Immigrant status and the social returns to academic achievement in adolescence

ABSTRACT

Social scientists have long debated whether high-achieving students of color are socially sanctioned. This discussion has rarely focused on immigrant students, who are exceptionally diverse in their educational performance and face challenges in social integration at school. This article assesses whether the effect of academic achievement on U.S. adolescents’ popularity among peers varies by immigrant status. Further, we investigate whether the same pattern holds for immigrant students across racial/ethnic groups. While theoretical frameworks led us to expect that some immigrant groups would be socially punished for their school achievement, we did not find evidence for a negative effect of achievement (GPA) on popularity (number of alters nominating ego as a friend) for any group. Instead, the effect of achievement on popularity is positive but smaller among second-generation and foreign-born students than among white students from native-born families. This social penalty is observed across Black and most Hispanic immigrant subgroups, applies to some Asian immigrant subgroups, and does not apply to white immigrant students.

KEYWORDS:

• Children of immigrants
• immigrant integration
• social integration
• academic achievement
• race and ethnicity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In this paper, we define immigrant children (or children from immigrant families / children of immigrants) as children who were born in the U.S. to at least one foreign-born parent or born outside the U.S. (Alba, Sloan, and Sperling 2011; Feliciano and Lanuza 2016; McMillan 2019). We define children from native families (or non-immigrant / third+ gen. children) as children who were born in the U.S. with U.S.-born parents.

2 U.S.-born students with only one parent are coded as non-immigrant if their parent was born in the U.S., and second-generation immigrant if the parent was born outside the U.S.

3 We tested five different specifications of GPA, including: GPA (as linear); GPA and GPA-squared; GPA, GPA-squared, and GPA-cubed; GPA, GPA-squared, GPA-cubed, and GPA to the fourth; and GPA divided into six intervals. We found the linear model to be the superior specification based on BIC.

4 GPA may also affect immigrant students’ popularity differently if immigrant students are less likely to participate in extracurricular activities. We did not include participation in extracurricular activities in our main analyses to avoid an overly large overcontrol bias (Elwert and Winship 2014). In a supplemental analysis (available upon request), we find that adding students’ participation in academic clubs, arts and culture clubs, sports teams, and student committees to the model did not change our main findings.

5 Although the Add Health cohort is older, its racial/ethnic composition is comparable to that of recent cohorts. In 2012-13, about 10% of youths from native-born families are Hispanic and about 1% are Asian; in comparison, about 55% of youths from immigrant families are Hispanic and about 16% are Asian (Enchautegui 2014).

6 Our estimates have wide confidence intervals, but we can generally rule out an effect of larger than -1.5 (i.e., a loss of 1.5 friendship nominations per point increase in GPA) for foreign-born Chinese students.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Institute on Aging: [Grant Number P30 AG017266]; National Institutes of Health: [Grant Number P2C HD047873].