Is academic achievement commonly associated with Asian students really based on immigration?

Lots, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_varieties_of_Chinese .

Never heard of that.

But that implies that the teacher does not really believe that the homework is valuable in helping the students learn (i.e. it is just busywork to punish the less well behaved students).

I’ve heard of it once. Also I was told that it was silly to attend parents teacher conference by a teacher because my kid got straight As in middle school, how silly is that.

I don’t disagree, JOD. (Post 259) But of course you’re preaching to the choir here.

As for this,

I cannot agree more.

It will be interesting to see if these predictions/anecdotal observations become prevalent in subsequent generations.

I find it interesting that many posts have criticized the “Asian” STEM pre-occupation. Yet like furrydog, I see many Asians in our area pursuing non-STEM interests.

As we see more diversification, I wonder if it will be viewed as a natural consequence of being exposed to different careers/ideas/values and applauded OR will there be a negative connotation attributed to the perceived change?..laziness.

Laziness is a behavior, not an academic major.

I almost major in it.

With so many kids taking 4 or 5 AP courses (and getting 4s and 5s) and staying up to all hours - we shouldn’t toss the term “lazy” around too breezily.

But/and I would note that strategic laziness in the work world is an art. I bow to the masters.

I don’t know if business and economics should count as “non-STEM” for this purpose, and I’m guessing those are the two majors most common for Asians that you’ve seen (guessing because that’s what I’ve seen, correct me if I’m wrong). In this context we’re using “STEM” to mean something with strong employment prospects.

Business and economics are two of the most common majors period.

They are not generally considered “STEM”, except possibly for (the relatively few) economics majors preparing for PhD study in economics (such students take advanced math and statistics courses like real analysis, proof-heavy linear algebra, calculus-based probability theory, etc.).

Not all true “STEM” majors necessarily lead to good employment prospects at graduation.

Social science is science so you could argue that economics is STEM too. My observation is that non-social science STEM majors have never really caught on “in a large scale” among non-Asian/non-immigrants while economics has always been a popular choice for “mainstream” Americans. In addition, Asians, those in super elites in particular, are now getting into History, political science and psychology as well, although by few numbers than in Economics. There are still far fewer majoring in Anthropology, Art History, Linguistics etc. then I suppose those are smaller programs in the first place.

It’s my impression that “STEM” as we’re using it in this topic is being used as a substitute for “majors with good employment prospects.” I’ve never heard the stereotype that Asian parents all push their kids into Geology.

@Vladenschlutte Yes, a lot of the “non-STEM” students I’m thinking of are business majors. But there are also a good number of other majors…journalism, communications, English, psych, music, etc.

The elites can tip the scale in favour of the middle class by focusing on test scores. We know from empirical research that test scores are hard to alter. GPA, EC etc. can be messaged and packaged.
Instead, we modify the SAT to make it more squeezed at the tails, so you can not differentiate the strong from the truly exceptional. Now we changed it again I am sure with the intention of reducing test validity even further. Then some schools go test optional…
Lani Guinier once said that for the elites, merit often functions as a handmaiden to power. I can not agree more.

What @ucbalumus posted makes my head spin. In linguistic terms, many of those are really different languages because they don’t have 80% comprehensibility. Others are dialects because they can understand each other reasonably well.

An excellent observation.

I agree with #226. I do think the American college way is to value perceived “natural” smartness/achievement over “hard work for a particular goal” smartness/achievement. That’s why we called them “gifted” programs–the it-factor is supposedly innate. So the kid who doesn’t study and gets a 35 on the ACT would be valued higher than the kid who takes 20 practice tests and makes a 35. And the Asian community would consider the first kid lazy, while the CC community looks askance at the posters who post about Kumon school.

Re Asians with non-STEM majors: Jeepers! Of course there are Asians with non-STEM majors! As many of us say, from many different directions in this thread, “Asians” are an awfully varied lot, and every single Asian kid is an individual. Discrimination or no, Asians make up a huge percentage of the students in most elite universities, second only (and sometimes not even second) to that equally uninformative category “Whites.” So it should surprise no one that Asians can be found in every nook and cranny of the academic world – and, yes, that includes English and Classics, as well as Theater Studies. (The best actress in my son’s high school class was a Chinese girl neither of whose parents could speak more than rudimentary English. She got a near-full-ride aid package at Tisch. Her grades were crappy, too – she was constantly flirting with being barred from drama productions for failure to maintain a B- average.)

Recognizing that, however, doesn’t mean that Asian (meaning, really, Han Chinese and South Asian) students don’t concentrate in certain areas disproportionately compared to other communities. Or that such disproportionality – on average, not for every individual – may not have a lot to do with the perceived higher hurdle for admission to a handful of elite universities. Whether there’s discrimination or something else, it’s a marginal thing. It’s ludicrous to suggest that anyone is actually trying to exclude Asians when they constitute 30%+ of the student body. It may not be ludicrous to suggest that they would be at 40% if there weren’t some effort to hold down their numbers, but it also is not ludicrous to suggest that they might be a lot closer to 40% if 30% of them rather than 10% were oriented towards humanities.

Whoa. I was just browsing in the “post actual results” thread in the What Are My Chances forum, on p. 130, this kid “Asiadude” first gen Chinese American with 2340 SAT, 36 ACT, 4.0 GPA from a magnet school, 9 APs incl. math, science, CS, history and English - all 5s, SAT II math and 800 Chemistry 790. He was also swim team captain for 4 years, pricipal clarinet at school orchestra, 250 volunteer hours at the hospital, crew, lifeguard, presidential scholar nominee.

Accepted: UWa (no direct CS admit), UCLA
Rejected: Stanford, Cornell, UPenn, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, UCB, Carnegie Mellon.

That is just outrageous!!! There is no doubt if he were a URM he would have gotten in everywhere!

When I was looking through the profiles of the 7 kids that got into all 8 Ivies, I noticed that for the 5 URMS their SAT scores are only in the mid 2200s, with barely any notable ECs, but the lone Asian kid in the group, the Indian girl, had 2390 SAT, wrote an app that help detect Parkinson’s disease, wrote some other medical app, seriously knock your socks off impressive.

I take back what I said. Asians do appear to be heavily discriminated. I don’t know how those liberals running our elite campuses can continue with this kind of blatant racial discrimination. It’s just wrong. Not only that but I find AA both patronizing and condescending. What they are implying is URMs have lower ability therefore simply can’t compete with Asians and whites without the bars being lowered for them. That is patently

I agree with most of the “not ludicrous” points made in post #275. But, part of the reason why there are fewer Asian and especially fewer second generation immigrant Asian students are oriented towards humanities is some of them realize that for elite college admission, orienting towards humanities means they will be competing for a spot with the strongest cohort of applicants who have all the advantages deemed to be important to humanities majors, and likely there’s a higher concentration of those with hooks/connections in that pool as well. Technically, while it’s daunting to compete with the ones who have similar backgrounds and strengths as their own, at least they know how. Of course, even if one is “oriented to” humanities, it doesn’t men they will major in humanities when they get in. Meanwhile, STEM may have a higher attrition rate so even among Asians oriented to STEM some may end up majoring in something else. I expec the next generation of Asian applicants will have more diverse interests as they gain more confidence in the prospect of being successful in fields other than STEM both in work place and in elite college admission.

Factors for that include a state history where local political elites prioritized private schooling and sent their own kids to private schools in Hawaii or on the mainland, not prioritizing funding for public schools because they were “for the poor/native Hawaiians/Asian & other immigrants”, consequent lack of educational opportunities for non-elites including children of Asian immigrants, etc.

This history is one major reason why everyone in an older relative’s upper-middle class Honolulu neighborhood made it a point to send their kids to private/boarding schools and to avoid attending even the state flagship if possible. It’s also a factor in why Hawaii has one of the highest rates in the nation of sending its HS aged kids to private schools at around 20%.

The common perception was the public schools…including the public university system wasn’t remotely up to minimal academic standards of their private/boarding or better mainland state counterparts. The public university system is viewed in the same light CCNY/CUNY system tended to be viewed by many average/high achieving NYC area HS families from the '70s till the late '90s…as 13th grade/schools of absolute last resort for those at the bottom of their respective HS graduating classes.

Incidentally, the above factors were also factors in why one faculty friend quit his position at a UH campus after a few years for a position at a NE LAC.

As a Stuy alum, the thought that students from wealthy families would flock to my HS or other NYC SHS is ROTFLOL amusing considering what I’ve observed of HS classmates with siblings who attended some topflight private/boarding schools such as the Dalton School, Horace Mann, Choate/Rosemary Hall, etc, wealthy families I’ve been acquainted with, college classmates who attended private/boarding schools, and wealthier relatives whose kids attended such private schools.

Common refrain I kept hearing from most of them and especially their kids…Heck, no!

Such public test-based magnet HSs are regarded as sink-or-swim academic pressure cookers which require too much hard work and navigating a public school bureaucracy without much/any handholding. Also, providing extensions for assignments was unheard of and teachers/admins would look askance at any student who had the nerve to even ask for such a thing. Assignment’s turned in late…one or more letter grade deduction/day so it was possible for an “A” paper to become a “D” paper because it was turned in 2 days late. All that’s “too much for the darling snowflakes”…and they didn’t sound like they were joking, either.

In contrast, many I knew who attended private/boarding schools seemed to have been provided extensions on assignments for what many would consider flimsy reasons to cover up procrastination/goofing off*.

Why subject oneself to such hassles if one can get a good education in a more nurturing environment of a private/boarding school?

It’s a factor in why the student body at Stuy is still mostly populated mostly by working/lower-middle class immigrant families and why it’s eligible for Title-1 status under the NYC DOE.

  • Many college classmates who came from such HS environments found it difficult to adjust when our LAC Profs were much less generous with extensions and felt the Profs were "too unreasonable" and "too rigid". As someone coming from a HS environment where extensions were never given, I felt those very same extension policies were on the generous side.

I heard the more privileged, wealthier families in the NE often do not send their kids to public schools.

For an inner-city public high school in our city which is NOT in the NE (where our child was growing up), I noticed the majority of their good students (top 50) went to a local community college, and only the top couple of students would attend a four year college. My child was in a “better” high school in a suburban area. The top 15-20 students may go to some well-known national research university or a well-known LAC out of state. The middle of crowd would attend a four-year flagship public, and the rest to other lower tiered non-flagship public. Almost no student attended a community college. Big difference even for people living in the same city. No wonder I heard that what family you were born into matters. The safety net could be an order of magnitude better if you were born into a good family. In terms of the schooling, I guess we are still quite segregated in many areas of our country – before college, we are segregated by this economic force: “who are capable of paying a higher valued property and/or private school tuitions.”