Alumni Profiles

Joel Vargas, EPLIP

Joel Vargas works with the Early College High School Initiative at Jobs for the Future, examining the district and state policy implications related to the initiative and exploring how state and federal policies can improve the postsecondary attainment of underserved students. He has directed, initiated, and studied a variety of middle school and high school programs designed to promote college access for underrepresented students.

As a former director of Summerbridge Manchester, Joel encouraged talented high school and college students from across the country to become educators--who in turn provide academic enrichment to public middle school students. He also coordinated a Higher Education Information Center program at a Boston Public middle school that promotes college access. He has served as a middle school teacher at the Derryfield School in New Hampshire, as a leader within the Summerbridge collaborative of programs nationally, and as an editor and research assistant for the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.

Joel's dissertation focused on how pre-collegiate college access/preparatory programs worked with comprehensive high schools to ensure their students' enrollment and success in a college preparatory curriculum. It consisted of three college access programs (AVID, Puente, and Upward Bound) in California at three different high schools and utilized a qualitative, cross-case design and analysis. The study found that although these programs often seemed to support students' access and persistence in college preparatory programs, their effects were ultimately limited by the limitations of the schools that students attended – schools that were designed with the assumption that not all graduates need to be prepared for college. Richard F. Elmore, Gary Orfield and Leslie Siskin served as his committee of readers.

Joel received a B.S. in Journalism from Boston University, and earned his Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in March of 2003. He is co-editor of Double the Numbers: Increasing Postsecondary Credentials for Underrepresented Youth (Harvard Education Press 2004). Joel is a native San Franciscan.