Many students often fall short of their goals despite their great aspirations to academic achievement. One of the factors to this impediment especially among the Africans increasingly arriving in the United States is segregation which impairs racial-ethnic identity evoking stigma. This minority group is however yet to be studied probably by sheer ignorance or because of their racial homogenization with African Americans. Indeed this conflation ignores the vast socio-cultural and historical differences. This paper examines the relationship between racial-ethnic identity as a determinant of possible selves and goal orientation of African undergraduate students in the United States. The paper thus intends to identify the manner in which racial-ethnicity shapes what goals the African students in the US set for themselves. A sample of 204 students was conveniently drawn from undergraduate programs in four schools (two from Alabama and two from Georgia) in the Southeast United States. The students comprised black African undergraduate students irrespective of their immigration statuses. Using goal orientation Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales (PALS) and Racial- Ethnic Identity Assessment (REIA) data was collected after which was subjected to descriptive and multiple regression methods for analysis. The study found out that there is no relationship between racial ethnic identity and goal orientations.
Keywords: African Undergraduate Students, Goal Orientation, Immigrants, Multiple identities, Racial-Ethnic Identity, United States
