Educational Problems of Asian-Americans May Be Overlooked Because of Stereotypes, Report Says

The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3281n.htm

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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Educational Problems of Asian-Americans May Be Overlooked Because of Stereotypes, Report Says

By PETER SCHMIDT

The popular image of Asian-Americans as academically successful ignores the tremendous amount of variation among different subsets of that population, according to a report released on Monday by a research collaborative involving the College Board and two institutes at New York University.

The collaborative, called the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education, argues in its report that "there is no such thing" as a composite for all of the ethnic groups that it studies, and figures such as the average SAT scores for that population mask how it is overrepresented at both ends of the achievement spectrum.

While some groups, such as people of Indian or Japanese ancestry, are doing substantially better in educational terms than the nation's population as a whole, others, such as those whose families came here from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, are less likely than the population at large to have high-school diplomas and college degrees.

"In reality," the report says, "there are significant numbers of Asian-American and Pacific Islander students who struggle with poverty, who are English-language learners increasingly likely to leave school with rudimentary language skills, who are at risk of dropping out, joining gangs, and remaining on the margins of society, and who are subjected to violence and discrimination on account of race, class, gender, ethnicity, or language."

In making that point, the report echoes arguments by Asian-American scholars and activists dating back at least 15 years (The Chronicle, February 10, 1993).

Clouding discussions of Asian-Americans in college, the report says, is the frequent inclusion of international students in enrollment figures and computations of average scores. The College Board has found that Asian students who attended high school outside the United States have substantially higher SAT scores than those who graduated from American schools.

Much of the report is devoted to challenging what its authors see as common misperceptions about Asian-Americans. It argues, for example, that the belief they are coming to dominate college enrollments stems largely from their being concentrated at a relatively small number of elite and highly visible schools. As of 2000, two out of three Asian-American or Pacific Islander students were enrolled in 200 colleges located in eight states.

The report also challenges the idea that this population is concentrated in private four-year colleges, noting that far more Asian and Pacific Islander students attend public two-year and four-year colleges, and their enrollments are rising fastest at public two-year institutions. In response to the stereotype of such students as being concentrated in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology, the report observes that they also account for a disproportionate share of degrees awarded in the social sciences and humanities.

A news release accompanying the report says it "builds on the simple premise that educational policies and practices must be based on fact, not fiction."

But in one area—its discussion of the impact of affirmative action on Asian-Americans—the report makes no reference to a recent study (The Chronicle, January 30) finding that their enrollments rose sharply at several public universities banned from considering race and ethnicity in admissions.

The New York University institutes involved with the study were the Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy. The report is titled "Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders: Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight."

Copyright 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education