Elvira Abrica

Dr. Elvira J. Abrica is a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) where she conducts research focused on increasing access to higher education for historically underrepresented groups across post-secondary institutional contexts. Specifically, her agenda centralizes race, ethnicity, and immigrant status in research across contexts of community colleges, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, and institutional research and assessment. Prior to arriving at UNL, Dr. Abrica served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for an action-research grant sponsored by The California State University Office of the Chancellor where she led a study on student success among Black and Latino males at California State University Fullerton (CSUF). Simultaneously, Dr. Abrica held a research position in an office of institutional research at a Southern California community college. Professionally, Dr. Abrica has worked in institutional research, assessment, and student affairs- across both 2-year and 4-year institutions- since 2009. Dr. Abrica received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Currently, Dr. Abrica is conducting two grant-funded studies. One is a qualitative study of the vocational and transfer pathways of Black, Latino, and Asian American immigrant students within the Nebraska community college system, supported by the Council for the Study of Community Colleges. A second study is a quantitative investigation of how community college leaders expand and restrict the STEM transfer function, funded by the University of Nebraska Foundation. Dr. Abrica is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families, and Schools (CYFS) at Nebraska and Project M.A.L.E.S at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work currently appears in the Journal of Applied Research in the Community College and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.