Introduction
The transition of Asian Americans to the western culture of the United States has been a topic in the recent years. The last several decades have transformed the demographic landscape of the notion, expanding both the size and diversity of racial minority populations. Asian Americans was one of the group that are the fastest growing. Asian Americans who had migrated to the United States, where they had adapted to the western culture. While adapted to western culture, they struggle to find their own identity. Asian Americans in higher education and their transition to college. While transitioning to college there are factors that impact to students’ experiences. Socioeconomic status plays in Asian American and Pacific Islander Students’ transition to college. Family backgrounds, professor, and peers’ directories of the adjustment and success of college. Low graduation rate is minority students’ incapability to find affiliation in the cultures and subcultures of their own campuses. The role of ethnic student organization in fostering minority students’ alteration to and membership in the cultures of a predominantly white institution. Asian American Students were observed sense of belonging in college and the environment. The social dimensions of the transition to college and residence hall environment and awareness of the campus racial climate had strong important relationships to students’ sense of belonging. Asian American students were seeming as model minority myth. The myth state that Asian American students always hardworking and success in college. However, this myth can hurt them more than true because it is not true.
Asian Americans Identity
Asian arrive in America with the hope of searching a better life and a brighter future for the family, unconscious that few are left unscarred currently of adaptation. There are some Asian American who accomplish the American dream, the price of relocation may not be entirely realized until too late. Immigrant family life in which the cost of migration if often most deeply felt and observe patterned differences in conflict according to salient dimensions of diversity within the Asian American population. In managing with the most instantaneous complications of language and culture adjustment, they must encounter challenges to recognized familial roles and patterns. Women start to leave home and work in the economic, their traditional gender roles and power relations are destabilized. Each person in the household have a role; parent- child roles and power relations are correspondingly affected. By adapted to western culture, immigrant families faced role and status changes. The children are English fluency more quickly than their parents. Children are often act as translators, culture experts, and be a representative of their family to the outside world. First- generations Asian American will follow and practice to Asia cultural values more strongly than those who are several generations removed from immigration.
Individualism and collectivism may result in painful clashes between parents and their young- adult children over degree of self-sufficiency in making important life decisions. Social interactions stimulus to identity development. Asian cultures tend to be more collectivistic while Western culture tend to be more individualistic. Since Asian are more collectivistic, they are pressures attending to others and fitting in. The central feature of the self is based on the collective and pubic selves and the attributes, opinions, and personality characteristics are situation specific. Due to children adapt to the Western culture, even though they live in under the same roof as their parents but live in different worlds with little connection and mutual understanding.
The Role of Shame
Every culture has apparatuses for social control and encouragement. In Asian cultures, shame and its associated loss of face are often used to strengthen familial and cultural responsibilities, societal expectations, and proper behavior. Loss of face is not only disapproval by society, but the loss of its confidence in the integrity or ego’s character. As the confidence of society is vital to the functioning of the ego, the loss of lien has come to establish a real dread disturbing the nervous system of ego more strongly than physical fear. Shame and loss of face can ruin a family reputation. Asian imparts individuals to worry about how others will react so that they can maintain face. Face includes the positive image, interpretations or social attributes that one claims for oneself or perceives others to have one. If one does not fulfill expectations of the self, then one loses face.
When one loses face, one feels tremendous shame, or guilt collectively shared by the family, as well as feeling of inferiority for not reaching ideals and goals as defined by the family. Children become hypersensitive to the judgment of others and use social situations as guides for their actions; they also become very cautious about taking the initiative. Shame is particularly painful to member of collectivistic culture, where the social consequences often involve exclusion. Shaming can involve in loss of support and confidence from one’ family, community, or social network.
Racial Stereotype
Racial stereotype of Asian Americans and their corresponding and misleading assumption mas other important challenges that many Asian American students face, such as substantial pressure from cultural conflict, welcoming racial climates, pressure to conform to racial stereotypes, racial discrimination. They were often stereotyped as monolithic model minorities who achieved universal and unparalleled academic and occupational success. Low- income Southeast Asian Americans are also stereotyped as deviants.
Socioeconomic Status Plays in Asian American and Pacific Islander Students’ Transition to College
The reality of socioeconomic status (SES) forms students’ educational paths, including whether they pursue and enroll in institutions of higher education. “Students’ socioeconomic status associated with their educational and occupational expectations, parents’ knowledge of financial aid, access to financial aid information, and enrollment in postsecondary education.” (AAPI, 47) There are socioeconomic status inequities among Asian American and Pacific Islander student (AAPIs), as well as generation status. First- generation AAPIs suffer from disparities in college access compared to their continuing- generation peers, and that low- SES AAPIs face disparities in access to four- year and highly selective institution when compared to high- SES AAPIs. Students navigate the road to college by predisposition, search, and choice.
Cultural mechanism perspective suggest that positive family cultural values contribute to the success of AAPIs. Family ties and the family’s valuing of education are responsible for higher levels of success among some AAPI groups. Such values can manifest in parents’ expectations that their child will go to college and their own involvement in their child’s education. Cultural values do in fact contribute to success among AAPIs. Parental expectations regarding the highest level of education that their children will attain and parental involvement are positively associated with AAPI and other students’ education outcomes. It is important to note that the relationship between parental influences and AAPIs’ educational trajectories is complex. Parental expectations positively associated with students’ expectations of their own educational achievement. Child- parent relationship and interactions are positively associated with academic achievement and college attendance. When students received pressure from parents it can negatively impact the college- going process.
Professor have a quality perspective of underscore the potential impact of professor support on academic progress. Certainly, professor interact with students daily, can build important relationships with students, and can play a major role in shaping their college opportunities and outcomes. Professor can serve as important school agents who can provide critical information and support to AAPI students. Another way professors can impact AAPIs’ educational paths are through their expectations of those students’ educational potential. Professors expectations can communicate with students and follow up. Professor expectation is the concept of stereotype threat, which refers to instance in which negative stereotype assumptions about individuals’ social group can cause anxiety and lead them to perform poorly on academic task. Even positive racial stereotypes can pose a threat a lead to negative outcomes because they can result in anxiety, fear of failure to conform to that stereotype, or choking under pressure to perform well academically and conform to stereotypes of the model minority.
Sense of Belonging
Sense of belonging illustrates the interplay between the individual and the universities. Students’ success is in part predicated upon the extent to which they feel welcomed by institutional environment and climates. One of the key influences upon sense of belonging is perception of support campus racial climates. Students are the only racial group for which interactions with diverse peers was meaningfully related to their sense of belonging. Asian American students are among the most likely to contribute in ethnic or cross-cultural organizations. They derive a sense of affiliation with their institutions may be emphasize and celebrate their ethnic identities. Diverse students’ social identities are important aspects of their lives that should not be supplanted in favor of integration into the dominant norms of the institutions. Asian Pacific American students locate their sense of belonging within their college environments in those activities that value their heritage. Students who perform better academically associated with a stronger sense of belonging as well.
Socially supportive residence hall environment was important for Asian American students. Residence hall is one of the important environment that academically supportive among Multiracial/ Multiethnic students, course- related faculty interaction among Asian Pacific American. Another component of college experience that is consistently related to sense of belonging for students of Asian American is the perception that their residence hall climate is socially supportive or tolerant of diverse backgrounds. The residence hall appears to provide a compelling environment for shaping students’ sense of belonging, perhaps through the intimacy and intensity of relationships formed and experiences gained in the residence hall during the first year. These finding are connecting to the sense of community students experience in the residence halls and the social support they experience from living on campus.
