WASHINGTON, D.C. — As immigration and population growth continue to reshape the demographic landscape of the United States, college and university leaders should pay closer attention to the growing number of their Asian-American and Pacific Islander students.
That was the crux of the message delivered Tuesday on Capitol Hill in conjunction with the release of the 2011 report of the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education, or CARE.
Among other things, the report, titled The Relevance of Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders in the College Completion Agenda , provides a more nuanced picture of the enrollment and degree completion rates of Asian-American and Pacific Islander students. Panelists contended that this group of students often gets lumped together as “Asians” and are often regarded as likely to do well in college because of notions of academic giftedness that are wrongly ascribed to all students of Asian descent.
The reality, says the report’s lead author, Dr. Robert Teranishi, associate professor of higher education at New York University, is that Asian-American and Pacific Islander students are unlike any other racial group in the United States in terms of their heterogeneity, which involves 48 different ethnic groups, more than 300 languages and a wide variety of histories, cultures and religions.
Understanding the variation in their socioeconomic backgrounds is key to ensuring their academic success, Teranishi said.
“If we do nothing, we have to think about what the consequences of that will be,” Teranishi said.
To illustrate the point, Teranishi highlighted statistics that showed wide variation in educational attainment among various ethnic subgroups within Asian-American and Pacific Islander college students.
