Thomas Tam: My name is Thomas Tam, I’m the director of the Asian American Research Institute, it’s affiliated with Queens College, it’s part of the City University of New York. I’d like to welcome you from the bottom of my heart that you came to this colloquium, taking time from your very busy schedule. This is probably the first colloquium on CUNY Asian American students, and it is possible only because of the strong support from Doctor Otis Hill, the Vice Chancellor of Student Development and Enrollment Services. The fantastic, sumptuous breakfast is provided by Dr. Hill and I want to thank him for that, not only for the food but for the support that he has shown to us. Without going into more detail, I think I’m going to ask Vice Chancellor Hill to come up here and say a few words. Please welcome Chancellor Hill.
Dr. Otis Hill: Thank you and good morning to all. It’s indeed a pleasure for me to bring greetings on behalf of the Chancellery on this special occasion, as the Office of Student Development joins with the Asian American / Asian Research Institute under the very capable leadership of Dr. Thomas Tam in its first colloquium on Asian American students in CUNY. I’d like to thank all of you for bringing, to participate in this very important venture. The urgency of the occasion is found in the prelude for this event, for when the day is done the ultimate question before us is, did the university maximize the opportunity for our Asian students to experience personal growth and academic success. For if it did, then the academy can say that it contributed to the personal, social, occupational, cultural and intellectual development of all students. This conference is the beginning of an assessment, a much needed assessment that can only serve to strengthen our resolve. We must be honest and straightforward in this initiative, for while we differentiate in roles as we pursue our daily tasks in this university, collectively we are the academy. Thus the success and satisfaction of Asian students affects all of us. We will learn and prosper from their success and enjoy a more fulfilling life, as will all the rest of our students. I eagerly join my colleagues from AAARI, in this undertaking towards excellence. Let us work together, share our findings and insights, and enhance the experiences in CUNY of the Asian community. Thank you.
Thomas Tam: Thank you very much, Vice Chancellor. The next speaker will be a person who is very important to the institute. She is one of the founders of the institute and she is the one who wrote the proposal and worked extremely hard in her retirement from CUNY to set up an institute because she really believed in the need for such an institute for the Asian American community. She has been a professor with the City College of New York for a long time. She is the author of seven books and numerous articles. Please welcome the chairperson of AAARI, Dr. Betty Lee Sung.
Betty Lee Sung: Hi, good morning, and I want to welcome each and every one of you and thank you all for coming to the Asian American Student Survey Colloquium. We have a very short history. We were only founded two years ago; unfortunately, right after 9/11. In the midst of all of this, we have been able to accomplish a great deal, and I think if you will look at some of the books and brochures you have with you, you will see how much we have done. I want to thank Dr. Thomas Tam for his leadership in taking us to where we are. One of the very, very first things that, after the institute was established, was I said we have to take a look and do a survey of the Asian American students. After all, there are 24,000 of us now presently enrolled, and when you think almost 6,000 of us go out every year after graduation into the city, into the workforce, into the community, we see how important our Asian students are. In some colleges we are on average about 13-14% of student enrollment throughout CUNY. But at some colleges like at Baruch, we’re up to 30%, and I think at City when I was there it was 19-20%. So we’re quite a dominant force, and yet very little has been done about finding out who the Asian American students are, how they’re doing, and what happens to them after they graduate. In 1999 there was a report that came out and I’m sure that all of you administrators remember it. It was the [Benno C. Schmidt] report that said “University in Crisis”, remember that? The report, after it came out, came out in many reports, but it was literally six inches thick or more. I went through that entire report and I looked at it and I was trying to find some mention of Asian American students. Did you know there was hardly anything, hardly any mention of the Asian American students at all? I mean, they talked about the problems of the black students, the Hispanic students, the minority students in general, and the declining numbers of white students, but I said hey look, the Asians are 13-14% of student enrollment, how come no mention was made of us?
That sort of made me very upset, and I said, as soon as the research institute was established, I think that the first thing we should do is undertake this study. We’re so grateful, too, for the support of Dr. Otis Hill, and today we’ll have Dr. Cheryl Littman with us, and she’s from the institutional research that will help us in this study. But today we’re grateful that you are here to give us your input, your experience, your expertise, to help us conduct this survey.
As noted in your program, there are going to be three sessions, the breakout sessions. I think Dr. Tam has delineated all this very, very well. One is the policy component, to discuss the policies that affect the academic success of Asian students, from recruitment retention to graduation and beyond. This would involve the analysis of the administrative structure and relationship with the Asian American communities. The second one would be a personal component, and I just had my new glasses so I can’t see very well with them. So I’m squinting at my notes.
The second one is the personal component which includes the psycho-social needs of Asian students. This would cover issues such as cultural and gender identity, acculturation of first and second generations, stress management, assertiveness training, and career development.
Third is the support component which will focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of CUNY support services to Asian students to navigate the complex university system. You know, when Asian students come into the system, most of them are quite bewildered because this is the probably the first generation that has come to a university. What is urgently needed are counseling services. And yet, in the more than 20 some years that I was at City College, with 19-20% of the students Asian American, we never had an Asian American counselor. And they would come to my offices and sit outside the door all the time, and I said I’m serving not only as a professor but also as a counselor. I was doing double duty for one salary. It’s very important that we look a lot at the support component that the university can provide the Asian students. I know we have a lot of counselors here today, so thank you for coming and please give us your input about your experiences with the Asian American students.
I’m sorry I’m not going to be able to stay very much longer for this symposium, which was very dear to my heart and I really wanted to stay, but I have to catch a plane to California this afternoon. My granddaughter is having her bat mitzvah. My son in law is Jewish and they follow the Jewish tradition. so I have to run along. Please, give us your expertise, your comments, your suggestions, and let’s hope that we make this survey a big success. Thank you. [Applause]
Thomas Tam: Thank you very much, Professor Sung. The next speaker is a very important person. She’s the First Commissioner in the New York City Office of Immigration. She has worked in the community for a very long time; she was the founder of a south Asian organization that served more than 300 youths. She was born in India, but she grew up in Central America and she lived for a time in Florida before she came to New York, and we are lucky to have her with us. She is a recipient of numerous awards, I’m not going to list them here. She is a wonderful person who cares about the community, especially the Asian American community, and her office does a lot of work on the research about public education, housing, and many other issues that are dear to the hearts of immigrants. Please welcome Commissioner Sayu Bhojwani.
Sayu Bhojwani: I appear to have arrived just in time. Good morning, I first want to respond a little bit to what Dr. Sung was saying that when I first arrived in the United States as a college student, the most bewildering thing for me was the number of choices that I had in terms of courses. Because where I went to school in Central America, you were essentially in high school given a track; in our cases, it was the sciences or business track. I went to an all-girls school, and the business track, I should clarify, was purely secretarial and home-keeping. I just wanted to respond to the point that you made, and also for a brief time I was an adjunct instructor at NYU, and this was about seven years ago. At that time also, there was such a dearth of south Asian instructors that you found yourself functioning as a counselor and advisor on many topics.
So I want to thank Dr. Tam and the Asian American Research Institute for inviting me and commend them on putting together this program. As you may know I’m Mayor Bloomberg’s Commissioner on Immigrant Affairs, and as such I spend my time in immigrant communities throughout the city learning about the needs of our diverse residents. My office’s mission is to foster communication and cooperation between the city’s immigrant communities and city government. We have three primary goals. One is to create access by promoting the utilization of city services by immigrant New Yorkers. Two is to build bridges by encouraging dialogue between city agencies and immigrant communities. The third is to offer expertise by serving as a resource on key immigrant communities to the mayor and other city officials.
In doing this work I’m increasingly aware that immigrants share many commonalities, such as their lack of awareness about government services, language barriers, immigration concerns, and discrimination on the basis of accent, appearance, and actual or perceived national origin. CUNY’s Asian and Asian American students are, of course, facing these same challenges. Our goal, mine as Commissioner and yours as teachers and administrators, is the same, to help immigrants, including Asians, integrate into the city’s social, civic, and economic life. That process is a two-way street, just as government’s responsibility is to ensure access to services and avenues for immigrant engagement, so too immigrants bear the responsibility of seeking ways to participate in the lives of the city.
One of the roles that you, as teachers and administrators working with Asian American students can play, is to highlight the many methods of civic engagement available in the city. These include civic associations, hordes of non-profit organizations, government committees and boards, just to name a few. I’m sure that you, probably more than me, especially if you grew up here, are more familiar with the many options available to students. I encourage you also to be aware of the diverse immigration background of many of your students, and how that may limit or enhance their ability to participate in the civic and political process.
As you may know, mayor Bloomberg has expressed his strong support for the Dream Act, which will open the door for legalization to immigrant students, and we the administration believe this is an important step forward for many of the Asian American and other immigrant communities. From my past work with south Asian students and my current work with other immigrants, I also know how important a sense of community and belonging can be. Based on my contact with CUNY’s Asian American students and south Asians in particular, I know that many students spend little time on campus other than to attend classes. With a primarily commuter student body and many people working while attending school, for you, creating a sense of community and belonging is a daunting but important challenge.
We also know that Asians and immigrants in general often feel that they are not adequately represented in positions of power in education, government, business, and media. Featuring those Asian Americans who do hold positions of power on college campuses and classrooms can help send a strong message to your students about their ability to achieve similar goals. At the very least, Asian American role models offer an example of someone with whom students can strongly identify and feel more of a sense of community and belonging, not only at CUNY but also in New York City.
As Asian Americans, our economic power is far greater than our political power. For example, businesses owned by Asians brought $25 billion in sales and receipts to the city in 1997, which was 71% of the total sales and receipts of all minority owned businesses. By contrast, only slightly higher than 1 in 5 eligible Asian Americans is registered to vote; this means that in general the Asian community does not harness its potential political power. With political power comes representation. With that representation comes attention to the issues that are of concern to our communities. This is an important lesson for Asian American students to understand and learn.
I’m also going to be leaving shortly, so I want to close by saying that I believe CUNY is an integral part of New York City, and Asian and other immigrant students are an important part of CUNY. With that in mind, I want to extend the resources of my office and city government to assist you in identifying speakers who can be role models, seeking internships in government agencies, and exploring ways to build community on your campuses, and finally to assist you in any other way to ensure the holistic development and full integration into New York City of CUNY’s Asian students. Thank you. [Applause]
Thomas Tam: Thank you very much, Commissioner, and I think you really hit the nail on the head when you talked about the lack of leadership roles in terms of the political involvement, and that is one area that I hope that we can address at this colloquium today. I also want to thank you for taking the time to join us and give us the support of your office. We will call your office, and we’ll follow up with your advice. The next person is Dr. Cheryl Littman. She is the manager of the institutional research and assessment at CUNY central office. She has received her doctorate degree from the University of Chicago, and she has done a lot of work in terms of say, studies within public education. I think that she’s going to talk to us today about the survey that she has done for CUNY students in general. She’s going to pick out parts that have something to do with Asian American students. Please welcome Dr. Cheryl Littman.
Cheryl Littman: Good morning. I’m often used to having a computer screen in front of me, not a microphone, so I hope everybody can hear me and understand. I am going to pick out some important factors or statistics that come out of a survey that our office did last year and that we’re gearing up to do again; its called the Student Experience Survey.
Before I get into some of those numbers, I’d like to just give you a general statistical profile of Asian students at CUNY because I think that to really help inform some of the discussions and breakout sessions that will follow, really in all three areas, policy, psycho-social and student support services. If you don’t mind, I’m going to read out some numbers, and I don’t think…if you’re interested in numbers, I don’t have any handouts today, but what I will try to do is send something to Dr. Tam that he maybe can distribute through the website. Don’t feel that you have to rush to write down anything. If you want numbers I can certainly repeat them or speak with you at the end and then send something out after that.
Asians represent about 14% of the undergraduate population at CUNY, and somewhat more at the graduate level. We have much better statistics about undergraduates and their racial ethnic backgrounds, so I’m going to focus on that population. At some point in the future we hope to be able to gather some better statistics for the graduate population. More than 25,000 Asian undergraduates are enrolled here at CUNY. Every year, CUNY awards more than 4,000 degrees to Asian and Asian American students. Baruch enrolled the highest number of Asian undergraduates, and among the community colleges, LaGuardia enrolled the highest number. But those are actual numbers that are sometimes influenced by the size of those institutions. So if we look at proportions, Baruch and Queensborough have the highest Asian enrollment by proportion.
One thing to know is that the numbers of Asian students are increasing across the university, but that statistic should just be qualified by knowing that enrollment overall is increasing at the university. We’ll see numbers increasing across all racial ethnic groups. The Asian undergraduate population at CUNY is pretty much evenly split between men and women, which is unusual because the university as a whole has almost 2/3 women and 1/3 men, not quite that drastic but something like 60% females at the university. The Asian population is more evenly balanced with respect to gender. In terms of where these students come from, primarily they’re residing in Queens, but about a quarter of the students are from Brooklyn. In terms of what they’re studying here at CUNY, primarily business management, but you can kind of link that to where they’re primarily enrolled, which is at Baruch, and obviously business majors are key there, and computer sciences. But interestingly, there’s a slightly downward trend in the percentage of Asian students who are majoring in computer sciences, and a slight upward trend in the social sciences. So that’s something that some of you at the campuses might want to look at. I think it’s kind of interesting because we tend to stereotype. I know I’ve read a lot about what certain kinds of students want to study when they get to college, and I think that there’s starting to be a shift, a little bit more diversity.
Let’s see what other things may be of interest. Let me talk a little bit about the background of the Asian and Asian American students at CUNY. I’m going to talk a little bit about the freshmen, because we have the best statistics about the incoming freshmen. 70% of Asian first time freshmen graduated from a New York City public high school. So while a number of students are foreign born, they have come here before going to college and spent some time, if not in elementary schools, then at least in the high schools and are graduating from New York City public high schools. On average they tend to be a little better prepared than their non-Asian counterparts, with higher high school averages and higher SAT scores. They tend to be a little more like what the nation considers traditional college students. They’re younger on average than the CUNY population, they tend to be financially dependent on their parents more so than the general population, they’re single without children, less likely to work, although a fair number do work, and they’re more likely to attend full-time.
One thing I’ll caution against is just because we have these statistics that make them more like traditional college students doesn’t mean that there are a large number of students who are non-traditional. Even traditional students are going to have needs that may not be readily apparent. We probably want to get inside these statistics and look more across actual campuses and look at the breakdown across campuses, so I’m giving you sort of the big CUNY picture. Some broken out statistics would probably be more helpful at the campuses.
About 80% of Asian students are foreign born, and by far Chinese students are highly represented, about 24%. But then Indian and Korean students, and students from Hong Kong, those countries are all highly represented among the Asian students, but it’s quite diverse. Even though maybe the numbers aren’t there, we have students from all over the world as most of you know. But sometimes when you’re on individual campuses, it’s hard to see the real diversity across the whole university. It’s tremendous, in terms of where students are from, in terms of the languages they speak, and something like 90% of the Asian American students speak a language other than English at home, so you can imagine what that’s like, many of you have direct experience with this, coming to classes where primarily you’re dealing with English in the classroom and at home you’re dealing with another language. This is common for a number of students, not just the Asian population at CUNY. So there are special challenges there.
Almost half of the students are the first in their family to attend college, and in general Asian students, and this statistic is self-reported, so I’ll just ask you to take it with a grain of salt, but Asian students tend to be slightly poorer than non-Asian students overall in the general CUNY population, and that’s according to family income reported on their Student Experience Survey. I’d like to talk just a little bit about some of the social experiences that Asian students have at CUNY. These statistics do come from our Student Experience Survey, and when we have the breakout session I might be able to give you a few more details in this area, but Asian students, and these are all again self-reported, report that they’re more likely to work with other students in class about their classes, outside of class as well, but interestingly enough, they are more likely to feel out of place on their college. So while they socialize, or at least in terms of academics there’s interaction, they tend to feel more out of place on their campuses and they report that their peers have different values than they do.
Asian students are in general less likely to interact with faculty than other students at CUNY, and that’s certainly a topic worth exploring. Like other full-time students at CUNY, Asian undergraduates spend little time on activities outside of class. That’s a trend that we see across the university and so that has some broader implications. Just a couple things that I want to pull right out of the survey that unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to put into my notes, so if you don’t mind bearing with me for a minute I thought some of these things were kind of interesting and that may spark some discussions in the breakout sessions.
Overall, it seems that Asian American students may not be taking advantage of services on campus like academic advising. My conclusions are a little bit tenuous, but I want to tell you why I’m drawing that conclusion. In our survey, we asked students to respond to a number of different questions using a grading scale that went from very satisfied to very dissatisfied.
There was this middle option that they could pick where there was no opinion. By far, well let me take that back, not by far, but a substantial proportion of Asian students chose no opinion when responding to that question about their satisfaction with academic advising, much more so than any other racial ethnic group when we looked at the breakdown. I thought that was interesting, because that sort of implies that if you have no opinion it’s probably because you have no experience with whatever we tend to be asking about. I don’t want to say that that’s exactly what these respondents meant, but I think it’s something that we should consider and take a look on the campuses, who is taking advantage of the various services. I think that came into play in terms of personal counseling, career planning and placement, use of student help services, and student orientation as well. There seem to be a high proportion of Asian students responding that they had no opinion in their level of satisfaction with these services. If it’s true, that means that they weren’t taking advantage of these, and that’s something worth discussing.
I have one other point I wanted to make. That’s probably too detailed, so I’ll skip that and leave you with that picture of Asians at CUNY and certainly I’ll be able to take some more detailed questions later in the breakout session and we’ll talk about some further statistics that we can generate to put a kind of quantitative picture of what’s going on at CUNY. Only one side of the story though, obviously there’s the qualitative picture. Okay, thank you. [Applause]
Thomas Tam: Thank you very much, Dr. Littman, for setting the stage for our discussion and the information about CUNY Asian American students. I feel very good about this colloquium, in that we have so many different people with all different expertise, with knowledge, with experience, that work with Asian American students. You’re all here today to contribute to us in terms of your understanding about the issue, and I’m really thankful to the Vice Chancellor for putting this colloquium together, because this is really the first attempt to look at this group of students, which is a substantial group, and to understand their needs and perhaps to understand and see how we can provide better services to help them to better develop themselves as a total person.
Now I feel that I need to tell you a little bit about how we got here. I think that several years ago, we were quite disturbed when we heard about all these suicides among Asian American students. You must have heard about the suicide that occurred at MIT for example, with the Korean student who immolated herself and was in the New York Times front page, magazine, etc.
That is only the tip of the problem. So, I’ve invited Professor David Cheng to give talks about the problems about suicide among Asian American students. Later on I also invited Professor Irene Chung and Professor Cheng to hold many different student counseling sessions and conferences that we have held, and they are very well attended, which indicated that there’s a real interest in that kind of thing. The three of us decided to go ahead and plan for a CUNY-wide Asian American student survey, and we call it the Survey of Well-Being for Asian American students. We worked quite hard on it; we worked for about half a year or so until we finally showed it to Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. In his wisdom, he said to me, he looked at it and said, okay, you can do this survey, and Dean David [Crow] said he’d help us do this survey. He said, well, you can do this, but try to remember this, don’t settle for the easy solution. It’s better to go for the really important stuff.
Basically, he’s saying that you can go ahead and ask everybody questions and then take the numbers down and calculate the averages and you’d get some sort of number, but it’s much better to go in there and find out exactly what the needs of the Asian American students are. So that’s what we’re trying to do now, which is to expand our focus from just focusing on the psychological well-being to a more total well-being of the student. Perhaps in that sense we are talking about the development of the leadership potential in Asian American students.
We’re going to be doing the breakout sessions, and I really hope that you can let us know about what the study should be about. In your opinion, and your experience, your knowledge, your expertise, is very, very important to the comprehensiveness and the inclusiveness of this study. Don’t worry about whether it may be the topics that other people are talking about, we want your opinion and we’ll take that into account as we continue to design our study about this. Chancellor Goldstein has promised us that he will, after we have gathered a lot of opinions, a lot of ideas, we’ll try to go for a major grant for a major study, so we really want your help here.
I just want to say a few things, before we do the breakout sessions. One is that Asian Americans, the most important thing about Asian Americans probably is about the model minority myth. People think that Asian Americans are such bright kids, are kind of studious, they know what they’re doing, so they have no need for other kinds of supportive services. And this is a really a very important point that we probably need to look at. Because in studies that have been done on the West Coast, for example the California State University system, at least one of the colleges found that more than 50% of the Asian American students there need remedial English and mathematics support programs. They also found out that there are two elements that are very important in terms of determining whether or not Asian American students are at risk. They find that language ability, which relates to their immigration status, whether they’re foreign born or native born, is two times more likely (if you’re foreign born) to be at risk. At risk, meaning, well you know what at risk means in terms of education; that you may not be able to fit into that environment that you’re in at that college. The other determinant is the socio-economic status. They’ve found that those below poverty lines, they run the risk of two times more likely to be at risk.
Another point that I would like to make is that Asian American students, as Dr. Littman has pointed out, is not a homogeneous group. It is the idea that they may be, say, traditional students, it may mask the heterogeneity of Asian American students. And heterogeneity can be looked at from two perspectives at least. One is the acculturation, in terms of say, how long they have been here, whether or not they’ve been able to fit in with mainstream culture, that sort of thing. The other is the ethnic identity; whether they’re from South Asia, East Asia, Pacific Americans, etc. How about their gender identity and sexual identity? These are the things that determine and that truly affect the needs of the Asian American students, and perhaps influence thinking about what to do with them. I just want to say, for example, among the Asian American students in one of the colleges that they have done a survey on, they found out that for South Asians, 58.4% of the students finished college and got their degrees. However, for the Hmongs, only 2.9% of that population is able to get their degree. So there’s a big difference within the Asian American population. These are perhaps things that in a finer study, maybe we can find out more, and perhaps find out the causes and the solutions.
Then, there is the issue about Asian values versus western values. The Asian values that focus on family, focus on the subjugation of the self to the group, focus on interpersonal harmony, versus the focus on individuality, independence, and perhaps things like self-exploration and that sort of thing. These different kinds of values really affect who needs help, what kind of help they need, and who can benefit better from different kinds of services. Lastly, I just want to say that, I’ve mentioned about a total student, the development of the total student. Perhaps, we can look at it as the development of a leader, perhaps if we can make our discussion, your contribution to the development of a new model for Asian American student leadership, that perhaps will begin a good chapter in our effort to work with Asian American students.
I just want to mention some chores. In terms of the breakout room, breakout room number 1 will be here. Those who have red dots, that say “1,” will stay here. Those who have yellow dots that say “2,” will go with Professor David Cheng to room 208. And those with blue dots that say “3,” will go to room 230, with Professor Irene Chung, who is going to facilitate the discussion. I hope we have a very fruitful discussion, and I hope you will come back here after the discussion so that you will know what the other groups have talked about. I thank you all for coming and I wish that we all have a very productive meeting. Thank you very, very much. You should come back here by…11:30.
