Reluctance to ask for financial aid forces many Asian students to make enrollment decisions based on college costs and affordability.
Dao Vang Tried convincing a Hmong woman to apply for financial aid before her son enrolled this semester at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Vang did not want them struggling to pay the entire $3,600 tuition bill themselves.
But the mother could not get past long-held fears about government. She confided in Vang a litany of facts about her family and income she did not want disclosed on a form for strangers to pore over. Eventually she said she would pay her son�s tuition herself although she wasn�t sure how.
�I couldn�t change her mind,� says Vang, coordinator of UWM�s Southeast Asian American Student Services. �Some parents I meet still see themselves as foreigners, even though they have lived in the United States for 20, 30 years. They don�t consider this country theirs.�
Nationally, Asian American students tend to rely on just themselves and their families to cover college costs, educators say, even though growing numbers of them qualify for government grants and other aid.
In the 2005-2006 academic year, for instance, 30.9 percent of Asian American freshmen came from families with annual household incomes of less than $40,000. By comparison, only 22.7 percent of all freshmen nationally had household incomes that low, according to an analysis of Asian American student characteristics and attitudes by University of California, Los Angeles, researchers.
The fact that substantial numbers of Asian American collegians are low-income runs counter to the popular but mistaken stereotype that all Asians are wealthy. The stereotype disregards the circumstances surrounding how some families came to this country. Many Southeast Asians, for example, fled war-torn Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam with little more than what they wore, settling for low-paying, hourly wage jobs in this country. It is not surprising that the 2000 Census showed that fewer than 10 percent of Americans of Cambodian, Hmong or Laotian descent age 25 or older hold a bachelor�s degree.
