Despite the pervasive “model-minority” myth of overachieving Asian Americans easily getting into U.S. colleges and universities, a study at the University of California, Los Angeles has found that more Asian American students are facing problems in accessing higher education opportunities than ever before.
“That myth prevents us from recognizing the issues for large portions of Asian American student populations — that do not fit that myth and in some cases are struggling more than other groups in the country,” says Dr. Michael Chang, the study’s co-author and an associate professor of education at UCLA.
The study, “Beyond Myths: The Growth and Diversity of Asian American College Freshmen, 1971-2005,” analyzed the past 35 years and more than 361,000 Asian American, first-time, full-time college students.
Conducted as part of UCLA’s Cooperative Institutional Research Program and administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, it is the largest compilation and analysis of data on Asian American college students ever undertaken.
The number of Asian American students in higher education topped one million in 2001 and has continued to increase. They are much better prepared for college, are more well-rounded, finish high school with higher grade point averages than ever before and are generally more self-confident in their intellectual and academic abilities, according to the report.
But the study found that fewer Asian American students are getting into their first choices of colleges and universities and that they are also coming more often from low-income homes with limited abilities to pay for the rising costs of a college education.
According to the study, nearly 31 percent of Asian Americans came from households with incomes of less than $40,000 annually. The national average for all groups is 22.7 percent.
