AANHPI in Higher Education: Facts and Statistics

When people think of Asian Americans, they may think of straight-A students and high-earning graduates. As a single demographic, Asian Americans appear to be doing well — high educational attainment, high household incomes — but a closer look by origin group paints a more complicated picture of how some Asian Americans are really doing.

This report covers Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AANHPI) statistics in higher education, including college demographics and educational attainment rates.

According to the Pew Research Center, Asian Americans made up about 7% of the U.S. population as of 2021.^{Note Reference [1]} The percentage of Asian students in postsecondary institutions reflected a similar figure: Asian Americans made up nearly 6% of undergraduates and 6% of graduates in 2022, as reported by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.^[5]

From 2017-2022, there was an overall decline of 11.5% in total fall enrollment — or a decrease of nearly 2 million students.^{Note Reference [5]}

The rate of enrollment increased by just over 5% for all graduate students from 2017-2022.

In 2019, roughly 66% of high school graduates — or 2.1 million out of 3.2 million students — enrolled in college in the fall.^{Note Reference [3]}

Roughly 93% of Asian students are first-generation or second-generation Americans.^{Note Reference [4]}

In 2015-2016, Asian students made up 6% of first-generation college students.^[8]

For fall 2018, Asians/Pacific Islanders made up 12% of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions: 7% were Asian/Pacific Islander men and 5% were Asian/Pacific Islander women.^{Note Reference [3]}

Overall, about 54% of Asians and Asian Americans ages 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree or higher as of 2019.^{Note Reference [1]} This figure holds true for both U.S.-born (55%) and internationally born Asians/Asian Americans (54%). In contrast, only 33% of the total U.S. population older than 25 had a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Educational attainment, however, varies widely between origin groups.

Over half of Laotians (56%), Cambodians (55%), Burmese (65%), and Bhutanese (75%) had a high school level of education or less in 2019.^{Note Reference [2]} Among the overall U.S. population, only 39% had a high school diploma or less.^[10]

In contrast, a higher percentage of Indians had postgraduate degrees than just bachelor’s (43% vs. 32%).^{Note Reference [2]} This may be influenced by the fact that over half of all H-1B visas (for high-skilled foreign workers) are given to Indian nationals (50.5%).^[11]

According to Pew data from 2017-2019, disparities in educational attainment corresponded with disparities in median household income. While the median household income was $85,800 among all Asians, only two Asian origin groups made above that amount (Indians and Filipinos).^{Note Reference [11]}

Most colleges with large Asian/Asian American student populations are located in California, which is the state with the highest Asian American population. As of 2019, around 30% of the U.S. Asian population lived in California, roughly 6.7 million people.^{Note Reference [11]}

Within the University of California system, the University of California, Irvine, was the top choice for in-state Asian American first-year and transfer students. The school received the most applications from Asian/Asian American prospective first-year students with nearly 40,000 submissions.