Abstract
Immigration to the United States has been a major catalyst for population growth and is the significant factor in the changing racial/ethnic composition of our population. The specific changes in the racial/ethnic mix in United States in recent times are due in large part to a surge in immigration from diverse sending countries. However, much of the terminology that continues to be used in the context of higher education to describe diversity in the student populations are anachronistic and serves actually to occlude true diversity. We argue that variables such as country of birth of the student, the country of origin of the parent, and parental educational achievement, all have significant impact on the academic progress and success of undergraduate underrepresented minority students. These are variables that should be used to disaggregate the traditional racial and ethnic categories, to really serve the needs of the increasingly diverse student body. These are not data typically collected by institution...
Highlights
There is an expansive literature identifying potential factors that are argued to produce and sustain the academic achievement gap faced by minority groups in the United States
Research and writing in postsecondary education seems not to recognize the need to “fine-tune” terminology and to recharacterize the diverse student populations to suitably parse out and further differentiate the “true diversity” of the current and future multiethnic public undergraduate student populations. This is problematic in the continued use of the term underrepresented minority (URM), which often translates as the broad categories of Black and Hispanic students when discussing issues of recruitment, funding, and support of students in specific curricular areas such as the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in postsecondary education
We argue that adding response categories related to the immigrant generation of the student, as well as parental and student countries of nativity, with a more detailed desegregation of racial/ethnic identification would be very useful information to parse the differences in the student population
Summary
It is beyond the scope of this article to review and/or summarize this history While terms such as multicultural education, culturally sensitive pedagogy, and diversity and inclusivity are widely used throughout the abundant literature, research assessing the academic achievement gap, as well as the intervention programs directed toward ameliorating its known contributing factors, continues to use outdated population categories such as “Latino,” “Hispanic,” and “Black” as racial/ethnic and cultural descriptors that fail to reflect the compositions of ethnically diverse populations as they occur today. This latter variable is arguably an important predictor of the undergraduate student’s ability to complete their degree, which remains often overlooked
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