At a press conference last week, members of UCLA's Asian Pacific Coalition promoted the "Count Me In" campaign and State Assemblyman Ted Lieu's Assembly Bill 295, policies for university admission data to include more Asian groups, in order to highlight some of the issues faced by certain ethnic groups in regard to access to higher education: Groups rally for admissions data to 'Count Me In'
Lieu's bill calls for state agencies that collect demographic data on ethnic origin, not including the University of California, to further separate categories for Asian and Pacific Islander groups. In addition to the existing groups of Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese, agencies would include 10 more Asian American groups such as Bangladeshi, Fijian and Hmong. The proposed divisions would mirror the method used by the United States Census.
I think a lot of people will appreciate not having to check off the "Other Asian" category. This will go a long way towards addressing individual communities' needs, and dispelling the monolithic "model minority" myth. It's pretty difficult to provide accurate admissions data when so many ethnic groups are combined into one category. For example, there are currently 26 students at UCLA who identify as Hmong. How do we know this? The Association of Hmong Students says so. This isn't really an accurate count—the figure was compiled by the organization because UCLA has no official data. Hopefully this will change, and they'll be able to get a better count for the future.
*
