A large proportion of AAPI students are from low-income backgrounds, they are the first in their families to attend college, and oftentimes they struggle to secure the financial resources to support themselves while in school.  AAPI students are also more likely than other students to be immigrants, non-native speakers of English, and students who often enroll in English-Language Learner programs.  Once on a college campus, AAPI students also face a variety of challenges when it comes to engagement to include: A reluctance to utilize support services like academic tutoring centers, career services and counseling; difficulty finding supportive classroom learning environments; a lack of culturally relevant and/or appropriate curricular and extra-curricular activities; a perception of pervasive discrimination on campus; and the challenge of resisting insidious stereotypes of AAPI students.  

All of these variables led me to recognize there is the lack of federal policy attention being paid to the AAPI student population.  Even more troubling is AAPI students seem to be an invisible racial/ethnic group in many policy discussions.  The tendency for policymakers to overlook AAPIs makes it difficult to address the complex set of their social realities.

To be fair, the U.S. Department of Education has made new investments in the AAPI student community.  We are very appreciative of Education Department officials for recently recognizing Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions, or AANAPISIs — institutions with at least a 10 percent enrollment of AAPI students, among other criteria — on their website listing of Minority-Serving Institutions, or MSIs.  This was a landmark change allowing AANAPISIs to be recognized and listed among other well-known MSIs such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges and Universities.  In fact, it is because of this acknowledgement that we now have a new national “umbrella” organization advocating on behalf of all AANAPISIs: The Asian Pacific Islander American Association of Colleges and Universities.