Valeria Morales is the daughter of migrant farm worker mother from Eagle Pass, Texas and formerly undocumented immigrant father from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Through family roots and experience, she gained a passion for equity and access in education. She is a first-generation college graduate, with ten years of experience in creating access to higher education for low-income, first-generation and minoritized youth.
Valeria received her BA in Psychology and Spanish from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2009. After graduation she served two years as an AmeriCorps Volunteer with the I Have a Dream Foundation of Boulder County, a nonprofit drop-out prevention program who also encourage low-income youth to pursue post-secondary education. In 2011, she joined the University of Colorado Boulder as a staff member in the Office of Admissions, focusing on diversity and access recruitment strategies. She later moved to the Leeds School of Business, with the charge to increase diversity recruitment, enrollment and retention efforts within the Office of Diversity Affairs.
In 2017, Valeria joined the Office of Precollege Outreach and Engagement as the new Rural Precollegiate Program Manager. In this position she supports the institution’s efforts to expand precollegiate programming into rural communities of Colorado. Currently, Valeria oversees partnership programs from the Western Slope, Eastern Plains, the San Luis Valley, as well as local partnership programs. In May 2019, Valeria graduated with her MA in Higher Education from CU Boulder, and is pursuing her Ed.D. in higher education to further her work in making higher education more accessible for Colorado’s youth.