What Is College Readiness, and Why Does It Matter for Asian and Pacific Islander American Students?

• In Event: Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Increasing Access for Asian Pacific Islander American Students: The Challenge of College Readiness

Abstract

College readiness has been defined as the level of preparation students need to enter and succeed in a credit-baring, non-remedial course (Conley, 2008). Despite the straightforward nature of this definition, the issues of college readiness in educational policy and research have not been so clear cut. There exists a variety of ways to measure and define college readiness, all of which have implications for student populations attempting to access and succeed in college. For example, academic preparation, time management, college knowledge, and working with faculty are all examples of indicators of a student’s potential for success in college (ACT, 2005; Adelman, 1999; Britton & Tesser, 1991; Conley, 2007; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005). In addition to a need of synthesizing the issues of college readiness, a need also exists to document its intersection with the opportunity and college trajectories of students of color, and specifically in this paper, Asian American and Pacific Islander students. Building on her previous work in this area, the author puts forth a synthetic review of college readiness while also addressing the issues facing Asian American and Pacific Islander students in attending and finishing college.

The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, the author presents a typology of college readiness so that the audience can have a better understanding of the multifaceted and complex issue of college readiness. This typology considers the ways that a deceivingly simple word as college readiness has been operationalized in the extant literature as well as the outcomes assessed. The second objective of this paper is to highlight the documented experiences with college access and college readiness of Asian and Pacific Islander students. This second section considers issues concerning: (a) the factors that contribute to underrepresentation of AAPIs in educational policy and research in the college access area, such as the model minority stereotype; and (b) the results of quantitative and qualitative research in higher education on disaggregated student data for Asian American and Pacific Islander subgroups.

Author

• Jenna Sablan, University of Southern California