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ABSTRACT
Scholars assume that Asian Americans’ emphasis on education is due to immigrant parents’ own experiences with intense education when young and concerns about their children’s social mobility in the United States. This article reopens the question by considering Indian immigrants who prioritize academics for their children, including extracurricular academics. Contrary to common assumption, education is not these immigrants’ top priority. Instead, they are responding to and motivated by a sense of intense competition, in which their children must stand out among peers. Asian immigrant parents choose education as the best venue in which to make their children competitive. They demonstrate a minority culture of mobility, performed as a distinct style of concerted cultivation.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Associate Professor Natasha Warikoo for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Notes
1. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/professional-burdens-model-minority-asian-americans/485492/; http://www.education.com/reference/article/unraveling-minority-myth-asian-students/ .
3. Cram schools are taken for granted as an ethnic ploy to achieve this frame. As Vivian Louie (Citation2004) also finds, educational achievement has become synonymous with Asian America, so much so that Asian Americans who do not achieve as highly as they perceive other Asian Americans to can dis-identify with their ethnic group. You are not really Asian unless you do well in school. Cram and ethnic-language schools provide a context within which people are around their co-ethnics and support their commitment to education. While noted as important, more scholarship should focus on these cram schools (Shrake Citation2010). Our understanding of these cram schools in the United States remains limited.
6. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/. It is important to recognize concerns about the Pew Social Survey on Asian Americans, as articulated here: http://www.colorlines.com/articles/asian-americans-respond-pew-were-not-your-model-minority. In a nutshell, the Pew Social Survey portrays Asian Americans as almost uniformly successful and assimilating, but it has not captured or downplays groups who do not fit that profile, such as many Southeast Asians, the undocumented within Asian America, and more.
9. http://www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2015/cb15-ff07.html (margin of error $12,482).
10. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/acs/acsbr13-02.pdf ($65 over 12 month period) The State of Asian American Pacific Islander Series, Center for American Progress and Asian American Pacific Islander Data has Indian Americans’ median household income at $95,000, and the total population median household income at $53,046, as of 2014. http://aapidata.com/infographic-aapi-median-income-2014/.
12. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2015 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates.
13. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2015 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates.
16. After-school learning centers, and supplemental education generally, are more popular in other countries than in the United States, but the trends are growing in the United States (Park, Buchmann, Choi, and Joseph 2016). Little is known about why parents pursue them for young children.
17. Source: U.S. Census Bureau: State and County QuickFacts. Data derived from Population Estimates, American Community Survey, Census of Population and Housing, State and County Housing Unit Estimates, County Business Patterns, Nonemployer Statistics, Economic Census, Survey of Business Owners, Building Permits; Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010–2014 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates.
18. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/indian-immigrants-united-states; https://www.advancingjustice.org/pdf/Community_of_Contrast.pdf.
19. Although not necessarily tied to education levels or class status, Indian immigrants now account for the second highest number of unauthorized persons in the United States, often due to overstaying their visas. http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/2016/09/PH_2016.09.20_Unauthorized_FINAL.pdf.
21. In recent years the cap on H1B visas granted by Congress, which are commonly used by Indian immigrants, has been reached within days of the start date. http://www.wsj.com/articles/demand-for-skilled-worker-visas-exceeds-u-s-supply-in-5-days-1460061278.
22. For instance, the organization The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE), now with over 2,500 chapters worldwide, was started by and for Indian immigrants in information technology to find networks among themselves, in part because of a lack of other forms of social capital. http://tie.org/about-us/.
24. At the South Asian Spelling Bee finals in 2016, the emcee of the event interviewed a random selection of participants. He joked with the youth after a few of them listed reading as their favorite hobby, asking them to try to pick something else as a favorite pastime, which they struggled to do.
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Pawan Dhingra
Pawan Dhingra is Professor of Sociology and American Studies. He also is a former curator at the Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of the award-winning Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Stanford University Press, 2012), which has been profiled in National Public Radio, Philadelphia Inquirer, Colorlines Magazine, and elsewhere, and the award-winning Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (Stanford University Press, 2007). He co-authored, Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Polity Press 2014).