’ve grown as a scholar to have curiosity and acquire distinct perspectives that better inform my work. I have had the opportunity to be in community with some very bright faculty. And those gold nuggets that they drop rub off on you.

Getting to work with Professor Ozan Jacquette made me think differently about how I approach my research from an organizational lens, shaping how I think about the intersection of market demands, resource dependency, and organization logics. While taking one of Professor Jessica Harris’s courses, they brought such a remarkable critical race expertise that has been an impactful experience for me when thinking about the racially intended and unintended consequences of policy design and the significance of political discourse and framing of underrepresented groups.  

And I can’t say enough about getting to work with Cecilia (Rios-Aguilar) who has been my advisor. I am very grateful to have been blessed to work with a very caring mentor, someone who when I reach out to them, they always care about me as a person. That’s something that’s very important to me, because from my time as a practitioner and, even now as an instructor in the courses where I am the TA, I always place emphasis on my students and how they’re doing before anything else, because I go back to my own personal experience in K-12 and higher ed. 

Part of this stems from my academic lineage and the lessons Cecilia has instilled in me about funds of knowledge—integrating students’ stories and assets into classroom discussions to foster community and affirm their experiences as student parents, transfer students, system-impacted students, and undocumented students, enabling them to seeing themselves as co-contributors of knowledge in the classroom – we all have a story and it informs how we enter educational spaces and navigate sociopolitical contexts. 

UCLA Ed&IS: Can tell us a little bit about your research?

Salazar: I’m exploring dual enrollment across California, examining the state’s top four highest enrolled Black and Latinx serving dual enrollment programs. It’s a robust project that engages both dual enrollment staff and high school partners across eight programs. There is a need to understand how racial equity is being made sense of and advanced at these unique sites. 

I have found intentional framing and concentrated efforts to increase participation and success for Black and Latinx students in dual enrollment. In these sites, DE is being led in racially equitable ways, grounded in racial, multilingual, and community-oriented approaches. Rather than reproducing the exclusionary nature that dual enrollment can take, the sites I’m working with are disrupting it through a systemic awareness of who is missing from participation, coupled with intentionally designed structures, on-the-ground efforts, and broader commitments from colleges and senior administrators. 

However, from the work I’ve done previously, I have found that dual enrollment programs are led in race evasive ways that often leave out equity considerations. There are concerns in the ways programs recruit, in how they reach out to students, and to parents, who can benefit from learning about the benefits of dual enrollment and higher education systems. These implementation challenges and administrative burdens stem in part, for instance, from staffing limitations, with some small colleges relying on dual enrollment teams of only one or two people to serve 1,000–2,000 students across multiple high schools. In other cases, dual enrollment is not integrated into broader community college strategic efforts, leaving it siloed. Additionally, there is significant variance across the state in how colleges broadly engage with equity, articulate it, and enact their commitments, mirroring the shortcomings of dual enrollment’s racial participation. 

From my early work, equity-mindedness offers a lens to address these gaps by guiding programs to intentionally broker dual enrollment knowledge in ways that build students’ social and navigational capital within both dual enrollment and the broader higher education context. This includes adopting multilingual outreach strategies and simplifying matriculation forms and processes. While dual enrollment holds great potential to expand higher education access, it often relies on selective recruitment. Equity-minded approaches can disrupt these exclusionary patterns and reposition existing commitments and practices to better serve students historically excluded from postsecondary opportunities.

Through my emerging work, I look forward to sharing findings to help dual enrollment staff, K–12 partners, and colleges position dual enrollment as a more racially equitable opportunity, one that extends beyond a broad college access strategy to account for additional influences and contexts that remain underexplored and shaping access.

UCLA Ed&IS: How have your own experiences shaped your interests and approach to research

Salazar: I’m reminded of something my mentor and colleague Eric Felix once told me: we already possess the research skills we need. It’s like when you’re at a family carne asada and you can tell something’s off—whether your tías aren’t talking to each other or the salsa tastes different. We have a keen eye and those skills, though often in non-Western forms, are already within us. When I talk to my students, I remind them that we already hold these analytical and observational skills; it’s just a matter of bringing them to light and honoring the epistemologies shaped by our experiences and communities.

Looking back, much of my research training stems from my lived experiences—being in proximity to the flaws of educational and social policies, spending time in K–12 settings learning about culturally mindful approaches to college access, and witnessing the potential of grassroots equity efforts in community colleges, including the role of policymaking and advocacy in research. These distinct experiences shape the work I do today. 

At the core of it all is my identity as a first-generation son of immigrants and a high school pushout, which informs how I recognize who is included in educational conversations and who is left out. Having been pushed out of the K–12 system and later returning to both the system and higher education, my work now focuses on advancing higher education opportunities for historically excluded and racially minoritized students.