Hawaiian Student Access & Success Research

Our Student Affairs Research Approach

Native Hawaiian Student Services (NHSS) values learning more about our Hawaiian students in an attempt to better serve them and build a university designed to suit the needs, aspirations and goals for Hawaiian students and our broader lāhui. As such, we are interested in better understanding the connections between Hawaiian student access and success and our collective social, political and legal conditions and goals as a lāhui.

  • How do social conditions, networks, or systems contribute to Hawaiian wellbeing and student access & success?
  • What does Native Hawaiian student success mean to students, families, faculty and community?

Native Hawaiian Student Profile

From 2008 until 2013, NHSS produced annual Native Hawaiian Student Profile reports documenting enrollment, registration, and graduation data on Native Hawaiian students across the University of Hawaiʻi System. The data is culled from the University of Hawaiʻi System Institutional Research Office (IRO) Operational Data Store (ODS).

The reports aim to provide snapshots of basic descriptive institutional data about Native Hawaiians in the University of Hawai‘i System to Native Hawaiian serving programs, the greater University of Hawai‘i System and Hawaiian communities. This snapshot includes enrollment and degrees awarded data from the 10 University of Hawai‘i (UH) campuses, including the 7 UH community colleges and 3 four-year institutions.

The data in these reports comes from the UH Operational Data Store (ODS) database, which is fed by Banner. ODS is the preferred database to query data used in reports, as it “freezes” data at benchmark points throughout the semester for static reporting benchmarks. The definitions below provide clarification for the way in which the UH System captures Hawaiian ethnicity data.

In the reports, the term “Hawaiian” student refers to the UH System Institutional Research Office definition of “Hawaiian Ancestry” which is defined as students who answered “Yes” to the Hawaiian Ancestry question (“Were any of your ancestors Hawaiian?”) plus those who answered “No” or left the Hawaiian Ancestry question blank, but said they were “Hawaiian or Part Hawaiian” for the ethnicity question. This “Legacy” methodology is a more accurate reflection of Hawaiian student enrollment because of its more specific Hawaiian ancestry indicator.

Furthermore, “Hawaiian & Part Hawaiian” refers to the UH System Institutional Research Office ethnicity category, which is part of the Conventional Methodology for determining ethnicity. Prior to Fall 2005, this Conventional Methodology was the only indicator used to determine Hawaiian ancestry. In Fall 2005, the University of Hawai‘i adopted the more preferred “Legacy” methodology (see above), which, unless otherwise stated, is used in this report.