Why class matters less for Asian-American academic achievement

Abstract

Asian-Americans are 6% of the U.S. population but comprise more than one-fifth of the entering classes in the country’s Ivy League universities. At prestigious public universities like the University of California, Berkeley, they constitute more than 40% of the student body. Figures like these would be unremarkable if Asian-Americans students uniformly hailed from high socioeconomic backgrounds, but this is not the case. Even the children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees whose parents have less than a high school education graduate from college at nearly the same rate as their middle-class peers, pointing to a perplexing Asian-American achievement paradox. Unable to explain the paradox, commentators of various political persuasions have pointed to the role of Asian culture in promoting exceptional academic outcomes. We debunk the specious claim that academic achievement can be reduced to Asian culture. What has been missing from the debate is the role that U.S. immigration law has had in ushering in a steady stream of highly selected, highly educated immigrants from Asia – what we refer to as ‘hyper-selectivity.’ The direct and spill-over effects of hyper-selectivity help to explain why class matters less for Asian-Americans than for other groups for academic achievement.

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