There are many terms that are used to denote Asian American and Pacific Islander populations, including (but not limited to): Asian Pacific American (APA), Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI), and Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI). In this report, we use Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) as a pan-ethnic classification that consciously includes South Asians (Desi) as part of the community. There are conflicting views on the appropriateness and oversimplification of any racial classification. Thus, we acknowledge that the terms students use to describe themselves are part of a dynamic process of self-determination and self-identification. Moreover, it is important to recognize that there is great heterogeneity in the historical contexts that shape the experiences within the APIDA ethnic groups (e.g., certain Southeast Asian American ethnic groups being relatively new to the United States)
For the current report, we have disaggregated the APIDA ethnic groups into regional groups as classified by the
Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence (api-gov.org), with two modifications: 1) the Filpinx ethnic group has been disaggregated into their own separate category (FIL) because of their longer history in the United States compared to the other Southeast Asian ethnic groups and the relative size of this group at CSUN, and 2) due to the shared sociopolitical identity as refugees caused by the aftermath of the Viet Nam war, Khmer Rouge Genocide in Cambodia, and the U.S. Secret War in Laos, Khmer, Hmong, Lao, Mien, Montagnard, and Viet ethnic groups have been grouped as one-half of the Southeast Asia region (SEA1) and the remaining ethnic groups in the Southeast Asia region are grouped separately (SEA2), Burmese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean, and Thai.
Data
The current report references the data available on CSUN Counts regarding total undergraduate student and new incoming undergraduate student count. Additionally, a dataset from the Office of Institutional Research with detailed APIDA student application information (admission and enrollment) from 2009 to 2022 was used to disaggregate by specific APIDA ethnicities as captured by the CSU system.1 The total size of the dataset is 73,899 applicants. Note that we have filtered out international applicants from Asia for this brief.
One of the most probable explanations for the decline in APIDA enrollment is CSUN’s impaction policy. During the years between 2009 and 2022, there was a drastic drop in enrollment from 2015 to 2016. CSUN went into campus-wide regional impaction in Fall 2016, which limited admissions for California resident transfer student applicants outside the CSUN-defined local area (i.e., Tier-2; the campus had already declared regional impaction for FTF earlier, in 2009). As such, the new policy required Tier-2 FTT applicants to have a higher eligibility index to be eligible for admission to the university.
Upon moving into impaction in 2016, admission rates experienced a sharp decline across all racial/ethnic groups at CSUN.
ASIAN PACIFIC ISLANDER DESI AMERICAN (APIDA) STUDENT ENROLLMENT AT CSUN 
