Asian Americans On Campus

While there are books on racism in universities, few examine the unique position of Asian American undergraduates. This new book captures the voices and experiences of Asian Americans navigating the currents of race, gender, and sexuality as factors in how youth construct relationships and identities. Interviews with 70 Asian Americans on an elite American campus show how students negotiate the sexualized racism of a large institution. The authors emphasize the students' resilience and their means of resistance for overcoming the impact of structural racism.

The American Dream of success for many Asian Americans includes the highest levels of education. But what does it mean to live that success? In Straight A’s Asian American students at Harvard reflect on their common experiences with discrimination, immigrant communities, their relationships to their Asian heritage, and their place in the university. They also explore the difficulties of living up to family expectations and the real-world effects of the "model minority" stereotype. While many of the issues they face are familiar to a wide swath of college students, their examinations of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and culture directly speak to the Asian American experience in U.S. higher education. Unique and revealing, intimate and unreserved, Straight A’s furthers the conversation about immigrant histories, racial and ethnic stereotypes, and multiculturalism in contemporary American society.

While there are books on racism in universities, few examine the unique position of Asian American undergraduates. This new book captures the voices and experiences of Asian Americans navigating the currents of race, gender, and sexuality as factors in how youth construct relationships and identities. Interviews with 70 Asian Americans on an elite American campus show how students negotiate the sexualized racism of a large institution. The authors emphasize the students' resilience and their means of resistance for overcoming the impact of structural racism.

The Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) population continues to obfuscate the discourse on diversity and higher education institutions. The historical and contemporary experiences of AAPIs in higher education clearly indicate that their presence has influenced and reinforced the importance of diversity in educational environments. To contextualize AAPIs’ participation in postsecondary education, this monograph provides: A historical overview of the “model minority” stereotype The affirmative action debate and AAPIs Their involvement in the education pipeline A discussion of their experiences in college. Implications for future research, practice, and policy are further discussed. Educators, administrators, faculty, policy makers, and researchers who are concerned with diversity issues and the AAPI population will find this monograph an engaging and valuable resource.

"This sourcebook is a resource for new and seasoned educators and practitioners as well as for students. As former student affairs practitioners ourselves, we believe it is crucial for educators to have a basic understanding of the needs, experiences, and theoretical frameworks relevant to Asian Americans in order to both inform your work and challenge your thinking about how best to serve this diverse population. For those of you new to learning about Asian American students, we hope the information in this volume will provide you with knowledge that can broaden your perspectives on today's college students. For those already working with Asian American students, we hope this volume will provide you with evidence to support and/or advocate for your programs and services as well as additional ideas for best practices. For Asian American students, we hope this sourcebook will help to validate and make sense of your own experiences as you move through your college career."--Page 6.

"Those who find themselves living in the Americas, no matter what their ethnic, educational, or economic background, must ultimately 'become their own personalities, ' melding their point of view with their points of origin and their places of settlement. For immigrant or refugee families and their children, this 'process of becoming' often means struggling with the contradictions of race, generation, economics, class, work, religion, gender, and sexuality within the family, workplace, or school.... Perhaps nowhere is the struggle more raw, poignant, and moving than in the words of the younger generation at the cusp of such becoming. We readers can also find insights within the candid accounts of their personal lives and in the experiences of their family and friends."--from Balancing Two WorldsBalancing Two Worlds highlights themes surrounding the creation of Asian American identity. This book contains fourteen first-person narratives by Asian American college students, most of whom have graduated during the first five years of the twenty-first century. Their engaging accounts detail the students' very personal struggles with issues of assimilation, gender, religion, sexuality, family conflicts, educational stereotypes, and being labeled the "model minority." Some of the students relate stories drawn from their childhood and adolescent experiences, while others focus more on their college experiences at Dartmouth. Anyone who wants to learn about the changing concept of race in America and what it's like to be a young American of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Burmese, or South Asian descent--from educators and college administrators to students and their families--will find Balancing Two Worlds a compelling read and a valuable resource.

Asian American Students in Higher Education offers the first comprehensive analysis and synthesis of existing theory and research related to Asian American students’ experiences in postsecondary education. Providing practical and insightful recommendations, this sourcebook covers a range of topics including critical historical and demographic contexts, the complexity of Asian American student identities, and factors that facilitate and hinder Asian American students’ success in college. The time has come for institutions of higher education to develop more holistic and authentic understandings of this significant and rapidly growing population, and this volume will help educators acquire deeper and more intricate knowledge of Asian American college students’ experiences. This resource is vital for college educators interested in better serving Asian American students in their institutions.

While Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are growing faster than any other racial group in the U.S., they are all but invisible in higher education, and generally ignored in the research literature, and thus greatly misrepresented and misunderstood.This book presents disaggregated data to unmask important academic achievement and other disparities within the population, and offers new insights that promote more authentic understandings of the realities masked by the designation of AAPI. In offering new perspectives, conceptual frameworks, and empirical research by seasoned and emerging scholars, this book both makes a significant contribution to the emerging knowledge base on AAPIs, and identifies new directions for future scholarship on this population. Its overarching purpose is to provide policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in higher education with the information they need to serve an increasingly important segment of their student populations.In dispelling such misconceptions as that Asian Americans are not really racial minorities, the book opens up the complexity of the racial and ethnic minorities within this group, and identifies the unique challenges that require the attention of anyone in higher education concerned with student access and success, as well as the pipeline to the professoriate.