Disaggregation: Not Enough Hmong Among Us?

A report released June 6 by The National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education (CARE) calling for “data disaggregation to better understand the variation of the educational experiences and outcomes within the highly diverse Asian American and Pacific Islander student population” has already garnered quite a bit of attention (from Inside Higher Ed, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Diverse Issues in Higher Education).

The report hopes “to raise awareness about and bring attention to the ways in which data on AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] students reported in the aggregate conceals significant disparities in educational experiences and outcomes between AAPI sub-groups.” It hopes, in short, to highlight what its authors regard as a violation of civil rights. The failure to disaggregate Asian and Asian-American data to reveal its sub-groups, the authors claim, “has been a key barrier to policy and program development that advances the equitable treatment for the AAPI community.”

By “equitable treatment,” of course, what the authors mean is unequal treatment — preferential treatment of the “underrepresented” sub-groups. The University of California system disaggregated its ethnic data in 2009, and a chart on p. 17 of the report nicely shows the “disparity” in need of “equitable”  correction — that Taiwanese were admitted to UCLA in 2010 at a rate 7.7% above the mean while the Hmong were admitted at a rate 13.1% below. “Put another way,” the report states, “Hmong applicants have a rate of admission that is 20.8 percent lower than Taiwanese applicants.”

The disaggregators, in short, want to do away with “disparities” of the sort I discussed in Too Many Asians Hmong Us, Or Not Enough? (based on this report of this report )— “fewer than 0.5% of the total physician population [of California] is of Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong and Samoan descent” — by bestowing preferential treatment. As Kawika Riley, CEO of the Pacific Islander Access project, writes in the Chronicle article linked above, “Pacific Islanders are not eligible for many scholarships and fellowships designated for underrepresented minorities” because they are “Asian Pacific Islanders, and Asians are not underrepresented.”

The disaggregators may think (or at least hope) that increasing the preferential treatment of “underrepresented” Asian groups would silence the growing opposition to affirmative action that has emerged among Asian Americans, but it might do the opposite. Ron Unz has demonstrated that the proportion of Asians accepted to selective, especially Ivy League, colleges has remained unchanged despite the increasing numbers of highly qualified Asian applicants. Whether of not this “surprising” consistency results from overt or covert quotas or the miracle of massaged “holistic” criteria, it is likely that admitting more members of Asian sub-groups would result in the admission of fewer Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other traditionally high-performing Asian applicants, the very applicants who under the current system suffer the most from the preferences given to blacks and Hispanics. If those preferences were eliminated, one leading scholar has concluded, “Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students.”

One virtue of the movement to disaggregate data is that is that it throws into sharp relief the destructive instability of “diversity,” its inevitable tendency to follow its own logic (such as it is) to implosion. Among the problems with “diversity” one of the most destructive is that there is no end point; according to its logic (such as it is), there is no justification for stopping with “groups” when there are always more sub-groups crying for “inclusion.” As George Leef points out in an incisive criticism of disaggregation, it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The disaggregation proposed doesn’t go nearly far enough. Colleges and supposed to report, e.g., “Sri Lankan” as a category, but Sri Lanka is a badly divided country with considerable inequality among its five main ethnic groups: the Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, and Veddah. It’s likely that there are imbalances lurking in the data for Sinhalese Sri Lankan-American students and Tamil Sri Lankan-American students. Don’t we need to find out?

Finally, if Asians should be disaggregated into their constituent sub-groups, why not whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans (surely Cherokee and Cheyenne are not fungible)? (One reason, as I noted in One Hmong Many …, is the opposition of “civil rights groups,” who vociferously opposed disaggregating “black.”) And as the “diversity” edifice is inexorably expanded to include gender identity and sexual preference, how can disaggregation be reasonably restricted to ethnic categories? In fact, how can it be restricted at all, since even sub-groups have sub-groups?

What we need is not more preferential treatment, but none of it.