Education and Asian Americans
Education and Asian Americans
Significance: Asian Americans have gained a reputation for high educational achievement. To some extent, this reputation reflects actual performance, and this performance has been part of the debate about why ethnic and racial groups vary in education.
The educational achievements of Asian Americans have attracted a great deal of scholarly and popular attention. Popular interest in Asian American educational performance often involves comparing this group with members of other minority groups, heightening the perception of Asian Americans as members of a “model” minority, a stereotype that often makes Asian Americans uncomfortable. Scholars interested in immigrants, minority groups, and influences on education have studied the educational performance of various Asian American groups in order to obtain insight into how immigrant membership and minority group membership may be related to achievement in school.
Levels of Achievement
Although it is difficult to discuss the educational performance of such a diverse group, Asian Americans do seem to show overall levels of achievement that are quite high. Moreover, they begin to distinguish themselves educationally at fairly early ages. In an analysis of 1980 US census data presented in their book Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States (1993), Herbert Barringer, Robert W. Gardner, and Michael J. Levin noted that Asian Americans showed high rates of preschool attendance. This was particularly true for Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and Asian Indians. The 1990 US census showed this pattern continuing. About 24 percent of all Asian American children under six years of age were enrolled in school, compared with 21 percent of white children. Among Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Thai American children, rates of early school attendance were particularly high, with 27 percent of Chinese, 31 percent of Taiwanese, 31 percent of Japanese, and 30 percent of Thai children under six years of age enrolled in school.
School enrollment, of course, is not the same thing as school performance. However, data from the 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Study show that as early as the eighth grade, Asian American children display higher levels of educational aspiration than other American children. According to these data, 43 percent of Asian American children reported that they aspired to education beyond a bachelor’s degree, while only 25 percent of white eighth-graders wanted to pursue postgraduate education.
Early School Attendance, Dropout Rates, and College Attendance Rates Among Whites, African Americans, and Major Asian American Groups
| Racial/Ethnic Group | % under age 6 in school | % age 16-25 not in school, not graduates | % age 18-25 enrolled in college |
| White | 21.4 | 8.6 | 28.9 |
| Black | 24.2 | 15.9 | 22.7 |
| Chinese | 27.0 | 4.8 | 51.3 |
| Taiwanese | 30.8 | 0.9 | 60.1 |
| Filipino | 21.1 | 5.5 | 44.4 |
| Japanese | 31.2 | 3.2 | 47.2 |
| Asian Indian | 24.3 | 5.0 | 51.0 |
| Korean | 25.4 | 4.3 | 43.8 |
| Vietnamese | 18.1 | 7.4 | 42.5 |
| Cambodian | 17.5 | 11.9 | 29.9 |
| Hmong | 16.8 | 10.9 | 27.4 |
| Laotian | 16.9 | 12.5 | 26.3 |
| Thai | 30.0 | 6.8 | 37.1 |
| All Asian | 23.8 | 5.5 | 45.7 |
Asian American children are more likely than other American students to reach high school and stay in high school. Less than 6 percent of Asian Americans ages sixteen to nineteen were high school dropouts in 1990, compared with nearly 7 percent of white Americans and 16 percent of African Americans. There were substantial variations among Asian groups; however, only the three most economically underprivileged Southeast Asian refugee groups (Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian Americans) showed dropout rates that were higher than those of white Americans, and all of the Asian American groups had dropout rates that were lower than those of African Americans.
College entrance examinations are among the most commonly used indicators of high school performance. Although breakdowns by particular Asian groups are not available, the scores of Asian Americans in general were as high as the scores of any other racial group or higher. On the American College Test (ACT), for example, the average Asian American score was 21.7, equal to the average score for whites and higher than the average score for African Americans (17.1). The average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) score for Asian Americans, 1056, was higher than that for members of any other racial or ethnic group, including white Americans (1052). Asian Americans tended to score much higher than white Americans on the math part of the test (560 for Asians, compared with 536 for whites) and substantially lower on the verbal part of the test (496 for Asians, compared with 526 for whites). This suggests that Asian American scores would have been even higher had many of them not been hampered by relatively weaker English proficiency.
Asian Americans were more likely than either white Americans or African Americans to be enrolled in college in 1990. Although 29 percent of whites and 23 percent of African Americans age eighteen to twenty-five were attending college in that year, 46 percent of Asian Americans in this age category were enrolled in higher education. Once again, there were substantial variations among Asian American groups, but only the Hmong Americans and the Laotian Americans, two of the most recent and most economically underprivileged Asian American groups, showed lower rates of college enrollment than the majority white population.
Theories of Asian American Educational Achievement
According to researchers Stanley Sue and Sumie Okazaki, in their 1990 article “Asian American Educational Achievement,” published in the American Psychologist, theorists have usually attributed Asian American school achievement either to innate, genetic characteristics of Asians or to cultural characteristics. Genetic explanations address the problem by citing the performance of Asians on intelligence quotient (IQ) tests and other measures of ability as evidence of higher levels of innate intellectual ability among Asians. Psychologist Richard Lynn has argued that Asian scores on aptitude tests and IQ tests provide evidence for a genetic explanation of Asian academic achievement.
Cultural explanations of Asian American scholastic success have received wider acceptance than genetic explanations. From this point of view, Asian American families pass on cultural values that stress hard work and educational excellence. Looking at Vietnamese American children, Nathan Caplan, Marcella H. Choy, and John K. Whitmore maintained that Vietnamese families passed on cultural values to their children that enabled the children to do well in school. One difficulty with applying this explanation to Asian Americans in general is that the different Asian groups come from a variety of cultural backgrounds.
To address the difficulties raised by both the genetic and cultural explanations, Sue and Okazaki put forward the theory of “relative functionalism” in their 1990 article. According to this theory, Asian success is to be explained by blocked mobility: As a result of barriers to upward mobility by other means, such as social networks, Asians tend to focus on education. Although blocked mobility may influence the life choices of Asians, it would not account for trends in other groups that also experience blocked mobility but do not show the levels of academic performance characteristic of Asians.
Sociologists Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston III have argued that Asian American educational success may, to some extent, be a consequence of the types of social relations found in Asian American communities. They have claimed that tightly knit ethnic communities, such as Chinatowns or Southern California’s Little Saigon, can promote the upward mobility of young people by subjecting them to the expectations of all community members and by providing them with encouragement and support from all community members. This explanation, though, does not tell us why Asian Americans who do not live in ethnic communities may sometimes be high achievers in school.
The precise causes of Asian American educational achievement, then, remain a matter of debate. In all likelihood, some combination of existing theories may account for the scholastic performance of this group, with some theories applying more to some specific groups than to others.
Bibliography
Children of the Boat People. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991. Print.
Flynn, James R. Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1991. Print.
Lee, Stacey J. Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. New York: Teachers Coll. P, 1996. Print.
My Trouble Is English: Asian Students and the American Dream. Portsmouth: Boynton, 1995. Print.
Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston III. Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States. New York: Sage, 1998. Print.