There’s growing debate among educators on whether the umbrella Asian Pacific Islander label conceals disparities among Asian American students or provides political power in numbers.
Whenever Southeast Asian students meet with Channy Rasavong, they discuss a multitude of personal and schoolrelated topics. In fact, Rasavong and others credit such institutional assistance for the steady growth in Southeast Asian enrollment at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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But nationally, support services aimed at not only Southeast Asians but all Asian Pacific Islander students remain scarce in higher education, experts say, despite studies showing worrisome disparities among subgroups in degree attainment, retention and family income. Long-held social stereotypes and the popular but deceptive “model minority” myth have arguably lulled many U.S. college leaders into believing Asians across the board do not need outreach in order to succeed.
This mindset fuels a growing discussion among educators: Is the Asian Pacific Islander label appropriate for all of its subgroups? Does this label still benefit students or has it evolved into more of a hindrance? It depends who you ask. And, the variety of opinions illustrates not only the complexity of such a discussion, but also of the subgroups themselves.
“As a label, it may cover too much, too many different kinds of people,” says Dr. Mitchell Chang, professor of higher education and organizational change at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There are people lagging way behind other people who fall under this label.”
However, Ling-chi Wang, a longtime activist and associate professor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley, says college students — even recent immigrants — still benefit from the Asian Pacific Islander umbrella more often than not. “There is a shared experience of what it means to be an Asian in America.”
