Negotiating My Ethnicity: How Higher Education Matters?

Higher education has long been acknowledged for its importance in fostering student identity development. Focusing on Chinese American college students in a predominately white institution in the Mid-west of the United States, this qualitative research provided a rather complicated role higher education plays for this group of students to contemplate what it means to be ethnic Chinese in higher education. In addition to the widely claimed “finding oneself in higher education”, this research revealed alienation and exclusion in negotiating their ethnic identity. Students’ agency along with the specific higher education environments offered insight to this finding.