Falling Through the Cracks: Institutional Invisibility of Southeast Asian American Community College Students

• In Event: Institutional Leaders, Staff, and Contexts Shaping Southeast Asian American Student Success Along the Education Pathway

Abstract

Southeast Asian American (SEAA) students are a growing population in higher education; however, they experience significant disparities in educational attainment and are often not the focus of research. Many SEAA students attend community college, so a focus on their community college experiences is warranted. AsianCrit (Iftikar & Museus, 2013) serves as the guiding framework, with the Asianization tenet as the focal point, for this study. Asianization refers to racialization processes depicting Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, yellow perils, model minorities, deviant minorities, and more. These racialization processes reinforce white supremacy through the exclusion and dehumanization of Asian Americans (Museus & Iftkar, 2013; Iftikar & Museus, 2018). Exploring how these racialization processes in community college contexts can uncover policies, processes, and practices embedded into the environment that (re)produce inequitable outcomes for SEAA students.
The purpose of this study is to explore how SEAA students experienced race and racialization in their community college environments. The questions guiding this study are: How do students describe their community college experiences as Southeast Asian Americans? How do Southeast Asian American students describe experiences with institutional support? The ten participants in this qualitative study identify as Khmer or Cambodian American (3), Hmong American (3), Vietnamese American (2), and multiracial: Vietnamese and Pilipino American (1) and Vietnamese and Mexican American (1). In sum, 25 interviews were conducted with most participants completing three interviews, one completing two interviews, and one completing one interview.
The community college environment perpetuates the institutional invisibility of SEAA students in a few ways. Assumptions of monolithic success are codified into data aggregation practices that lump all Asian ethnic communities together, masking disparities and diversity within the population. Due to a lack of knowledge about or interest in learning more about their lived experiences, stereotypes and assumptions guide the creation of policies and practices that continually restrict access to resources for SEAA students. This limited understanding and lack of recognition of SEAA students’ needs prevent equitable allocation of resources and support, which have previously been leveraged for populations who share many of the same barriers and issues of access. For example, the model minority myth is a pervasive stereotype that informs how little resources are deployed for Asian students. Participants pointed to the existence of learning communities and programs for other populations of color and were highly cognizant that there were no such programs for them. They are forced to find other spaces on or off campus or go without.
The resulting experiences of invisibility reinforce the marginalization and isolation of SEAA students as they navigate community college with very little attention, focus, or support. As a result, many SEAA students “fall through the cracks.” Understanding the mechanisms that reinforce the invisibility of SEAA students allows advocates to develop various strategies to mobilize data disaggregation efforts and the application of data to meaningfully inform how policies and resources are deployed. As community colleges continue to be an initial foray into higher education for SEAA students, these institutions must ensure environments that meaningfully attend to the racialized experiences of SEAA students.

Authors

• Varaxy Yi, California State University - Fresno
  Presenting Author

• Ko Yang, California State University - Fresno
  Non-Presenting Author

• Vanna Nauk, California State University - Fresno
  Presenting Author

• Kathy Moua, California State University - Fresno
  Presenting Author

• Gaonoucci Vang, Hmong Innovating Politics
  Presenting Author