The New York Times
We found in “The Asian American Achievement Paradox”, which Min Zhou co-authored, that precollege students of Asian descent benefit from the “stereotype promise”. Teachers believe they are intelligent, hardworking, morally worthy, and can improve grades for academically poor Asian American students.
We’ll stop there. The coauthors attempt to explain the average educational success of “Asian Americans,” a classification that includes dozens of ethnic/national subgroups that have varying average degrees of educational success (including some that are below average), who live all over the United States, based on *162 interviews* with adults of various “racial” groups in one city, Los Angeles.
This book was awarded several awards. It’s amazing.
UPDATE – Perhaps the book has more depth. To give an overview of how different subgroups in Asian American education success are classified, we will take a look to UC Berkeley’s undergraduate matriculants.
California’s Indian American population is approximately 1.5%. 12.7% of Berkeley’s students are “South Asian,” predominantly Indian.
California has 3.5% Chinese Americans. Chinese make up 15.3% of Berkeley’s student body.
California boasts 2.5% Vietnamese American population. The Vietnamese make up 3.9% in Berkeley’s classes.
California boasts 3.2% Filipino American population. About 3.8% are Filipinos in Berkeley’s classes.
California has about 1.2% Korean Americans. 4.6% of Berkeley’s students are Korean.
California’s Japanese American population is approximately.7%. Japanese are 1.4% in Berkeley’s classes.
California has a mere.8% Pacific Islander population. Many Pacific Islanders get lumped into one AAPI group and are assumed to benefit from some of the same positive stereotypes as Asian Americans. Berkeley is one-tenth of 1% Pacific Islander.
You can see that while California’s larger Asian American communities do well on average, California’s stereotypes of exceptional Asian American education success are driven by Indians and Chinese who “overrepresent” their respective populations by around 8, 4.5 and 4, respectively.