June 11, 2008	Wednesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 06, 1429

LOS ANGELES: The success of some Asian-American and Pacific Islander college students has given rise to a myth of the “model minority” that obscures important differences within a diverse population whose educational needs are often neglected, according to a report released on Monday.

The concentration of Asian-American students in a relatively small number of elite universities, including the University of California, Los Angeles, and UC Berkeley, has raised fears of a “takeover” of the upper tiers of higher education in the US, said the report, a collaboration among a national commission, research institutes at New York University and the College Board.

In reality, more than half of Asian-American students attend community colleges or minimally selective four-year colleges, the report said.

Many students come from low-income families with limited English language ability and vary widely in test scores and other educational benchmarks, the report found.

Their increased participation in higher education closely tracks that of Hispanic and black students, as racial and other barriers have fallen over the past few decades, the report said.

“We are not an ethnic group every one of which has just graduated from Harvard,” said Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., speaking at a Washington news conference to announce the report.

There “are two populations ... one high income and high education attainment, and then a second group, equally important, that is low income and low education attainment,” Wu said. “The (first group) has completely overshadowed the existence of the other group of folks.”

To be sure, many Asian-American students do very well in higher education, particularly in California, where they make up roughly 40 per cent of admissions to the Los Angeles and Northern California UC campuses, said UCLA education professor Mitchell Chang.

Fueling the success has been US immigration policy, which favoured entrance for highly educated and trained people from Asia and Europe, the report said, noting that these immigrants tend to push their children into advanced degrees and professions.

As of 2000, 44.1 per cent of Asian-Americans had obtained college degrees, as opposed to the US average of 24.4 per cent, according to the report.

But many Asian groups fell far short of these achievement levels. Almost 60 per cent of Hmong people in the US that same year had less than a high school education, the report said. Pacific Islanders fared poorly. Only 15 per cent of Native Hawaiians, for example, had college degrees.

Chang said the lower income groups do not have the stellar high school preparation or other advantages of the more affluent immigrants.

The majority of Asian-American students at UCLA are from low-income families, Chang said. Their choice of college is between UCLA and the California State University system, not UCLA and expensive private schools, he said.

They often feel “tremendous pressure” to fit the model minority stereotype, continuing to struggle, for example, in science or math programmes when they would be better suited to other areas of study.

“They end up having to drop out, or don’t do well enough to get into medical school,” he said.

“For the general public, there’s an idea these Asians are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but they’re often struggling in ways very similar to other groups,” he said. “We shouldn’t assume they’re all going to do well for some magical or mystical reasons.”—The LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times