Are Asian-Americans considered an "underrepresented minority" in academia in the US?

Question

As an Asian-American I sometimes feel as though I am "stuck." There are certainly many Asian academics, but only a few Asian-Americans. This is complicated by the statistics. In absolute numbers, I think the numbers of Asian-American academics are small. Asian-Americans only make up a small percentage of the overall population of the U.S. (about 5%), and so from that perspective, a statistic that says something like, "9% of academics are Asian-American" (I made this up) can be regarded as saying that Asian-Americans are overrepresented.

At the same time, to my knowledge, I was the only Asian-American in my entire PhD program while I was there (not just my year - the entire PhD program), there were to my knowledge no Asian-American faculty in the department, and I can count on my fingers the number of Asian-Americans I see represented in my field.

(Edit: I also want to add that I understand that even the term "Asian-American" is messy because it lumps together several different ethnic groups)

Answer 1

There is no universal definition of "underrepresented" and also no universal definition of Asian-American, so it's impossible to answer this question accurately. A very rough answer is that it depends on the discipline (eg computer science vs anthropology) and also on which ethnicities are considered Asian-American.

Your personal experience notwithstanding, it is likely that Asian-Americans are overrepresented in academia overall, simply because Asian-Americans are overrepresented among Americans with advanced degrees. But this isn't a very useful metric from the point of view of diversity and equity.

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Edit: The NSF has a breakdown by race and discipline of US citizens awarded doctorates in 2016: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsf18304/report/which-fields-attract-students/minorities.cfm

As for faculty, another reason it's going to be hard to find good data on whether Asian-Americans are underrepresented is that schools love to pretend that their faculty is more diverse than it is, so they often have rather creative definitions of "underrepresented."

Answer 2

Your suggestion that Asian-Americans are under-represented in US universities sounds wrong to me — more likely they are an "over-represented minority"

To really answer this question in detail, you'd need to clearly specify the scope of interest (i.e., which set of universities, which fields, etc.) and get admissions/employment data to compare with the demographics of the host population. Your choice of the specific group of Asian-Americans is also somewhat curious (and could be considered cherry-picking), insofar as it combines a race/ethnicity with citizenship status. In any case, doing a proper analysis of this issue would be quite a big project and I do not propose to make any attempt here to take that on.

Setting aside that caveat, if you are confining attention mostly to the most elite universities in the US, or the STEM fields in most universities in the US, there is pretty clear evidence that Asians are heavily over-represented relative to their population numbers. This is a consequence of what the economist Thomas Sowell has referred to as their status as a "model minority" (i.e., a high-performing racial minority with a number of high outcomes across various social indicators). You might be interested to know that a recent lawsuit against Harvard university involved a controversy over anti-Asian discrimination occurring as a result of affirmative action for other race groups. The materials in that case show that Asians are already heavily over-represented in the university, and would be more so if not for favouratism of other race groups on "diversity" grounds. An internal report at Harvard University in 2013 found that Asian-Americans were 19% of the student body, and if the university were to assess admissions applications purely on academic factors, they would have been 43% of the student body (see e.g., news coverage of report here).

So, your hunch here sounds wrong to me. Whenever the matter has been subject to analysis of admissions data, the results have generally shown that Asian-Americans are heavily over-represented in university admissions. Harvard is certainly not an aberration from the norm on this issue. It is certainly possible that Asian-Americans might be under-represented as students in some sub-fields, or at particular universities, but the general stream of evidence is the opposite of what you are supposing. As to faculty positions, I'm not sure there, because obviously it takes about a generation for students to flow through to become faculty. It might be that high numbers of Asian-American undergraduates have not yet flowed through heavily into higher degrees and faculty positions, but at least anecdotally, in the STEM field my observation has been the opposite.

Answer 3

Since OP has clarified that they’re in pure math, I wanted to point out that the AMS has great surveys with extensive information about PhD demographics in math and first job outcomes. Here’s the most recent survey

Among the US citizens earning PhDs, 6 were American Indian or Alaska Native, 81 were Asian, 27 were Black or African American, 34 were Hispanic or Latino, 2 were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, 754 were White, and 31 were of unknown race/ethnicity.

That summary is all math, but they do later break out statistics, biostatistics, and applied math separately, so you can work out that in pure math their are 47 Asian US-citizen pure math PhDs that year out of 672 total US-citizen pure math PhDs. That’s almost exactly 7%. Among all American Millennials, 6.4% are Asian. But this calculation is actually quite sensitive to whether you include permanent residents. If you do then it changes to 70/710 = 9.9%.

So Asian-Americans are slightly over represented among US math PhDs by a factor between 1 and 1.5.

(As other answers have said there’s nuance to add to this about more specific ethnicity which I won’t repeat.)

Answer 4

Are Asian-Americans considered an “underrepresented minority” in academia in the US?

Both "yes" and "no" are wrong. In my discipline, physics, Asians are over-represented among both non-American and American physicists. But if you look at most social sciences or humanities, you will find far fewer Asian academics. This can be readily seen by searching for pictures of conference attendees at various disciplinary conferences.

There is also a lot of regional variation, and variation by rank.

And yes, you are quite right that the concept of "Asian American" is unclear, as are many other supposed identity categories. National, cultural, language background, etc. vary and should be considered.