Heightened Resilience

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING | COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS

CSULB faculty address AANAPI students’ challenges on multiple fronts.

Nearly a quarter of the student body at CSULB is made up of Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander (AANAPI) students, many of whom grew up in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in Southern California, such as the Cambodian American community in Long Beach. These students are a big part of what makes CSULB unique, but AANAPI students can still struggle to succeed. The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened the educational and economic disparities that these students faced and also heightened their mental health challenges, but AANAPI students often do not seek help when they are experiencing emotional distress, sometimes due to cultural stigma. Their unique perspectives could easily be missed and their needs continue to be unmet, but multiple faculty at CSULB have recognized the missing resources and have stepped in to fill the gap.

The Department of Education awarded CSULB not one but two grants from its Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI) Program—a Title III, Part F, grant in 2021 and a Title V, Part A, grant in 2022. To qualify for this program, an institution must serve a student population of which at least 10% are AANAPI and at least 50% are receiving federal financial aid. CSULB is one of the few institutions to receive both types of funding.

In the first of the two grants, co-principal investigators Professor Dr. Barbara W. Kim and Associate Professor Dr. R. Varisa Patraporn in the College of Liberal Arts received $1.46 million for the five-year program called Project Resilience: Improving Post-Pandemic AAPI Student Wellness and Fostering Career Pathways at the Beach. The program seeks to address some of the difficulties that AANAPI students face by focusing on their mental health. Some of these challenges include those exposed or worsened by the pandemic, such as worsening financial disparities or escalating anti-Asian discrimination and violence. The program, in collaboration with the College of Liberal Arts and the Division of Student Affairs, also supports CSULB’s goal to amplify the voices of AANAPI students and deepens its commitment to the health and wellness of its community.

Project Resilience has four main objectives. The first is to support wellness and mental health, and the program trained five peer mentors who worked with 19 mentees during the 2022-to-2023 academic year. The second is to offer work-based learning experiences and skill development. In the fall of 2022, 13 students received scholarships and completed internships at AANAPI organizations in the greater Long Beach community. In the following spring semester, nine more students received scholarships and completed internships or career development workshops to help them seek and prepare for internships. Faculty and staff development is the third objective, and the program has hosted workshops to help over 50 faculty and staff learn strategies to support AANAPI students. Finally, the program seeks to offer academic support through learning communities, the first of which will launch in the fall of 2023.

The year after Dr. Kim and Dr. Patraporn received the Part F grant, three Asian American professors— Professor Dr. Pitiporn Asvapathanagul and co-principal investigators Assistant Professor Dr. Yu Yang and Lecturer Dr. Tongzhou Wang—collaborated to apply for the second grant. Dr. Pitiporn Asvapathanagul has taught at CSULB for 11 years and has served on the University Resources Council (URC), which is a faculty group that advises the university on budgetary matters, as well as mentored students as part of GenExcel, a group that supports first-generation students. Dr. Asvapathanagul has seen students struggle over the years and knows that their academics suffer as a result of financial difficulties. “Students share with me that their lives are difficult. They want to perform better, but how are they going to perform better if they don’t even know how they are going to pay rent next month?” she says.

It was clear to Dr. Asvapathanagul and her colleagues that existing resources were not sufficient to help students succeed, so they applied for the Title V, Part A, AANAPISI grant in the summer of 2022. That fall, they were awarded a five-year $1.57 million grant for the AANAPI Student Success Center & Development (ASCEND) Program. ASCEND seeks to help students achieve greater academic success by helping them make ends meet while they are taking classes. According to Dr. Asvapathanagul, “Students cannot concentrate because they have to go out and work to make sure they can pay rent and not take too much in loans. We want to help them focus on school more than this.”

The ASCEND program specifically seeks to offer STEM students direct financial assistance, mentoring and tutoring, and leadership and career workshops, and to create diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops for faculty. The first two objectives are already underway, with 55 applications for financial aid currently under review.

The two programs are complementary and will both result in a better experience for AANAPI students at CSULB. It’s Dr. Asvapathanagul’s hope that the ASCEND program’s financial support will allow students to focus on their academics and help them graduate more quickly, while the tutoring will help them succeed in their more difficult courses and raise their GPAs. Project Resilience also seeks to support academic success by addressing the mental health challenges and inequities specific to AANAPI students. Both resources work to address the many challenges of the multifaceted student body at CSULB.

The fact that multiple CSULB faculty are seeking and gaining these grants speaks to the university’s commitment to the health, diversity, and security of its AANAPI and low-income students. “I would say that all of our students need support,” says Dr. Asvapathanagul. “Other faculty and I, if we do not try to seize the opportunity for the student, who will do it?”