Marion Lloyd is a research professor at the Institute for Studies on the University and Education (IISUE) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences (Sociology), and an MA in Latin American Studies from UNAM, as well as a BA in English and Romance Languages and Literature from Harvard University. From 2020 to 2024, she served as Deputy Director for Institutional Assessment and Social Impact at UNAM. Since 2023, she has been a member of the United Nations University's Independent Expert Group on Rankings, which highlights the harmful effects of global university rankings on institutional equity and proposes alternatives.
Her research focuses on higher education policy and educational equity from an international and comparative perspective, with an emphasis on Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and the United States. She examines how societies design policies—or “social justice algorithms”—for low-income populations, Afro-descendants, Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, and other disadvantaged and underrepresented groups. Drawing on critical perspectives, including the political economy of higher education, decolonial theory, and critical race theory, her work analyzes the roots of inequality and power relations in contemporary societies and educational systems. Her research project at CSHE, “Diversity as Counterhegemony in the Post-Affirmative Action Era,” traces the evolution of equity policies at UC Berkeley following California's 1996 ban on race-based affirmative action (Proposition 209). It also examines the tensions surrounding those policies during the second Trump administration and the drivers behind the continued push for diversity on campus.
From 1995 to 2011, she worked as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia for U.S. media outlets, including The Associated Press, The Boston Globe, the Houston Chronicle, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Today, she writes a regular column for Campus Milenio, a Mexican higher education supplement, and contributes to U.S. and international media outlets.
Access and equity policies, intercultural higher education, university rankings, decolonial theory
