Hawaii folks have always found one aspect of federal government data collection particularly puzzling. How can it make sense that all the disparate cultures and groups of the Asia-Pacific region are frequently lumped together into one category?

The plain fact is that it doesn’t make sense, and now it seems professionals, particularly in the education field, are starting to grasp how distorted a picture one sees through such a wide lens. This clearer understanding may be late in coming, but falls into that “better late than never” category. It’s happening just as Census Bureau figures show Asians to be America’s fastest-growing racial or ethnic group.

Last week, experts in Asian-American and Pacific Islander issues met in Washington, D.C., summoned by the U.S. Department of Education to discuss ways of understanding the component segments of this population. What’s stunning is that it’s only been since 2007 that the federal DOE started separating Asian-Americans from Pacific Islanders and Native Hawai- ians for data collection.

Their differences are about as wide as the Pacific. Between 2006 and 2010, about three-quarters of Taiwanese-Americans and more than half of Korean-Americans 25 and older had a college degree, a marker achieved by only 10 percent of Samoans and 12 percent of Laotian-Americans of the same age.

These are all groups that Hawaii knows well. In fact, new Census Bureau data show Hawaii well out in front of other states in the proportion of residents of Asian ancestry — almost 57 percent.

Nationally, however, awareness has come only more recently that the broad-brush depiction of the Asian and Pacific Islander group was so blurry as to be meaningless. For example, the needs of the Micronesian community — some of them lacking in housing and other basics — are obscured if their stories become overwhelmed by the experiences of other groups that have adapted more easily to Western ways.

Robert Teranishi, an associate professor at New York University, said Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders face the opposite problem of African-Americans and other minorities that work to dispel negative stereotypes. They find they must draw attention to the least successful among them to escape their image as the “model minority,” he said. That’s the only way those struggling to make it can get the help they need.

In mainland states where communities have much smaller Asian-Pacific Islander populations, getting a better count without violating privacy by identifying individual families has been challenging, officials have said. Fortunately, Hawaii has an advantage here and can serve a leadership role in helping Americans broadly to better understand these groups.

The University of Hawaii has been creating separate data sets for Asian and Pacific Islander groups for years, a response to public concern about lower achievement in education and earning power among Native Hawaiians and some Asian groups, particularly Filipinos.

Speaking at the D.C. gathering, Pearl Imada Iboshi, who heads the UH Institutional Research and Analysis Office, said further study showed Native Hawaiians falling 9 percentage points behind other groups in the six-year graduation rate. The result: UH has made outreach to Native Hawaiian college readiness and support a priority.

As the U.S. becomes increasingly diverse in ethnicity and other ways, following Hawaii’s example in a more finely focused approach to population research should guide social and educational policy in the direction that its people really need.