Institutional Research Associate
PhD, Urban Education Policy, University of Southern California
MEd, Education, University of California, Los Angeles
David Velasquez is a Institutional Research Associate at Loyola Marymount University’s Institutional Research and Decision Support. Prior to that, Velasquez was a research assistant at the Pullias Center for Higher Education and a Gates Millennium Scholar in the Urban Education Policy PhD program at USC Rosier School of Education.
Advised by Tatiana Melguizo, Velasquez was interested in how practitioners and organizations can remove barriers and improve supports to aid low-income, students of color in persisting through college. This interest guided his research focus on community colleges, developmental math, vertical transfer, and policy implementation.
Prior to USC, Velasquez taught math at high schools throughout South Los Angeles. He received his master’s degree in education with a focus on urban teaching and a bilingual authorization (BCLAD) in Spanish from University of California, Los Angeles. He earned a bachelor’s in social welfare from University of California, Berkeley and spent time conducting research at the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in Washington, D.C. While there, he analyzed trends among successful transfer of low-income students and students of color from community college to public four-year institutions, which led him to see the leaks in the mathematics pipeline as an opportunity to increase college persistence.
