Quintessential FOB Asian speaking: looking back, I feel that important skills for a successful career are things like the ability to manage people or run a business - areas where both DW &I didn’t have knowledge to impart. So when we looked at more tangible areas, there were some that were both appealing and we had the skill to teach (typical STEM areas) and those that left us just shaking our heads - put it down to the limited (or maybe even zero) exposure to humanities.
Even a year or two ago, when we went to the Museum of modern art in Manhattan, in our eyes, the exhibit rooms were at the level of artwork you’d see in a 2nd grade class. And then there was one exhibit showing a naked couple standing along with two naked preteen kids, that to us looked like porn, kiddie porn, at that, but it was clearly a hit with the other patrons. Even the faded Monet looked like nothing of consequence compared to any number of pics you can get off Google or what we got off a Samsung at a National Park in our last vacation. Same with literature - Michael Crichton or Lee Child appeal to me a lot more than Shakespeare or the Brontes. And yada yada with regards to works or lives of greats like Mozart, Caesar et al.
So for what people typically consider as “humanities” today, we didn’t then, and still don’t see anything that is much beyond a hobby or an afternoon’s experience, so that’s why we focused trying to get them into STEM.
“The “concern” about Asian Americans do differently than what Caucasian Americans do now will become a greater fear that Asian Americans will do exactly what Causian Americans do in order to gain advantages in life later.”
What “fear” are you talking about?
My white kids already got far more exposure to Asian kids at college than they did at home (by virtue of where we live). Good for all of them! Smart, motivated, go getter kids of any race - what’s not to like?
But I don’t have that loser fear-based mentality that someone else’s success has to come out of the hides of my kids. The pie can always grow. We can all do well. It’s not a competition.
From reading these boards, my sense is that a certain amount of “insider information” is necessary to get the desired college acceptances. There are so many elements to the process, it’s not hard to see why it can be confusing…how many SAT subject tests? who to ask for recs? what to write about in essays? what is my “And”. I get that you have no sympathy for the culturally ignorant foreigner who can’t get with the program. So while you might think they are not smart and are clueless about their environment, I’m inclined to think that the program can be very complicated.
It requires some absorption of American cultural values, that’s true.
But the colleges make it ABUNDANTLY clear that their admissions is not about rack-and-stack the SAT scores. So when students or parents come on here complaining that so-and-so down the road got in with a 2100 when their little darling had a 2300, yes, that tells me they didn’t read the instruction manual, so to speak.
The following is a case not about college acceptances; rather, it is about getting into an accelerated (well…just not so dumbing down) math track starting in the 7th(?) grade in middle school in our school district:
When we moved to a “better” public school district (“being better” means that it is politically acceptable for some more motivated or able students to have an opportunity to learn more than some other less-motivated/less-able students), there was some kind of math placement test for all students in 7th (or 6th?) grade.
The problems in the placement test are supposed to be “harder”, for example, they would throw in some Matrix addition and subtraction problems in such a test.
For those families in the know, the PARENTS will try to prep their children beforehand because they know the test items are supposed to include something that are in the curriculum at their children’s grade level. (You could not blame this “tiger coaching” on Asians – This is because there were relatively few Asian students and almost zero Asians who were on the staff/teachers in this district back then.)
For some parents who were really in the know, they could get hold of the questions on such a math placement test. Why did I know? A coworker of mine later told me that his child’s grandmother used to work for this school district and she still had good connections to get hold of all the test items easily. He told me that it was very easy for his family to prep for this. And he did get what would be tested for his child who was in the same grade as my child.
I learned the “lessons” because of this event. So I started to prepare learning materials by myself for my child to learn ahead of his school’s grade - much to his dislike (he occasionally protested but not often because of his “nature”), especially when the teacher sets a VERY LOW standard.
Much later, even when my child was already in college, he still occasionally teased me that I tried to “trick” him into learning N+x grade’s materials (whatever x may be) when he was only in the N-th grade.
It is this “system” that makes me to take such a “defensive” move. Without the connection to gather the needed information as easily as other families which are more established than us, what else can we do?
BTW, in another district in another city in our state back then, they tried to place their kids in the gifted/talented/acceleration track starting in kindergarten or first grade. This was done so early because otherwise there may be too many Asian kids who may be in such a track when these Asian kids are no longer so disadvantaged in later elementary because of their “English language deficient” environment at home.
This is where first-generation-to-college students in high schools where few aspire to go to college other than the local community college or maybe the local commuter state university are disadvantaged in applying to many more selective colleges. They may not realize the various additional requirements (SAT subject tests, recommendations, essays, CSS Profile) until the deadlines have passed, their counselors may not be paying attention to reminding them of such needs when most students do not need them for the local colleges, if they are going to college at all, and they won’t be hearing about it from peers or parents. And counselors and teachers in these high schools may not be well practiced at writing good recommendations.
Perhaps that is why some highly selective colleges have changed SAT subject tests from “required” to “recommended”, so that they can give a little slack to applicants in the situation described above (though the usual saying of "treat ‘recommended’ as ‘required’ " would apply to those in environments where going on to highly selective colleges is common enough that students should know). Of course, this is just one bit, since there are also recommendations, essays, and CSS Profile that can impede students in the situation described above.
The dis-confusion would happen twice as fast if some immigrant groups would not restrict their socializing and their conversations about college admissions only to other recent immigrants of that same nationality, who are equally confused. Student after student tells me that this is what happens, which is why the learning curve continues to be so long – or so high. They tell me that their parents live in an echo chamber when it comes to the entire college process. If the student tries to correct these misunderstandings by citing someone authoritative, such as a Caucasian admissions rep (from a college) or consultant or even teacher or guidance counselor, the parents immediately become distrustful and state that such people with (American) opinions “are not to be trusted,” “have it all wrong,” “don’t know what they’re talking about,” “are deliberately trying to lead the student astray,” etc.
The conversations among those parents apparently revolve around grades and scores, the “unfairness” and the “racism” of the whole college system, etc.
^ I do not think the real or perceived unfairness is due to the racism. It has more to do with this human nature: It is not easy for those who have had the advantage to let go of their advantage. If those who cry about “unfairness” now were all of a sudden given the advantage, they would not be that willing to let go of their advantage either.
I remember there is a book with a title like “the blue blood:…” (if I remember it correctly, the author is a Harvard-graduated social science professor who taught at Cal), which documented how those who were at the advantage at that time a century ago tried to keep their advantage over those new comers (say, the Jews.)
To put it bluntly, if the Asians were “on the driving seat” for this system and had the advantage, I am not sure whether they would do things more fairly than the current system either, if they could get away with it with their unchecked power.
Right. Not to mention the echo chamber that the Ivies are the only colleges worth attending and all other colleges will result in “want fries with that”. Or that only STEM majors are employable and other majors will result in “do you want your latte in tall, grande or venti.”
It’s kind of hard to listen to complaints that other people have “the advantages” when they are deliberately ignoring just the very advice that could get them what they wanted.
Well, PG, your reply #109 also goes back to my earlier example about reverse immigration. If, while in Korea, I restricted my conversation about Korean institutions to recent American immigrants, and failed to achieve my intent in moving to Korea, whose fault would it be that I was “confused” or had the wrong impression or information?
The demonstrated active resistance to available, basic information is difficult to feel empathy about. It’s a result of deliberate insularity, not honest bewilderment with no opportunity for correction. These are not stupid people we’re talking about, but educated ones - whether educated overseas or here (usually there but sometimes here as well). These are, in large part, professionals – engineers, physicians, business owners, researchers, that kind of thing. But those who prefer willful ignorance to accurate data. While it’s not the entire community, it is, according to my students, the prevalent, operating reality.
I have a headache reading through all these posts. Lots of generalization. I know more about Art history, yes Monet and such, more than my husband’s European relatives because I took Art History in college. What a concept. The only guy that had more knowledge was the guy who majored in art and started his own business. Same with opera and theatre. One of my roommates in Boston was an aspiring opera singer. She was in a clothing model and dated a guy in a rock band. How’s that for a colorful life.
While my husband knows more about science and stuff. My knowledge of science is from textbooks and formulas. He has a deep understanding of it.
As recently, in my brother’s circle he knows of one Asian student who got into Harvard this year. I’m not sure there are any advantages but this family has kids who got into Yale before. While my Korean coworker with daughters very high stats and talented artist didn’t get into Harvard, she only got into MIT. The emphasis is on only. Haha, kidding of course.
What accurate data are you speaking of? It is quite offensive to suggest that such educated and intelligent people would willfully ignore data when they place such a high value on education and just want the best for their children in that regard.
You are welcome to continue believing that Asians are sabotaging their own admissions efforts and that they are not being held to different standards. I will use my own anecdotes to believe otherwise.
My experience has been similar to @epiphany . As a college professor and as a person of Indian origin who has been through the US education system since elementary school, I do get asked questions from many educated Indian families re: college entrance. There is a focus on test scores and GPA and EC’s which are strikingly similar across these students. When I suggest that they should look at a wide range of schools, including LAC’s, that Duke is not exactly a safety, that a magical 2400 is not the golden key, etc. etc., they are no longer interested in anything I have to say. I now simply tell folks to look for a college counselor in their neighborhood. It’s much easier than feeling compelled to validate lingering misconceptions.
“What accurate data are you speaking of? It is quite offensive to suggest that such educated and intelligent people would willfully ignore data when they place such a high value on education and just want the best for their children in that regard.”
How many kids on CC tell us that their parents will consider them failures if they don’t get into HYPSM? that their parents won’t even consider perfectly fine top tier LACs because they haven’t heard of them? And if they haven’t ever heard of them, they can’t possibly be any good because their criteria is - the folks in the old country haven’t heard of it?
We have even had parents from those cultures on CC who simply won’t consider anything but the almighty HYPSM (and Berkeley, can’t forget Berkeley).
Such people are ignorant, bogibogi. And when they refuse to open their minds to other top schools, even when they are told by Americans that the sun doesn’t rise and set on HYPSM, then they are deliberately choosing to remain ignorant.
And you are welcome to believe that they listen to what they don’t want to hear. Obviously we have very different sets of anecdotes, you and I. Setting aside what is reported to me as accurately as I can tell by my students – regarding their own parents – I have two other sources of validating information:
(1) Asians who do know (better) how U.S. college admissions works, even though they themselves grew up in China, etc. under a very different system. Such people try to educate immigrants directly, telling them The Real Deal. With my own two ears I hear those parents come back to me, after such Truth Sessions (to which I have been privy) and deny that Mr. Whoever (who operates both in China and in the U.S.) knows what he’s talking about. Such parents sometimes admit that Mr. Whoever has had such a conversation with them (and that of course he is not to be believed); other parents pretend that such a conversation never occurred, even though their son or daughter was sitting right there in the room and reports later to me the very words that were spoken to the parents, by the informing party.
(2) The multitude of 1:1 long conferences I have had with parents of my students.
Step One: Initial conference with parents, filling them in on how U.S. admissions operates – what’s important for successful results beyond scores and grades. Parent listens, nods.
Step Two: parent returns the following week, as if Step One had never occurred. No reference is made to the previous 90 minutes of information, nor has any practical step been taken to align the college list vaguely with reality. At that second conference, I again, patiently, repeat Step One (the key points), offering as I do in every conference, Q&A opportunities.
Step Three: parents return the following week, as if neither Step One nor Step Two occurred.
Step Four, Five, Six: identical. In the meantime, sometimes these parents have ventured beyond me and sought verification from other knowledgeable people. Occasionally they admit that that information confirms what I have said. Nevertheless, they argue with the facts as if they don’t really believe them. In the meantime, also. often their students intervene and try to explain, in Mandarin or in English, how the heck things work. Sometimes this actually occurs in my presence; at other times, the students report to me in detail what they have said to their parents. When I ask them, “How did your parents respond to you?” The answer is, “They didn’t believe me and instead turned to other Asian parents, who agree that you and I must be lying to them.”
This is the dominant pattern. The minority pattern is one of two: (1) the parent tries earnestly to assimilate the new information and is cooperative, eager (obviously) for good college admissions results from people who actually know the procedures and the business; very often those are the same “hands-off” parents who also do not try to control their students’ choice of majors or choice of college; (2) the parent does not necessarily understand everything that is said to them (me, others) but acknowledges that it is complicated and concedes the effort to those with expertise.
And this is not altogether the exact same issue, but it’s related: I recently asked one of my students why so many Asian immigrant parents with college age students have what those born here would consider unrealistic college lists, to an extreme. She replied that she has heard her parents and her parents’ peers talk a lot about this, and, according to my student, the assumption is that “since” admissions is not “all” quantitatively determined, then all bets are off. It “must be” rather random in that case. There must be no rhyme or reason to it, simply because it includes factors other than what can be concretely measured. There is no middle ground: either it is linear or it is a picture of disorder and one might as well get on board. I’m not exaggerating her interpretation, even though I cannot verify, of course, that her interpretation is accurate – and I’ve challenged her often on this. (Is there really no gray area, in your parents’ eyes and the eyes of their peers?) I think this may be actually just a matter of – again, not understanding a much more vague system, admittedly – rather than “insisting” on one extreme or the other. She was just reporting on her impressions and offering that as a possible reason for unrealistic college lists. However, that was also reported to me by someone completely different who is very fluent in both Mandarin and English.
Based on the fact that our child in the end applied to a single college in this list, and the majority in his list of colleges to apply to were LACs, we are definitely not such parents.
Re: Berkeley: I actually discouraged our child from applying to ANY major college in California (e.g., neither Berkeley nor Stanford.) Wait…I take it back: He did apply to one of the LACs in the Claremont college system. He applied to LACs all over the country.
One of my coworkers went to Berkeley decades ago. He liked to share one of his stories while he was there (grad school only). One of the students actually decided to carry his tire to the class after the tire had been stolen so many times (and he had to replace it.) Also, when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I went to another UC for my graduate school - 3 students in my year who could not find the apartment had to stay in a hotel for more than a month at the beginning of the fall semester. (Granted, the grad students often received the short end of the treatment, no matter what school they go to – even though it is these grad students and those high power professors who are generally reluctant to teach any students in the classroom who help the university to gain or maintain the reputation for the university. So the phenomenon of not treating grad school students well could be similar at schools in other state as well. The message here is that, ignoring the “brand name” issue in this discussion for now (this is because some “old/established system” still manages its brand name well enough), in general, if you want a “better deal” in this country, you should not have the illusion that some other people will pay the services for you. You ain’t in the Europe.)
Some of the last few posts on this thread have veered off in a direction that I disagree with. I’d like to present a few personal opinions as a counterpoint. Although I’m not Asian, I do have several family members by marriage and many close friends who are Asian immigrants, so hopefully I am not misrepresenting things too badly. Unfortunately, massive overgeneralization and stereotyping are endemic to a topic such as this, so please grant me some leeway.
It’s probably true that many Asian immigrant parents have too high a fixation on test scores, academic achievement, etc when it comes to college admissions. But talk about missing the forest for the trees. Asian-American students are between 20% and 29% of domestic undergraduate enrollments at HYPSM while being about 5% of the US population. This means they’re almost 5 times overrepresented. And I think you could plausibly make the case that they’d be 30%-35% of the enrollments if all ethnically identifying information were whited out from the applications but colleges continued to try to admit the best class according to their holistic criteria. So whatever the hell they’re doing, it’s working when it comes to the “game” of elite college admissions, or more substantively, educational attainment in general - and that’s a good thing.
So, I’m not exactly sure who should be taking lessons from whom when it comes to the college admissions “game”.
P.S. Some posters may argue that this “game” isn’t worth playing. That’s fine – it’s a free country, so don’t play if you don’t want to. But others are also free to make their own choices.
Unfortunately, no individual (much less a whole group) is perfect, and it’s probably true that many in the Asian immigrant community stubbornly adhere to what they want to believe.
But this is the system that Asian immigrants are familiar with from their home countries. People are right that they need to adapt more to the US system, but that’s probably much easier said than done. Most people in this forum haven’t experienced the trials and tribulations of being a first generation immigrant and having to adopt a new language and culture. I think it’s perfectly understandable that immigrants make mistakes that their own communities reinforce. They probably do put too much academic pressure on their children and backing off 20% would probably be better.
But Holy Cow – if that’s their worst sin as parents then we should sign the whole damn country up. It’s true that Asian immigrants are overgeneralizing from their own preconceptions and not learning how to best do things. But at least they have the excuse of being immigrants. In the meantime, there are whole sections of some cities where over 80% of children are born to parents who barely give a damn about them (meaning at least one parent abandoned them and certainly isn’t providing financial or emotional support).
Forget about learning the intricacies of elite college admissions in a new country. Lots of people who were born here can’t seem to learn much simpler lessons - that they should graduate from high school (not even talking about college) if they want to have a shot at a meaningful future; that having kids as a teenager and dropping out isn’t exactly going to rocket you up the career ladder or lead to a happy life for yourself or your children.
In comparison, immigrants pushing their children a bit too hard is a pretty venial sin. From seeing some of my relatives, I’m 100% sure it’s done out of love - but not the mushy-mushy kind of love that’s in a movie. Many Asian immigrant families are willing to make sacrifices for their children that are orders of magnitude beyond what many others would ever even contemplate, much less do for 30 years. Personally, I think that’s one major reason why their kids are willing to work and push themselves so hard - it’s because when these kids see their parents making this level of sacrifice and modeling this behavior, then whatever they’re asked to do in school seems trivial in comparison.
Anyway, I’m sure that the succeeding generations of Asian Americans will “mellow” a little bit and hopefully find a middle ground between the stereotypes of tiger parenting and average American parenting. Personally, if I had to pick a poison then I’d be very tempted to pick 75% “mini-tiger” parenting blended with 25% average upper middle-class parenting (and 0% average family parenting).
And besides, this approach does seem to be working even if it’s not perfect. On average Asian immigrants are doing quite well in the US. Not only with respect to college admissions, but also with respect to employment, household income, family stability, etc. Also, frankly I do think they’ve accomplished this despite facing some level of discrimination - the US does do a pretty good job of providing opportunity to everyone, but by no means have we developed the perfect society or has human nature changed.
Regarding forests and trees, the discussion of immigrant parents of students in a position to aim for HYPSMetc is focusing on a small number of trees in the forest.
At the forest level, this is about students who go to any college. For any race/ethnicity (including the Asian ones), most college-bound students head off to community colleges or various public and private universities of varying levels of selectivity, with very few heading off to the super-selective ones where things beyond grades and test scores matter greatly (if the student has something like 3.3/1800/26, the schools are within reach for admission can separate most applicants by grades and test scores, unlike the super-selectives flooded with 3.9+/2200+/34+ applicants).
Tiger parenting probably has only minor effects (and not necessarily positive) on the forest level compared to the immigration patterns having selected the immigrant parents of some ethnic origins to be of high educational attainment. After all, the 3.9+/2200+/34+ student should be going to college, even if s/he does not get into a super-selective one due to a tiger parent pushing him/her to ignore everything else that is typically necessary for admission to such a college. Merely having parents of high educational attainment (tiger parents or not) tends to be a rather large advantage for the kid’s future educational attainment.