STEM Pushout and Redirection: Institutional Disposability and the Educational Experiences of HMoob American College Students

• In Event: Education and the Production of "Asian American": Institutional Racial Logics, Community Negotiations, and Their Implications

Abstract

This paper counters the prevailing perception that all Asian Americans excel in STEM (Kang et al., 2021) by documenting the institutional and socio-cultural factors which push-out HMoob American college students from STEM programs at one large, predominantly white university; and the coordinate processes of gatekeeping and deficit-oriented advising that redirect those students toward non-STEM programs.

We draw on the secondary education literature on push-out and gatekeeping (Kennedy et al., 2019; Tuck, 2011) which demonstrates how federal accountability measures (e.g., high-stakes testing) push-out students of color by pressuring them to enter alternative high school graduation pathways and/or humiliating students into stopping out. We also use Ngai's (2014) concept of "disposability" to theorize how HMoob college students have been framed as disposable subjects who benefit the university’s audit culture of higher education accountability (Apple, 2005; Shore, 2008), and simultaneously, are disposed of by removing them from institutional spaces.

This analysis is based on a multi-year Participatory Action Research project between HMoob American college student activists and education researchers to study the systems of oppression and inform advocacy to support HMoob college students.

Data include 115 interviews with 106 participants – 56 participants who were current students, 34 who were former students, and 16 who were staff that work directly with HMoob students - 25 observational field notes from activities involving HMoob students on campus, and over 200 pages of research memos in the form of auto-ethnographic journals in which student researchers reflect on their interactions with participants in relation to their own personal experiences as HMoob college students.

We have documented institutional processes that push-out HMoob, and other minoritized students, away from selective majors and toward non-competitive and eclectic majors with higher graduation rates. Namely, we see this phenomenon in STEM, where our participants planned to enter a STEM program but were redirected away from it by their advisors after struggling with certain gatekeeping mechanisms such as entrance exams, minimum GPAs, and “weed out” courses and towards a related, but less competitive major, that would allow the student to graduate on time but would not provide them the same post-graduation job opportunities they hoped to achieve. Moreover, our data indicate that HMoob students who experienced this redirection often did not understand the long-term consequences of abandoning the pursuit of their desired major but none of these consequences appear in institutional data. Rather, as long as the student graduates, they can be held up as an institutional success even though they experienced this exclusionary process.

We argue that institutional gatekeeping, push-out, and redirection frame HMoob American students as disposable subjects, while at the same time perpetuating an audit culture of higher education accountability by both lifting the college graduation rates and suppressing the STEM program rejection rates of students of color. We suggest that these institutional logics can be disrupted by re-orienting college academic and career advising, and by providing needed resources and training, to support the transformative advising of minoritized students from an asset-oriented community cultural wealth perspective (Yosso, 2005).

Authors

• Bailey B. Smolarek, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Matthew Wolfgram, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Lena Lee, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Chundou Her, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author