In order to boost America’s college degree attainment rates amid the country’s shifting demographics, resources should be targeted toward Minority-Serving Institutions with the highest concentration of low-income students from the often “overlooked and underserved” groups of Asian and Pacific Islander students.
That was one of the take-home points from a forthcoming report presented in preliminary form on Monday at the second annual higher education summit of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund.
The report—officially known as the 2011 CARE Report (National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education)—was presented by New York University associate professor of higher education Robert T. Teranishi.
Teranishi used the figures in the report to advocate for increasing the number of schools federally designated as Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (or AANAPISIs) and increasing the funding of such schools.
Currently, Teranishi said, only 15 of the 52 schools designated as AANAPISIs get funded through the federal AANAPISI program. Further, data show that far more schools—148 as of this year—are eligible for the program, and by 2013 the number will be 160.
“We believe that working with the AANAPISI program and its campuses holds great untapped potential for educating institutional, state and national audiences about how to better respond to the unique needs [and] challenges of the (Asian and Pacific Islander American) college student population,” Teranishi said.
Like other speakers at the summit, Teranishi sought to weave the importance of increasing degree attainment rates among Asian and Pacific Islander American students into the overall college completion agenda of the Obama administration. That agenda calls for having Americans have the highest proportion of college degrees in the world by 2020—a goal that summit speakers said won’t be reached without increasing degree attainment rates among Asian and Pacific Islander students, who have experienced a five-fold increase in higher education enrollment from 1979 to 2009, from 235,000 to 1.3 million.
