Deconstructing hyper-selectivity: Are the socioeconomic attainments of second-generation Asian Americans only due to their class background?

Abstract

Recent studies by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou claim that “hyper-selectivity” is the primary causal factor accounting for the high average educational attainment of second-generation Asian Americans. We critically assess hyper-selectivity, which has not been carefully evaluated in prior research. We argue that hyper-selectivity is inadequately conceptualized and is not clearly supported by data on immigration or income mobility. Hyper-selectivity ignores accumulated facts about Asian American family processes relating to cultural factors and educational attainment. Rather than being a class phenomenon, Asian cultural factors have important effects for most second-generation Asian Americans regardless of the socioeconomic status of their parents. Overemphasizing hyper-selectivity inadequately acknowledges the cultural heritage of Asian Americans and ignores the agency of immigrant Asian American families.

Keywords

Asian Americans immigration selective migration second generation educational attainment racial inequality

Introduction

Tran et al. (2019) argue that “hyper-selectivity” is the key underlying causal factor accounting for the high average socioeconomic attainments of second-generation Asian Americans. Lee and Zhou (2015) presented closely related arguments in The Asian American Achievement Paradox which have been widely acclaimed by American sociologists.¹ Lee and Zhou’s view was further reiterated in “Hyper-selectivity and the remaking of culture” (Zhou and Lee, 2017). In the following, we critically assess these influential studies and argue that, despite its popularity, hyper-selectivity is inadequate as the primary explanation for the higher socioeconomic attainments of second-generation Asian Americans.

The hyper-selectivity view

Tran et al. (2019: 4) state:

Despite the diversity within the US Asian immigrant population, a distinguishing feature is their positive immigrant selectivity, and, more speciﬁcally, their hyper-selectivity … Lee and Zhou (2015) coined the term hyper-selectivity to describe a dual positive immigrant selectivity in which immigrants are not only more likely to have graduated from college than their non-migrant counterparts from their countries of origin, but also more likely to have a college degree than the host society. This hyper-selectivity helps to explain the favourable socioeconomic outcomes of the ﬁrst generation, as well as the second generation’s exceptional educational outcomes.

For example, as Zhou and Lee (2017: 8) stated:

Among Vietnamese immigrants [to the US], more than one quarter (26%) had at least a bachelor’s degree, while the comparable figure among adults in Vietnam was only 5%. Among Chinese immigrants, 51% had graduated from college, compared with only 4% of adults in China, meaning that Chinese immigrants in the United States are more than 12 times as likely to have graduated from college as Chinese adults who did not immigrate. While both groups are highly selected, Chinese are hyper-selected, as they are also more highly educated than the general U.S. population (51% vs. 28%).

Although not clearly explained in general analytical terms, “hyper-selectivity” seems to imply that the Asians who immigrate to the US have privileged class backgrounds in keeping with their unusually high levels of educational attainment. As Lee and Zhou (2015: 6) state, Asian immigrants “selectively import class-specific cultural institutions, frames, and mind-sets from their countries of origin.” Zhou and Lee (2017: 11) more fully explain that “it [hyper-selectivity] results in a large and highly educated middle class, who selectively imports middle-class-specific cultural frames, institutions, and mindsets from their countries of origin.” Hyper-selectivity is thus “middle-class-specific” rather than being associated with Asian ethnic culture (Zhou and Lee, 2017: 8–9).

Tran et al. (2019) further emphasize how these middle-class origins enhance the socioeconomic attainments of second-generation Asian Americans. They argue that

hyper-selectivity has cultural, institutional, and social psychological consequences that can boost the second generation’s educational outcomes in ways that defy the status attainment model. Hyper-selected immigrants construct a strict and narrow “success frame”–including high educational and occupational achievement – and, critically, they create and sustain institutional resources, including after-school academies, tutoring services, and SAT preparatory classes, to ensure that their second-generation children realize the success frame. (Tran et al., 2019: 4–5)

Despite being a “middle-class-specific” phenomenon, Asian Americans from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are said to benefit from hyper-selectivity. As Zhou and Lee state (2017: 12),

Hyper-selectivity helps to explain how the [Asian American] child of restaurant employees or factory workers knows how to gain admission into the country’s top universities, and how to draw on ethnic capital to pave his or her pathway … And because these resources are preferentially available to co-ethnics from a wide range of class backgrounds, children from working-class families are able to assuage their socioeconomic disadvantage with co-ethnic advantages, supporting the idea that an ethnic group’s socioeconomic heterogeneity is instrumental to group mobility…. (Tran et al., 2019: 5)

Tran et al. (2019: 5) further state:

In addition, hyper-selectivity has social psychological consequences that have “spillover eﬀects” across ethnic origin groups. Residential proximity among Asian ethnic groups in the United States also promotes spillover eﬀects. This allows, for example, Vietnamese immigrants to beneﬁt from institutional resources like after-school programmes that are available among Chinese communities.

The authors continue by claiming that

the hyperselectivity of Chinese immigrants leads to the perception that all Chinese are highly educated, hard-working, and deserving … And because of the racialization that occurs in the U.S. context, this perception extends to other Asian Americans, despite diﬀerences among them.

These “spillover effects” and related high levels of socioeconomic attainment are facilitated by “ethnic capital”:

Groups with high levels of human capital can convert this into ethnic community resources, or ethnic capital, via entrepreneurship … These group-based resources support and facilitate the actualization of the success frame. It is the access to ethnic capital—in the form of tangible and intangible ethnic resources—that makes the success frame tenable, even for working-class coethnics. In the Chinese immigrant community, for example, ethnic capital comes in the form of academic tutoring centers, test cram schools, and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) preparatory courses—all of which are run by ethnic entrepreneurs to support the success frame … These ethnic resources are accessible and affordable to working-class immigrant families, which help overcome their disadvantaged class status in order to effectively navigate the U.S. educational system and achieve desirable outcomes. (Zhou and Lee, 2017: 9)

Stereotyping is the other process that facilitates “spillover effects” which lead to the high educational attainment of Asian Americans, even when they are from lower-income family backgrounds. As stated by Zhou and Lee (2017: 9):

The stereotype of Asian Americans as a hyper-selected group can result in “stereotype promise”—the boost in performance that comes with being perceived by teachers, guidance counselors, and peers as smart, high achieving, hardworking, and deserving.

According to Lee and Zhou (2015: 127):

Teachers’ positive stereotypes of Asian American students can change the behavior of even some of the most mediocre students, thereby producing exceptional outcomes and reinforcing the belief that Asian Americans are intrinsically brighter, more hardworking, more diligent, and more promising than other students.

Hyper-selectivity does not reflect Asian culture in any way, and Zhou and Lee (2017: 8) are critical of the view that “there is something essential about Asian values or traits that produce such exceptional outcomes. This is a popular argument often made by pundits and journalists.” That is, “It is important to note that this success frame is not intrinsically Asian; rather, it has been constructed and promoted by hyper-selected Asian immigrant subgroups, which, in turn, can affect other Asian subgroups as the U.S. society homogenizes Asians” (Zhou and Lee, 2017: 9).

Hidden assumptions implicit in an aggregate statistical measure

An obvious problem with Zhou and Lee’s statistics on the hyper-selectivity (i.e. Lee and Zhou, 2015: 30; Tran et al., 2019: 9–10; Zhou and Lee, 2017: 8) of Asian immigrants is that the percentages are not broken down by cohort (Sakamoto, 2017). In East Asian societies that rapidly developed (e.g. South Korea and Taiwan region) or are still undergoing a relatively high pace of economic growth (e.g. China and Vietnam), there are often major cohort differences in educational attainment. Educational attainment among older cohorts is much lower due to the smaller number of educational institutions as well as the generally lower level of economic development in prior decades. With increased urbanization and economic development over time, however, younger cohorts typically obtain much higher levels of education in a more modern society that often differs markedly from that experienced by their parents when they were of school-going age (e.g. Lin, 2007).

According to 2014 OECD statistics on tertiary education for China, for example, only 2% of persons aged 55 to 64 years had any post-secondary education, whereas that figure increases to 27% among persons aged 25 to 34. This cohort differential does not mean, however, that Chinese aged 25 to 34 are over 13 times more “selective” than Chinese aged 55 to 64. The younger cohort simply benefited from a more advanced educational system associated with greater economic development in recent decades as clearly documented by Treiman (2013). By not being broken down by cohort, Lee and Zhou’s (2015: 30) statistics on the hyper-selectivity are exaggerated.

Developing societies are often characterized by regional segmentation between the major metropolitan centers and the more traditional and poorer, less developed rural areas. In the case of China, this regional segmentation is codified and exacerbated by law and is well known as the hukou (i.e. 户口) household registration system (Liu and Xie, 2015). Due to this system, children of Chinese parents who migrate to urban areas outside of their state of birth cannot legally attend public schooling in the urban area of their parents” current residence or place of work. The availability of public schooling is restricted to persons in the province of their official hukou household registration (Wu, 2019).

For example, if a migrant worker is employed in Shanghai (a highly developed city in eastern China) but was born in Qinghai (a less developed province in western China), then the worker’s children cannot attend a public school in Shanghai. They are instead restricted to attending public schools in Qinghai. Although they are legally allowed to attend a private school in Shanghai, the costs of doing so are typically exorbitant for the average migrant. Persons without a Shanghai hukou face a more restricted housing market in Shanghai, which is already extraordinarily expensive. Although China may be an extreme case, regional segmentation in educational systems is common in developing nations (Fägerlind and Saha, 2016). Lee and Zhou’s (2015: 30) statistics on the hyper-selectivity of Asian immigrants are exaggerated because they implicitly assume that everyone in a given country has been engaged in the same educational competition with everyone else in the entire nation.

Another problem with Zhou and Lee’s (2017) statistical portrayal is that it overlooks the implications of the fact that most Asian immigrants obtained their college or university education in the United States (despite being casually acknowledged by Lee and Zhou (2015: 30)). After having completed high school in Asia, many Asian immigrants came to the United States to attend college or obtain a graduate degree. Kim and Sakamoto (2010) refer to this group as the “1.25 generation” and analyze their distinctive labor market outcomes. The significance of the 1.25 generation for Zhou and Lee’s (2017) educational statistics is that most foreign-born Asians did not have such a high level of education at the time that they emigrated from Asia to the United States.

Using data from the 2017 National Survey of College Graduates, the percentage of the 1.25 generation of foreign-born Asians may be ascertained based on information about where they attended high school and college or university. These data reveal that among foreign-born Asians aged 25 and older who have a college degree, about 43% are 1.25 generation (results available upon request). Although foreign-born, the 1.5 generation immigrated to the United States at a young age and were therefore schooled primarily there (Kim and Sakamoto, 2010; Rumbaut, 2004). According to the 2017 National Survey of College Graduates, the 1.5 generation comprises 24% of foreign-born Asians aged 25 and older who have college degrees. Therefore, only 33% of foreign-born Asians with college degrees (i.e. 100% − 43% − 24%) did not receive any educational degree in the United States (Kim and Sakamoto (2010) refer to this group as the 1.0-generation).

Because most Asian immigrants with college degrees (i.e. two-thirds) received their highest degree in the U.S., they were simply availing themselves of the greater opportunities of the American educational system. Most Asian immigrants were not actually so highly educated at the time that they emigrated to the United States, as indicated by the statistics discussed by Lee and Zhou (2015: 30), Tran et al. (2019: 9-10), and Zhou and Lee (2017: 8). Indeed, data from the 2017 National Survey of College Graduates indicate that 40% of the Asian 1.25 generation have fathers who did not have a college degree (i.e. they are not from elite families).

If Asian immigrants were really so selective and privileged, then one would expect their children to score notably higher on standardized international exams than the Asian children in their respective countries of origin (who are supposedly not selective at all but rather are those with lower educational capacities and performances). Hauser (2020) considers data on several standardized international test scores on reading, math and science. He breaks down the data by racial categories in the United States and reports that, for recent cohorts of students, average test scores for Asian Americans are usually higher than those for white Americans. Contrary to the hyper-selectivity explanation, the average test scores for Asian Americans tend to be similar to the averages observed in East Asian countries.² If anything, Asian American average test scores in high school math—although high by overall American standards—actually tend to be a little lower than in East Asia, probably because those countries place greater emphasis on that subject.³

Drawing conclusions about educational attainment while ignoring horizontal stratification

Zhou and Lee’s (2017) and Lee and Zhou’s (2015) characterization of hyper-selectivity ignores the theoretical significance of educational stratification in East Asian countries. Those countries are famously very status-oriented in terms of evaluating educational credentials (Hannum et al., 2019). Horizontal sources of education stratification are extremely important (in contrast with the traditionally greater emphasis in the United States on the vertical dimension of highest level completed). Prestige is a primary factor in determining the associated lifetime rewards that are conferred by graduating from a particular university in Asia.

For example, a graduate from the University of Tokyo (i.e. the most prestigious university in Japan) has a much higher chance than other college graduates of becoming a Member of Parliament, a high-ranking executive in a major corporation, or a well-paid, successful professional in law or medicine (Reischauer and Jansen, 1995; Sakamoto and Powers, 1995). Graduates from prestigious universities also have much greater success in the marriage market (Reischauer and Jansen, 1995). In order to be successfully admitted to a prestigious university, however, Japanese students typically must, from an early age, undergo long hours of additional study at afterschool “cram schools” (known in Japanese as juku or 塾).

East Asian educational systems are famous for their highly rigorous college-entrance exams (e.g. Bray and Lykins, 2012; Lee and Zhou, 2015: 75; Liu, 2015; Reischauer and Jansen, 1995). High-achieving students must prepare at a “cram school” (known in Chinese as a buxiban or 补习班, which is itself a lucrative business industry) over the course of many years if they are to be successfully admitted to a prestigious university (e.g. University of Tokyo, Peking University, Seoul National University, National Taiwan University, National University of Singapore). Many students study full-time at “cram schools” after completing high school but before entering college (e.g. the so-called “masterless samurai” or rōnin in Japan) in order to improve their college-entrance exam scores in a subsequent year.

Students who have spent many long hours of study for years during most of their youth in order to score higher on college-entrance exams (e.g. the gaokao or 高考 in China) do not necessarily discard the associated career rewards from graduating from a top university in their own country in order to emigrate to work in the United States. These prestigious credentials are highly prized if not glorified in their own status-oriented countries but are generally ignored and economically unrewarded in the US labor market (Kim and Sakamoto, 2010; Zeng and Xie, 2004). Tran et al.’s (2019) and Lee and Zhou’s (2015) characterization of Asian immigrants is exaggerated in that many successful educational elites choose to remain in their countries of origin. They are unlikely to jettison the attractive returns to their lifelong educational investments in college prestige by emigrating to the United States in order (for example) to start up an arduous small business in a low-wage industry such as a noodle shop or a hair salon.

Field of study and college prestige seem to be increasing in significance in the United States labor market as well (Kim and Sakamoto, 2010; Kim et al., 2015). A bachelor’s degree in many STEM fields actually yields higher lifetime earnings than a graduate degree in many non-STEM areas (Kim et al., 2015). As is well-known, Asian Americans are over-represented in prestigious American universities and in higher-paying STEM-related fields of study (Kim and Sakamoto, 2010; Wang et al., 2017; Zhou and Lee, 2017). For this reason, the claims made by Zhou and Lee (2017: 10), Tran et al. (2019: 11-12), and Lee and Zhou (2015: 31-33) about Asian intergenerational mobility are often simplistic because their statistics are based on educational level, ignoring horizontal educational stratification.

Regarding field of study, a second-generation Asian American with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from MIT or Stanford has much greater career and earnings prospects than someone with a master’s degree in history or anthropology from a small state college. Considering intergenerational mobility only in terms of educational level, Lee and Zhou (2015: 43) emphasize that “the children of Mexican immigrants exhibit the greatest educational gains” in comparison to Chinese and Vietnamese, and “the children of Mexican immigrants are more successful than those of Chinese immigrants” (Zhou and Lee, 2017: 10). However, when the focus is shifted to intergenerational income mobility, Asian Americans have extremely high rates of rising out of the bottom quintile as children and attaining the highest income quintile as adults. As stated by Chetty et al. (2020: 736), “Asians have much higher rates of relative mobility than all other groups.” More specifically, Chetty et al. (2020: 730) report that 26% of Asians born to parents in the lowest income quintile obtain individual incomes in the highest income quintile compared to 3% for African Americans, 7% for Hispanics, and 11% for whites. The much higher intergenerational income mobility for Asian Americans is facilitated by their greater concentration in STEM fields of study and prestigious colleges (Xie and Goyette, 2003), although these factors are not considered in the mobility statistics in Zhou and Lee (2017), Tran et al. (2019), and Lee and Zhou (2015).

Intergenerational mobility depends on family processes which are partly cultural

Family processes and resources have been recognized as critically important aspects of student achievement (Hanushek, 2016; Sewell et al., 1969). In the case of Asian Americans, Goyette and Xie (1999) demonstrate that Asian American parents tend to have extremely high educational expectations for their children, which improves test score achievement. Every study based on data from probability samples similarly finds that Asian Americans have, on average, higher academic aspirations than other groups (Hsin and Xie, 2014; Kao, 1995; Kao and Tienda, 1998; Liu and Xie, 2016; Xie and Goyette, 2003), which is entirely consistent with decades of qualitative studies reaching similar conclusions (e.g. Caudill and De Vos, 1956; Jiménez and Horowitz, 2013; Kasinitz et al., 2008; Kitano, 1976; Lee and Zhou, 2015; Petersen, 1966; Schneider and Lee, 1990) . The higher levels of educational attainment along with their chosen fields of study result in higher levels of income and occupational attainment among Asian Americans (Kim and Sakamoto, 2010; Sakamoto and Hsu, 2020; Wang et al., 2017; Xie and Goyette, 2003).

Asian American parents make greater investments in promoting their children’s education (Sun, 1998). They spend more money for their children’s educational expenses, including supplemental educational activities (Lee and Zhou, 2015: 74–75). Asian American parents save more for their children’s college education (Sun, 1998: 441). The amount saved is even more pronounced when calculated in terms of the proportion of total family income (Sun, 1998: 443). Asian American parents are more disciplined about educational development and Asian American children study more hours per week, which greatly enhances their chances of enrolling in college (Hsin and Xie, 2014; Stankov, 2010). Asian American parents are less likely to get divorced, in part because they believe that doing so would be detrimental to their children; parents do not suddenly suspend their values when deciding whether to divorce (Sakamoto and Kim, 2018; Sakamoto et al., 2012; Sun, 1998). Consistent with that view, recent research finds that even basic measures of family structure (i.e. growing up in a two-parent family versus a single-parent family) have important mediating effects on intergenerational income mobility (Bloome, 2017; Harding and Munk, 2020).

Compared to women in other racial and ethnic groups in the United States, including whites, Asian American women who become mothers do so at a significantly older median age, when they tend to be more educated, more financially secure, and more emotionally mature. Compared to women in other American groups, Asian American women have fewer children, and these children are much more likely to be marital births (Cai and Morgan, 2019). In addition to being more likely to have their own two biological parents, Asian American children benefit from being more likely to have the supplementary adult supervision of grandparents in their home (Raley et al., 2019), who help to provide quality childcare as well as to instill more traditional Asian values (Tam and Detzner, 1998).

Consistent with many Asian cultures (at least in comparison to the United States), the social psychology of Asian American families involves more interdependency and less individualism (Buchtel et al., 2018; Caudill and De Vos, 1956; Caudill and Plath, 1974; Doi, 2001; Kitano, 1976; Sakamoto et al., 2012; Sakamoto and Kim, 2018; Kim et al., 2019). Second-generation Asian Americans are typically socialized to consider their self-esteem not as an a priori right, but more as a reward that is contingent upon contributing to the status of the family which, in the contemporary world, typically includes excellent educational achievement (Buchtel et al., 2018; Tao and Hong, 2014). In contrast, given its individualistic cultural ethos, mainstream American childrearing focuses more on promoting independence, autonomy, and fostering the child’s “true self” to ensure her happiness regardless of whether doing so optimizes her educational achievement or long-term socioeconomic status (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Sakamoto et al., 2012).⁴

Due to more interdependent family relations, Asian American children are more sensitive to pleasing their parents because Asian American children are less emotionally independent from their parents” judgments (Asakawa, 2001; Nisbett, 2004; Stewart et al., 1999). It is not really harsh discipline by itself that matters for Asian American educational attainment (cf., Chua, 2011) but rather the higher educational expectations of Asian parents when combined with more interdependent childrearing practices (Kim et al., 2019). Asian parents are thereby able to more successfully transmit their educational expectations to the children’s educational behaviors (Asakawa and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Goyette and Xie, 1999; Hsin and Xie, 2014).

Although recognizing the existence of high academic expectations and some family investment behaviors (Lee and Zhou, 2015: 70–75; Zhou and Lee, 2017: 11–12), Zhou and Lee inadequately consider the theoretical significance and causal import of Asian American family structures and processes. Zhou and Lee (2017), Tran et al. (2019) and Lee and Zhou (2015) dismiss the Asian American family as an independent source of agency by implying that it is entirely derived from hyper-selectivity and its corollary, so-called “ethnic capital” (Zhou and Lee, 2017: 11). The latter seems to refer most clearly to supplemental educational services that are available and used by many Asian Americans, and the cultural “success frames and achievement mind-sets” which characterize many Asian Americans. By referring to the high value placed on academic achievement as community-level “ethnic capital,” Lee and Zhou are ignoring the primary role of Asian American families and childrearing practices in instilling high educational aspirations in second-generation Asian American youth in the first place (Sakamoto and Kim, 2018). The direct causal processes reflecting greater Asian parental investments (both social and economic) in their own children to enhance their educational outcomes are instead asserted to be characteristics of a vague, broader “community” (without any clear geographic definition) that is supposedly somehow infused with “ethnic capital” due to hyper-selectivity.

Contrary to Zhou and Lee’s (2017: 11) discussion, supplemental educational services are not primarily “ethnic capital” given the fact that they are widely available in various forms to all racial and ethnic groups (e.g. from free video clips on YouTube to private one-to-one tutoring). Asian American youth are more likely than other groups to take commercial SAT test preparation courses that are not specifically oriented to any particular ethnicity (Byun and Park, 2012). As noted by Sakamoto (2017), Lee and Zhou’s (2015: 74–75) emphasis on supplemental educational services in their study of Los Angeles county (see also Zhou and Lee, 2017: 9) “overlooks the fact that second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese have high levels of educational achievement in smaller cities (such as College Station, Texas) where Chinese and Vietnamese supplementary schooling services do not exist” (p. 2012).

Lee and Zhou (2015: 49) assert that the high educational attainment of second-generation Asian Americans “is not happenstance … it is a product of the historic changes in U.S. immigration law in 1965 to give preference to applicants with high levels of education and skills.” That immigration law is said to give rise to hyper-selectivity which supposedly underlies the “ethnic capital” that leads to the high educational attainment of second-generation Asian Americans (Zhou and Lee, 2017: 8). “The change in U.S. immigration law has resulted in the hyper-selectivity of Chinese immigration” (Lee and Zhou, 2015: 49).

However, as shown in the demographic and educational statistics in Hirschman and Wong’s (1986) article, “The Extraordinary Educational Attainment of Asian-Americans,” second-generation Asian Americans had high levels of educational attainment well before 1965. Overall Asian American educational attainment exceeded that of whites in 1959 (Iceland, 2019). In the case of adult second-generation Chinese Americans and adult second-generation Japanese Americans, their educational attainment exceeded that of whites as early as 1940 (Hirschman and Wong, 1986; Petersen, 1966; Sakamoto et al., 1998), long before the selectivity of more highly educated Asian immigrants in recent years.⁵ As stated by Sakamoto (2017: 2012), “Indeed, throughout various times of the 20th century, second-generation Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese seem to have achieved higher levels of educational attainment than the local populations in such diverse places as Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Peru, and the Netherlands.” While Asian immigration to the contemporary United States is probably somewhat more class selective than in the early part of the 20th century, we disagree with Lee and Zhou’s highly contrived argument that cultural factors do not play any significant role in the educational attainment of second-generation Asian Americans.

Zhou and Lee (2017: 12–13) discuss “stereotype promise” but do not present any hard evidence that such a stereotype can sustain the years of hard work and persistent study that typically underlie high levels of Asian American academic achievement (Hsin and Xie, 2014). Being used in an almost tautological manner, “stereotype” is not clearly defined as a term in the sociology of socioeconomic attainment. Before World War II, common portrayals of “Japanese American men as gardeners and Chinese American men as laundry workers” (Sakamoto et al., 2009) simply reflected the actual modal occupational distributions of those groups at that time. Those stereotypes no longer exist today because, in fact, Chinese and Japanese American are no longer employed in those jobs in any appreciable numbers. Second-generation Asian Americans were very high achieving in education before World War II (Hirschman and Wong, 1986; Sakamoto et al., 1998; Model, 2020) despite negative stereotypes about these groups being widespread during that era (Wu, 2003). As discussed by Zhou and Lee (2017: 8), the so-called “model minority stereotype” did not arise until the 1960s. Finally, Zhou and Lee (2017) and Lee and Zhou (2015) do not explain why “ethnic capital” and “stereotype promise” do not affect second-generation Cambodians, Hmong, and Laotians who have lower levels of educational attainment (Model, 2020; Sakamoto and Woo, 2007) and who tend to have phenotypes that are very similar to those of Vietnamese (who are also of Southeast Asian origin).

Portraying second-generation Asian Americans as being without a cultural heritage

Mainstream white Americans often understand the United States as being based on individuals with inalienable civil rights and freely negotiated contractual agreements. Americans value “equal opportunity” for individuals to compete and achieve their desires, whatever they may be. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” seem to well represent some of the core values for much of contemporary American society, which glorifies freedom that promotes individualism (Bellah et al., 2007; De Tocqueville, 2003).

Asian immigrants were socialized in Asia, however, which often have more collectivist cultural traditions. In collectivist cultures in Asia, glorifying individual freedoms is less salient relative to performing expected duties for family and society (Buchtel et al., 2018; Nisbett, 2004). Collectivist family values encourage children to enhance the status of their family rather than prioritize their own individual happiness (Tao and Hong, 2014). Asians emphasize the extrinsic benefits more than whites, for whom individual fulfilment plays a larger role (Jiménez and Horowitz, 2013). Asian Americans are thus more likely to enter STEM fields of study which provide more lucrative career rewards (Xie and Goyette, 2003).

Asian parents invest more financially in their children’s education (Lee and Zhou, 2015; Sun, 1998), but the high level of Asian American educational attainment is also partly a cultural phenomenon, as is carefully analyzed by Liu and Xie (2016). Collectivist Asian values and norms about childrearing, family, and educational attainment reflect the Asian context of limited educational opportunity and a stratified labor market. In the United States, with its greater educational opportunity, however, Asian values and norms result in Asian American educational attainment exceeding whites.

Relabeling values and norms prioritizing educational attainment in Asian American families (Hsin and Xie, 2014; Kim et al., 2019; Liu and Xie, 2016; Sakamoto and Kim, 2018; Sun, 1998) as “achievement mind-sets” (Lee and Zhou, 2015: 6) and the “success frame” (Zhou and Lee, 2017: 9) does not transform them into “structural variables” or “ethnic capital” nor does it negate their fundamentally cultural character, despite Lee and Zhou’s (2015: 20) claim to “debunk the popularly held myths about cultural traits.” Zhou and Lee’s (2017) extensive discussion of the “success frame” is inherently cultural in showing the strong commitment and various behaviors that Asian American parents have in regard to promoting their children’s educational attainment. Referring to that commitment and those behaviors as “ethnic capital” does not neutralize the fact that those characteristics refer to parents” activities in regard to only their own children, and not to other children in the “community”.⁶

Asian cultural characteristics associated with many Asian American families tend to increase the educational attainment of Asian American children even among many from low-income and working-class backgrounds (Hsin and Xie, 2014; Lee and Zhou, 2015; Liu and Xie, 2016; Model, 2020; Sakamoto et al., 2009). Every study that has investigated parent-offspring matched data over the past several decades finds that socioeconomic control variables (i.e. parental education and household income) do not explain away the higher educational attainment of Asian Americans (Hauser, 2020; Liu and Xie, 2016; Model, 2020; Sakamoto et al., 2009). Class effects on educational attainment are thus smaller for Asian Americans (Hauser, 2020), and “this is especially evident at lower levels of SES [socioeconomic status]” (Liu and Xie, 2016: 210). Lee and Zhou’s (2015) characterization of Asian American educational attainment as being intrinsically “class-specific” is exaggerated. On the contrary, ethnic cultural factors that largely cut across class characteristics are critical variables for most second-generation Asian American groups (Model, 2020).

A detailed analysis of educational achievement in China finds that socioeconomic control variables do not have such strong effects as in the United States (Liu and Xie, 2015). In China, “family income is significantly associated with children’s achievement, but family assets and direct measures of monetary resources are found to have little effect … non-monetary resources, particularly parenting, are of great importance to children’s achievement … and parenting practices do not vary greatly by family economic resources” (Liu and Xie, 2015: 59). Contrary to being “middle-class-specific,” SES has little net effect on educational achievement among Chinese just as it does among Chinese Americans.

Zhou and Lee’s (2017) emphasis that Asian American educational achievement is inherently a “middle-class-specific” phenomenon oddly contradicts their own repeated statements about even “poor and working-class” Asian Americans having higher-than-expected educational attainment (e.g. Lee and Zhou, 2015: 30) so that “the child of [Asian American] restaurant employees or factory workers knows how to gain admission into the country’s top universities” (Lee and Zhou, 2017: 12). Or, as Tran et al. stated (2019: 5), “Hyper-selectivity helps to boost opportunities and outcomes in ways that defy the status attainment model and explain why the daughter of Chinese immigrants whose parents have only an elementary school education, work in ethnic restaurants, and live among working-class co-ethnics is able to soar past her parents and graduate from Harvard.” Lee and Zhou (2015: 6) do not explain why purportedly “class-specific cultural institutions, frames, and mind-sets” so readily and heavily influence lower-income Asian Americans as compared to other groups such as lower-income African Americans, lower-income Hispanics, and lower-income whites who have ample opportunity (being demographically larger subpopulations) to interact with and observe their own wealthier co-ethnics.

Remembering their more constrained upbringings compared to those of their white peers, however, second-generation Asian Americans probably become (as parents) more mainstream American in their own childrearing practices, especially when they inter-marry with other racial groups. Cultural influences are probably weaker in the educational attainment of third-and-higher generation Asian Americans (Sakamoto et al., 2009). Accordingly, the intergenerational income mobility patterns of third generation Asian Americans more closely resemble those of mainstream whites (Chetty et al., 2020). This pattern underscores the cultural aspect of second-generation Asian American educational attainment because by the third generation, substantial cultural assimilation into mainstream American society has occurred (despite the supposedly continuing existence of hyper-selectivity, “ethnic capital,” and “stereotype promise”).

The higher educational attainment of second-generation Asian Americans does not prove that the United States is a perfect meritocracy or that no discrimination exists against Asian Americans or other groups. But it does indicate that educational aspirations do matter and that significant socioeconomic opportunity certainly does exist both in the American educational system and the labor market at least for Asian Americans.⁷ Lee and Zhou (2015: 3) associate socioeconomic opportunity with being politically conservative when it is explained in terms of “culturally essential arguments” which are claimed to promote “a neoconservative policy paradigm” (Lee and Zhou, 2015: 12; see also Zhou and Lee, 2017: 8). Perhaps hyper-selectivity may seem less “neoconservative,” but a puzzling intellectual tension is inherent in claiming that the extraordinarily high upward socioeconomic mobility of lower-income Asian Americans (Chetty et al., 2020) is nonetheless still a “middle-class-specific” phenomenon (Sakamoto, 2017).

Conclusion: The “hyper-selectivity” of exactly what?

Zhou and Lee (2017) and their colleagues have published several articles arguing for hyper-selectivity (Lee and Zhou, 2015; Tran et al., 2018; Tran et al., 2019), but these publications are repetitive. They do not extend or elaborate the details of their theory but rather only reiterate its basic rhetoric. Hyper-selectivity as indicated by the difference in the percentages of different groups who have bachelor’s degrees does not clarify what that measure is analytically representing at the family and individual levels. Parents with more education may simply have greater educational aspirations for their children. Perhaps those parents have higher levels of cognitive skill. Such parents might more highly value the long-term benefits of education for their children (Hofstede and Minkov, 2010). Simply reiterating a simplistic statistical measure does not adequately explain what hyper-selectivity analytically represents.

In conclusion, Zhou and Lee’s (2017) and Lee and Zhou’s (2015) description of hyper-selectivity suggests that most Asian immigrants are extraordinary educational elites who must be extremely wealthy or class-privileged in the first place. The high level of educational attainment among second-generation Asian Americans is described as being primarily “middle-class-specific” reproduction rather than genuine upward socioeconomic mobility. The cultural characteristics of Asian American families are thereby obfuscated because Asian American educational attainment is asserted to mechanically derive from “middle-class-specific” hyper-selectivity that is supposedly embedded in “ethnic capital”.

In the foregoing, the limitations and ambiguities of Zhou and Lee’s (2017) and Lee and Zhou’s (2015) measure of hyper-selectivity have been critically analyzed. While we agree that Asian immigrants are often selective in some ways and probably more so in the contemporary period, Zhou and Lee’s (2017) hyper-selectivity is poorly conceptualized and simplistically measured. It ignores other relevant findings from prior research, especially in regard to Asian American family processes that relate to cultural factors. Rather than being essentially a class phenomenon, Asian cultural factors have important effects for most second-generation Asian Americans. Contrary to Zhou and Lee’s (2017) discussion, “ethnic capital” is largely a spurious aggregate characteristic deriving from Asian American family processes while “stereotype promise” is mostly speculative or even tautological. Overemphasizing hyper-selectivity inadequately acknowledges the cultural heritage of Asian Americans and dismisses the agency of Asian American families. Implicitly portraying second-generation Asian Americans as being just the same as elite, rich white Americans ultimately obscures more than it explains in regard to educational attainment in the United States (Kim et al., 2019).

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The research assistance of Li Hsu is gratefully acknowledged. All opinions stated herein are the sole responsibility of the authors.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Arthur Sakamoto

Notes

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