Spurred in large part by continued Asian immigration into the
state, the number of Asian American students at the University of
California continues to rise, far exceeding the average percentage
of Asian American students at universities nationwide.
Asian Americans accounted for slightly more of the admitted
class than whites, for the first time this year, at 36 percent of
admitted California residents for fall 2006. White students were
the only ethnic group that decreased in the percentage admitted
from last year.
UCLA admitted 5,369 Asian American students this year, an
increase from 4,710 last year; 3,744 white students were admitted
for the fall 2006 class.
Asian Americans include Chinese, East Indian/Pakistani,
Pilipino, Japanese, Korean, Pacific Islander, and other Asians.
“I think it’s a continuation of a trend that we have
seen for over two decades … (as) Asian Americans have represented
the largest group of applicants to many of the UC campuses for many
years, like UCLA, Berkeley, and Irvine,” said Don Nakanishi,
director of the Asian American studies department.
Though Asian American students make up the largest group of
students admitted to the UC and enrolled at UCLA, data compiled by
the National Center for Education Statistics shows that this is not
the case across the entire nation.
In 2002, only 6.5 percent of enrolled students in
degree-granting institutions in the United States were Asian
Americans. The largest group was whites, who accounted for 67.1
percent of enrolled students.
Mitchell Chang, associate professor of higher education and
organizational change at UCLA, said he believes the increases in
enrollment may be a result of immigration trends in recent years
and financial constraints on Asian American families, which make
public institutions preferable to private schools because of lower
fees.
“We have to look for explanations that are certainly
beyond biological factors and beyond cultural factors. I think we
should rather be looking at (issues) such as immigration and
financial capabilities,” he said.
Chang said a contributing factor might be that Asian American
families often do not have the financial resources to let children
attend private universities such as Stanford, USC and the Claremont
Colleges, or go to school out of state, though he said the issue
should be researched further.
At Stanford University, the ethnic composition of the class of
2009 includes 22.6 percent Asian Americans and 42.4 percent whites.
In the fall of 2005, 21.1 percent of enrolled students at USC were
Asian Americans and 47.2 percent were white.
At Yale University in Connecticut, 13 percent of enrolled
students are Asian American while 14 percent of undergraduates at
New York University are Asian American.
C. Cindy Fan, professor and chairwoman for the Department of
Asian American Studies and a professor of geography, said the
increase of Asian Americans at the UCs may be a result of recent
trends that show more immigrants from Asia settling on the West
Coast.
“Looking at Southern California or just California in
general over the more recent years, we’ve seen an increase in
immigrants from mainland China and also Taiwan, which has been
quite significant,” she said.
“If you look at the distribution of the Asian population
in the United States, it’s very bicoastal and mainly in
metropolitan areas,” she said.
A total of 236,039 Asians immigrated to the United States in
2003, primarily from China, India and the Philippines, according to
the Yearbook of Immigration Studies. The statistics were compiled
by the Office of Immigration Statistics, which works through the
Department of Homeland Security.
Fan said there may be a cultural component that contributes to
the increasing number of Asian Americans at the UC.
“Emphasis on education has always been very strong among
the Asians. Second- and third-generation children of Asian heritage
also are very much motivated, or (have) been motivated by their
parents to seek higher education,” Fan said.
Ricardo Vazquez, a UC spokesman, said Asian Americans achieve UC
eligibility at the highest rate of any ethnic group.
Proposition 209, which was passed into law in 1996, made it
illegal for public institutions to discriminate on the basis of
race, sex or ethnicity, and prohibited affirmative action programs.
This may have helped shape trends as UCLA has been more reliant on
using numerical information, such as GPA and test scores, Chang
said.