Prospective Students

Every year I seek to admit 1-2 PhD students to come study at UCLA and work on my research projects. 

Working on a research project provides invaluable mentoring and development opportunities for graduate students. It also allows you to get funding for your PhD through graduate student research assistantships (GSRs). People who work with me usually see themselves in the future as academics (professors), research or policy analysts in think tanks or similar organizations, analysts or evaluators for school districts, or doing development work in international organizations (World Bank, IDB, etc.).

If you want to come to UCLA, please contact me. Before you do that consider:

1. Make sure our interests are aligned. Below are things I’m either currently working on, or have a significant interest in

• Policies to improve teaching/learning for English-Learner classified students

• Dual-language immersion policy

• Student mobility

• Anything having to do with education policy and/or educational program evaluation in Latin American countries (particularly Mexico and Colombia– which are the countries I know better)

• Teacher labor markets

• Program evaluation

2. My expertise is in quantitative education policy analysis. Therefore, most of my projects use quantitative methods. Our collaboration will be most successful if you already do the following:

• • • • • • Understand the basics of quantitative analysis. By this I mean you have taken several courses in basic statistics and probability, regression analysis, etc. People with economics, sociology, public policy, or political science degrees usually have this training.  

          • Can program using statistical software such as R or Stata (and beyond.....the more tools the better!).

In addition, you should be interested in learning how to prepare and analyze large-scale data sets including administrative data sets from school districts, state-level data, international data (PISA, etc.) and/or survey data (NCES data). 

If all of this applies to you, please send me an email at lsantibanez@ucla.edu. I would love to hear from you!

ps. our admissions cycle usually closes on (or around) December 1st.