UCLA

Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs) have played an integral role in transforming the ways higher education institutions in the United States and Pacific Islands serve Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students. Although scholarship on AANAPISIs has demonstrated how these institutions and programs have promoted AAPI student success, few have discussed how these programs and services are sustained beyond the federal grant’s tenure. Moreover, although the federal grant program is intended to serve both Asian Americans and Pacific Islander communities, much of the empirical research has either used the AAPI panethnic label without considering the different educational experiences of Pacific Islanders from Asian Americans within these sites or overlooked how AANAPISIs have served Pacific Islander students specifically. To address these oversights in higher education research and discourse, this study documented how two AANAPISIs—one in California and the other in the Pacific Islands—with a targeted interest in Pacific Islander student success institutionalized aspects of their grant-funded programs and services.

Using qualitative research methods within an embedded, multiple case study design, this study highlighted the various strategies employed at both AANAPISIs to help facilitate the process of institutionalization. More specifically, AANAPISI administrators were able to demonstrate the success of their programs, adjust institutional processes and practices to support their efforts, and build relationships with key stakeholders both within the institution and beyond. Although findings demonstrated a pathway to institutionalization, participants in the study also shared challenges they encountered in the process of garnering institutional investment to sustain AANAPISI efforts, demonstrating how the process of institutionalization is ultimately racialized. Moreover, these challenges varied significantly by site, illuminating the importance of considering contextual factors when navigating the process of institutionalization.

Findings from this study offered effective strategies that can be leveraged to help move AANAPISIs toward institutionalization; however, this study also exemplified the ways in which higher education institutions operate as racialized organizations and the impact that this has on institutional processes that are often framed as race neutral. By bringing awareness to this reality, AANAPISI scholars and practitioners must reimagine efforts toward institutionalization that can challenge the centrality of whiteness in higher education and promote the success of students, like Pacific Islanders, who are often overlooked or made invisible.