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Student regent-designate Maria Ledesma is the 10th UCLA student to hold this position.

Over the next two years, University of California students can expect pressing issues such as fee increases and admissions accessibility to come before the Board of Regents.

As student regent, UCLA graduate student Maria Ledesma will be one of the only voices representing the concerns of the more than 200,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students in the UC system.

The student regent and the student regent-designate are the only student voices on the board, the UC’s most powerful governing body. There are a total of 26 regents, 18 of whom are appointed by the governor.

The regents approved Ledesma’s appointment July 20, and her term as student regent will begin July 1, 2006. This year she will serve as the student regent-designate, who can participate in all deliberations of the board but cannot vote.

“Ideally I think that more student voice is always better,” Ledesma said. But at least having two student regents on the board, even if only one has voting power, helps to create continuity in student input, she said.

Ledesma will serve on the Finance, Educational Policy, and Grounds and Buildings Committees. She specifically chose the Finance Committee so she can voice her input on future fee increases, which are extremely likely to come before the regents before her term is up.

Regents are expected to raise fees again next year in agreement with their May 2004 compact with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Since the position’s creation in 1975, Ledesma is the 10th UCLA student to hold the position, said Trey Davis, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President.

Regent Norman Pattiz, who headed the selection committee, presented Ledesma to the Board of Regents at their July meeting. She was chosen from a total of 79 applicants representing all nine UC campuses, Pattiz said.

Ledesma is the first Latina to serve as student regent in the history of the position, Pattiz said.

Ledesma considers this a great honor, because “both people I know and people I don’t know have worked very hard for me to be here,” she said.

She became interested in the position through the UC’s Board of Admissions and Relations With Schools, where she served as the graduate student representative last year. Through the board, she became interested in matters of educational policy, such as the UC’s recent decision to withdraw from the National Merit Scholarship Program.

Having taken part in many of the Board’s discussions on the issue, Ledesma said she supports the UC’s withdrawal because it is “in sync with the UC’s role of comprehensive review” in admissions.

“One of the things that continues to interest me is the challenge that the university will continue to face in the admission of historically underrepresented groups,” Ledesma said.

The system needs to be held responsible for “making sure that all qualified students have a place at the university,” she said.

Ledesma’s interest in admissions policy comes not just from her own experiences, as a first-generation college student, but also through her own course of study.

Ledesma is currently pursuing a doctorate at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, where her research focuses on the admission of historically underrepresented students into highly selective schools.

Growing up in Oakland, California, Ledesma and her three siblings have all attended UC Berkeley.

Ledesma earned a master’s degree in education from Harvard University in 1999.

Ledesma has also worked as an outreach coordinator for the Early Academic Outreach Program and read admissions applications for UC Berkeley. In the future, she is interested in both teaching and research in higher education, and in educational policy.

One highly controversial agenda item that will continue to brew during her term will be the UC’s management bids for U.S. Department of Energy nuclear laboratories, Ledesma said.

She also expressed interest in admissions-related issues that are likely to come before the regents during her term, such as the role of comprehensive review and the weight given to honors-level high school coursework in the admissions process.