Dr. Robert Teranishi served as the principal investigator on the CARE report released today.
Upset by the insinuation and portrayal of them as a uniformly privileged population, Asian-American and Pacific Islander students at UCLA tried to point out that many ethnic subgroups were underrepresented on campus and, partly because of this, disadvantaged. They, along with AAPI students at other UC campuses, spent many months calling for administrators to expand and refine their data collection and reporting of their racial demographic.
The following year, the Office of the President announced that it would, on its standardized UC application for undergraduate admissions, expand the number of AAPI ethnicities from eight to 23.
Before long, university officials began receiving data supporting the students’ claims about AAPI heterogeneity and educational disparities. The annual data showed important but worrisome characteristics about some of the subgroups. Student-run organizations at multiple UC campuses have subsequently used the data for funding proposals and to advocate for student needs and to fine-tune their retention efforts.
These are among the findings of a new report showing ways in which disaggregated data of AAPI college students has been collected and reported and how it has been used on campuses.
The report, being released today, was produced by the National Commission on Asian-American and Pacific Islander Research in Education (CARE). With funding from the Educational Testing Service, CARE principal investigator Dr. Robert Teranishi studied several universities with substantial AAPI enrollments—about 36 percent of UCLA’s 27,000-plus undergraduates are AAPI, for instance.
Among other things, the CARE report indicates campuses have seen stark differences in recent years between the proportion of some subgroups in the general population versus the proportion of high school applicants from those subgroups.
