PhD Candidate in the School of Education & Information Studies in the Division of Higher Education at UCLA
Patricia Martín is a PhD candidate in the School of Education & Information Studies in the Division of Higher Education at UCLA. She was born in San Juan de Los Lagos, Jalisco, and raised in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Her experiences navigating higher education as a first-generation student and inequities in her P-20 schooling informed her research interests in studying higher education enrollment management, college recruiting, advertising, and college access. She received her bachelor’s degree in sociology with minors in education and applied psychology from UC Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in higher education from UCLA. Patricia serves as a graduate researcher for UCLA’s DataX initiative in the curriculum development and redesigning of undergraduate and graduate courses at the intersection of data, ethics, and society.
Her research interests focus on the intersection of college access and organizational behavior. She is interested in using computational social science to investigate postsecondary institutions’ enrollment and advertising practices and their effects on college access for underserved students. Her dissertation research tackles understanding universities’ digital marketing approaches as a timely and critical way to inform equity in college admissions. She employs a 12-month critical ethnography informed by Chicana/Latina Feminist epistemologies with high school students from California’s San Joaquin Valley (SJV). She utilizes semi-structured interviews, participant observations, collection of digital advertisements (e.g., emails and social media ads), and focus group interviews to explore the role digital advertising practices play in informing students’ college search and college application behaviors. Through a critical discourse analysis, findings from her dissertation shed light on the overwhelming information students receive through generic messaging and promotion of out-of-state, short-term, non-degree programs, and private institutions– perpetuating the inaccessibility of college.