Jesse Enriquez

PhD Candidate in the Department of Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego

Jesse Enriquez is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Education Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is a proud product of two Hispanic Serving Institutions; he earned his BA in Kinesiology from CSU, Chico, and MA in Postsecondary Educational Leadership from San Diego State University. Prior to starting his doctoral studies, he worked in the non-profit sector and in higher education as a student affairs professional. He currently serves as the Associate Director of the CSU Young Men of Color Consortium and as an adjunct faculty member at California State University, Channel Islands, which is located a short distance from his hometown of Oxnard, California.

Jesse’s research explores the lived experiences of Students of Color who begin their postsecondary education at “two-year” open access institutions (i.e., community colleges) with hopes of transferring to a “four-year” universities to complete a bachelor’s degree.

His research unapologetically uplifts the voices of students on the margins, particularly young men of color, student-parents, and community college students. To examine the transfer phenomenon, he employs critical frameworks such as the transfer receptive culture framework (Jain et al., 2010) that analyze how institutions of higher education facilitate the transfer pathway for students who have been historically underrepresented and excluded from higher education. Rather than focusing on what Students of Color can do to improve, change, or learn to adapt to their environments; his research examines what institutions of higher education can do to improve, how they can change, and how they adapt to their students.