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From the NYT:
Elite, Separate, Unequal
New York City’s Top Public Schools Need DiversityBy RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG JUNE 22, 2014
WASHINGTON — NEW YORK CITY’S elite public high schools were always meant to provide a quintessentially American blend of academic excellence and democratic accessibility. Unlike the city’s expensive private schools, they would be free and open to all who were academically qualified, irrespective of pedigree.
“You pass the test, you get the highest score, you get into the school — no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your economic background is,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in 2012. But this year, only 5 percent of seats at those eight schools were offered to black students and 7 percent to Latinos, in a city where the public schools are 70 percent black and Latino. At Stuyvesant High School, just 3 percent of offered seats this year went to black and Latino students.
Over the last six years, black enrollment at Stuyvesant has fallen from 2.0% to 1.0% and Hispanic enrollment from 3.0% to 2.3% (according to the official five meg School Demographics and Accountability Snapshot).
When the number of black and Latino students admitted to a public school is a tiny fraction of their share of the general population, it raises red flags about the fairness of the admissions system. … In his campaign for mayor, Bill de Blasio called for diversifying these schools.
What won’t white males do to oppress the vibrant?
The policy [devised by the author for putting a thumb on the scale] has resulted in far more racial and ethnic diversity than in New York City’s elite public schools. At Walter Payton, 21 percent of students are black and 25 percent are Latino. Some critics worry that these numbers are still inadequate in a public school system where 41 percent of students are black and 45 percent Latino. But compared with Stuyvesant, Payton is a multicultural paradise. …
New York City schools have never been subject to a citywide desegregation suit, and the state’s schools are now more segregated than Mississippi’s. But the unfortunate reality of segregation can be leveraged to promote a positive outcome in the city’s elite schools. Isn’t it time for New York City’s top schools to recognize that excellence can be found among students of all racial and economic backgrounds?
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the author of “The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action.”
Yet, over the last six years, whites at Stuyvesant have fallen from 30.1% to 21.7%, as Asians have grown from 64.7% to 73.2%.
The missing word in this oped is … “Asian.”
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
If they fill up good schools with bad students, they will become bad schools, and good students will go to private school.
There is more segregation in NYC than Mississippi because the whites in NYC can afford private school.
White oppression is a lie. What is section 8, unemployment, disability, EMTALA, WIC, food stamps, but reparation? And it has all been squandered, and thanks to the stranglehold leftists have on elementary and middle school education, every person in the United States is indoctrinated with the “Whites are evil” mantra, the same as “2+2=5”.
When the USA is a 3rd world country, whites will be to blame, of course.
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot [an asian one] stamping on a human face – forever.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/iq.htm
It’s nice to see Steve’s influence growing amongst the pundits and hopefully filtering out from there.
A post at Instapundit today:
IMMIGRATION BRINGS VIBRANCY TO SWEDEN: Swedish health authorities discover every girl in one class had undergone genital mutilation: report. We can learn so much from other cultures, which have different values than ours. “Of the 60, nearly half of the girls had undergone the most extreme form of female circumcision, in which the clitoris and labia are cut off and the vagina is sewn up to leave just a small opening. . . . A common practice is for immigrant parents to take their young girls to their home country, where the ritual is performed. Most often it is done with a razor blade or a knife, and without anesthesia.”
“Isn’t it time for New York City’s top schools to recognize that excellence can be found among students of all racial and economic backgrounds?”
Hurrah! That’s certainly never been considered. Paging Dr. Sysiphus.
What’s missing is the word “IQ” not “Asian”.
But compared with Stuyvesant, Payton is a multicultural paradise. …
Payton is a multicultural hell (FIFY)
NY area Asian Americans strike me as poorer, more liberal, less assimilated, and less organized that California Asians. They don’t seem to care their elite public schools are going to start adopting an anti Asian policies. They quickly killed a bill to restore anti Asian affirmative action programs.
LA area congresswoman Judy Chu also outmuscled multiple Hispanics to win and hold a seat in Congress where Hispanics outnumber Asians 2-1.
Actually they do not mention the White percentage, which was probably cut in half. I would be curious how Jews are doing, or are they declining in numbers like generic Whites. Stuyvesant is also very close to New York’s traditional Chinatown (I say traditional as there are now a gaggle of Chinatowns) so a large number of students with Chinese ancestry is not unreasonable.
California’s Supreme Court has 3.5 Asians and one Hispanic, again despite a 2-1 numerical disparity the other way.
The half Asian looks extremely white, I had no idea until I read her retirement announcement.
I think all the Swedes with aggressive personalities became Vikings and left the gene pool, or got killed in Sweden’s ill-advised invasion of Russia.
A lot of Viking types also became mercenaries, then settled down with local girls elsewhere in Europe.
Nobody has ever wanted to invade or immigrate to Sweden until after the post WWII boom and welfare state creation. Before that it was poor, cold, and hard to farm, excepting a very tiny number of Jews who never numbered more than a couple thousand. Rather it has spent so long exporting people, the people ever developed the distrust needed of hordes of penniless foreigners.
The Romans got as far as southern Denmark in a few punitive or exploratory expeditions, but did not see the point of going any further. The chuck of western Germania they had taken over never produced any wealth for them.
I knew the answer before I read the piece.
Try walking across the campus of UC Berkeley some time — it does not look like part of America anymore. And of course UCLA has for some time been colloquially known as ‘University of Caucasians Lost among Asians’. But no one cares about that because it’s Whites who’ve born the brunt of that race replacement.
By the same author in the WSJ last year: A Fresh Chance to Rein in Racial Preferences
A more emphatic endorsement of race-neutral alternatives in Schuette would reinforce Fisher. In a society where unequal opportunity is increasingly associated with class rather than race, a strong ruling in Schuette could move the country toward affirmative action that helps the truly disadvantaged.
He seems to believe, or wants us to believe, that race has nothing to do with class. So if we have affirmative action policies based on what he calls class rather than race, we’ll get diversity that no one can claim is based on racial preferences.
Such a clever guy.
In NYC Latinos (a mix of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and, more recently, Mexicans) are now about 25% of the population, while Asians are about 12%. At elite Stuyvesant HS (admission by exam only), Asians are now 75% of the entering class, while Latinos are about 2%. Try to imagine the income inequality that will result once this mixed population of Asians (Mostly Ivy League bound after Stuyvesant and Bronx Science) and Latinos (50% HS dropouts and bound for low wage manual labor) hits the job market. Of course no one will notice that mass immigration is the primary driver of income inequality as median incomes slog through yet another decade of stagnation, because that would be nativist, which is really just another form of racism.
And if you think that the Asians (and Whites!) will altruistically mix with the Latinos (and Blacks!) just to lower the Gini index, guess again. Fancy upper middle class enclaves like SOHO and Brooklyn Heights have been ethnically cleansed of Latinos (and Blacks!) and the NY Times is happy to report that the NYC schools are among the most “segregated” in the country (Provided we agree that Asians are Whites and Latinos are Blacks, that way we can use the off the shelf language of Brown vs. Board of Education and won’t have to think about what our immigration policies are doing to our society). Of course, NYC has about the highest Gini index in the country (topped only by DC, natch). Nevertheless, tony districts like SOHO and Brooklyn Heights went about 80/20 for Obama in ’08 and ’12. It’s almost like they’re hypocrites or something.
Who knows maybe the democrats will keep pushing quotas on selective educational institutions and thereby weaken, if not break, the voting coalition of Asians and Latinos, America’s premier electoral odd couple. In the case of Stuyvesant, more than 80% of the Asians would have to be sent packing in order to make room for “equally qualified” Latinos, Blacks, and Whites (who believe it or not are just 22% of the entering class rather than their population share of 33%). I think it’s only fair that Chuck Shumer be the one to break the bad news to them.
Don’t know how suddenly Sweden became the topic of the conversation but here we go. I am Swedish and just like everyone else with half a brain I will be looking for more news about the Somali girls. We had a major holiday here(Midsummer) so maybe it was a mistake it was published. Now when the normal editors are back this will likely be ignored just to prove that the multiculti-lovers don’t care about black kids.
Sorry Fredrick, I posted that to show how Steve’s use of the word “vibrancy,” is becoming part of the pundit lexicon.
IMHO, anyway.
Yeah, I knew the word that wasn’t being mentioned, too.
What’s interesting is that it’s clear many of the Asian kids getting high scores on both verbal and math don’t actually have the underlying skills. (Remember that many others do.)
I haven’t figured out yet how much of it is due to open cheating and how much of it is due to high test scores not being a proxy for intellect the way it is for whites and Hispanics.
That is, I don’t dispute that Asians have a slightly higher median IQ than whites. But I’m starting to wonder if high IQ means something different.
An interesting discussion at my site took place a while back where two commenters had the patience I lack to put it into words:
“In other words, the tests may be systematically over-predicting [Asian] actual cognitive abilities in some pretty significant ways even though they are not truly gaming it. Do not get me wrong. I am a believer in general intelligence (g) and I believe that cognitively loaded tests have real significant predictive validity for actual intelligence (especially when the n is large and randomly sampled), but it seems to me the claims that such tests are effectively immune to dramatic differences sustained behavioral differences are highly improbable (especially at the upper end of the ability distribution). These differences may not necessarily show themselves in differential validity tests (especially Freshman year GPA as reported by the college board) since they also capture willingness to work hard in the past too, which probably correlates reasonably well to freshman year at least, but I suspect they are still there. Moreover, I would not entirely dismiss the possibility that different groups may have different sorts of strengths in intelligence and that asians may have a form of it that shines especially in the more limited domain that they test for….”
second commenter:
“It’s the difference between someone who learns to play football and someone who learns how to do football practice drills. The point of, e.g., running through those tires is not to be the best tire-runner, the point is to develop agility and speed….In math-nerd terms, ER, it’s like you and I are saying that the test is NP-complete; that it’s possible for someone to create a “test-taking algorithm” and that this algorithm will return a correct solution set without performing the activity the test is supposed to require. ”
Leaving out the technical jargon, the Chinese and Koreans are definitely gaming and cheating tests overseas. When you read of recent Asian immigrants acing the NY tests despite limited English, it seems likely they’re doing the same thing over here.
A common practice is for immigrant parents to take their young girls to their home country[For FGM]
I’m sure it would be interesting to find out how many of those parents had arrived in Sweden as asylum seekers, fearing for their lives at home.
Wren – Sorry Fredrick, I posted that to show how Steve’s use of the word “vibrancy,” is becoming part of the pundit lexicon.
That’s good, that ‘vibrancy’ is becoming ironic. However I don’t think Steve was the first person to employ it that way. I would certainly exhort everyone here to use it only in that manner online and in conversation. Come on people, let’s make it a thing.
Same goes for ‘enriching diversity’.
Harrison Bergeron – Who knows maybe the democrats will keep pushing quotas on selective educational institutions and thereby weaken, if not break, the voting coalition of Asians and Latinos, America’s premier electoral odd couple.
Asians are not going to are not going to turn electorally conservative. At least not going by past performance. If they do break from the Democrats it will only because they are the political/electoral majority and they won’t be doing YT any favours at that point.
Interesting comments, Education Realist. I’ve lived in Hong Kong for many years (I’m a midwesterner of Dutch extraction) and have a lot of experience with education here. The drills-vs-playing the game analogy is not a bad fit for much of what I’ve seen.
There are lots of students here who excel in school, and even up through university, so long as they can ‘stay on the tracks’, i.e. study and think in a linear fashion. The problems start when they need to move on to associative thinking and grasping and applying abstract principles.
There’s no lack of people here who can do that kind of thinking, but I doubt their frequency is any greater than it was among the people I grew up with, and it may indeed be lower. But the main problem is that the rewards for ‘staying on the tracks’ are very high — or perhaps it’d be more accurate to say that the risks of being penalized for wandering off-track now and then are disproportionately onerous.
It is also hard for Americans to grasp how many hours students here put into their studies. The work ethic is astonishing. Just for fun, I often tell students (and their parents!) here that back in the Carter era when I was a kid I didn’t own a book bag until I was 14 or so, and I had no homework to speak of till my last year of high school, and then only sporadically. They look at me as if I were spontaneously combusting right before their eyes.
I’d be interested to know how those Asian students are doing compared to graduates in past generatons. Are they over-perfoming, under-performing, or doing about the same (in nobel prizes, Westinghouse winners, etc.)?
“a quintessentially American blend of academic excellence and democratic accessibility.”: my, how I laughed.
Looking at the numbers that you linked to, it’s interesting that while Asian enrollment rose from 65% to 73%, and black and hispanic enrollment fell from 5% to 3%, the proportion of students receiving free or reduced lunches increased from 33% to 47%. Are the Asians getting poorer or are they getting better at gaming the free lunch system?
Also, who are these “Other” whose numbers have grown so markedly in certain schools? Not Asian, black, hispanic or white, and it can’t be native Americans, so who’s left? Some new affirmative-action-worthy group?
“Nobody has ever wanted to invade or immigrate to Sweden until after the post WWII boom and welfare state creation. Before that it was poor, cold, and hard to farm, excepting a very tiny number of Jews who never numbered more than a couple thousand. Rather it has spent so long exporting people, the people ever developed the distrust needed of hordes of penniless foreigners.”
In Scandinavia it was more or less impossible to survive being poor, and if you look at archeological finds, Denmark and Scania has always been rich. Farming has never been that important in Scandinavia anyway, as animal husbandry and fishing was how most Scandinavians got their food. The Vikings used their grain to make beer, not bread. Needing to have boats to get food from the sea, and good houses to survive the winter, you also needed skilled carpenters, that again needed skilled smiths to make the tools, so Scandinavia has never been about tilling the earth.
Because of the winter, you also had a pretty low parasite load, and stuff like bedbugs, lice, etc was also simple to get rid of, as you just let your house freeze during a cold spell, while you visited family or neighbors.
Another point worth mentioning, also from archeological finds, is that we seem to have had more or less constant warfare since the bronze age. Those that chose to fight with their neighbor, rather than forget internal differences and band together, were conquered.
“The Romans got as far as southern Denmark in a few punitive or exploratory expeditions, but did not see the point of going any further. The chuck of western Germania they had taken over never produced any wealth for them.”
Swedens biggest export article have always been high quality iron, and relative cheap iron, can explain why so many areas experience an increased living standard when the Vikings pop up. The British and Irish went from living in wattle and daub round houses, to Scandinavian style houses within a generation, when trade and immigration with Scandinavia started.
This is the staff of Kahlenberg’s employer, The Century Foundation…
http://tcf.org/experts
The missing word at this factory of verbal garbage is HYPOCRITE
Any theories on why Asian public school students in NYC do so much better relative to whites than they do in Chicago? NYC public school population is 15% white vs 12% Asian and Stuy is 72% Asian vs 23% white. Chicago public school population is 8.5% white vs 3% Asian and the top 3 public schools referenced in the article are 30-35% white and 10-14% Asian.
Unlike NYC, Chicago’s admissions policy is not purely meritocratic, the crappier the area the student comes from, the lower the score he needs to get in, but since 2009, race can no longer be explicitly considered, so of course the Hispanic, and especially the black, share has declined since then. Whites’ and Asians’ shares rose at about the same rate. Since whites are probably a little less likely than Asians to live in low-income areas, and places with a lot of non-English speakers (which is worth bonus points), it doesn’t seem like the new system would benefit whites over Asians.
The ethnic mix of Asians in both cities is pretty similar. The whites are different; much more Jewish and substantially more Italian in NYC, much more German and Polish in Chicago, and a bit more Irish in Chicago, but, on balance, you would think that would favor NYC’s whites.
Perhaps NYC whites are much more likely to go to private schools, but given that NYC is 33% white vs a public school population that’s 15% white, while Chicago is 31% vs a public school system that’s 8.5%, that doesn’t appear likely. Despite having similar white shares overall, I’m open to the possibility that NYC’s population under age 18 is substantially whiter than Chicago’s, and that the white private school population in NYC is more elite than Chicago’s (most private school whites in Chicago probably just go to decent Catholic schools), but that still can’t be enough to make a difference; NYC’s population under 18 can’t be much more than 20% white, if that.
“It is also hard for Americans to grasp how many hours students here put into their studies. The work ethic is astonishing.”
The thing is, it’s not really a work ethic to master or understand the material, something that is almost entirely irrelevant. They just want the grade. And so yes, they work, but sometimes the work is establishing a good way to cheat, because that’s more reliable. Other times, it’s memorizing material without any interest in the material itself, or what it’s used for.
And yes, many are not like this, many are “bright” in the way we mean the word, and so on. I write about one in precalc and four in last year’s composition/enrichment class. There are many more.
McGillicuddy: Any theories on why Asian public school students in NYC do so much better relative to whites than they do in Chicago?
Guesses, not rising to the level of theories, because I don’t know anything about Chicago’s Asian population, and not much about NYCs:
Different ethnic mix of Asians – Vietnamese do reasonably well, but not as well as Chinese and Japanese. Cambodians do less well, especially since so many of the smarter ones were killed before the refugees made it to the U.S. So if Chicago has more Vietnamese or Cambodians (or Filipinos), the “Asian” population will do less well.
Even if most of the Asian population is Chinese, there may be differences within that population – the Chinese who came over to build the railroads were not elite by Chinese standards, while many of those coming over in the past 20 years are elite, or at least above average, by Chinese standards. So a population that’s primarily the descendants of coolies from the 19th century would be less smart than a population that’s primarily the descendants of people who could get out of China in the 1980s and 1990s.
Lastly, while Chicago is a go-getting place, NYC is brutally competitive, with commensurate rewards. It’s possible that there’s self-selection among Asians moving to the U.S., with the smartest and most ambitious more likely to choose NYC. New York, DC, SF, and LA get the elite from all over the U.S.; Chicago only gets the very top of the midwest.
My brother was accepted at Stuyvesant HS; but, because my father needed to live equidistant from NY – Philadelphia – Norfolk, VA in the early 70’s, he opted to move his family to the NJ coast…left Brooklyn for the Jersey Shore – home of Bell Labs, at the time, too. We excelled in public schools in Jersey and had thrived with tracking in mediocre Bklyn schools earlier…but some of you know that story.
What I will never understand (being raised by Finnish academicians & 46 (!) year green-card carriers; and, being steeped in Finnish culture) about the US, is this obsession to ignore or disdain the small group of high-intellectual-ability students in every state/town/school system. I think if Stuyvesant accepted 3% AA’s or 8% this or that, it should not matter. The majority of students at Stuyvesant are Asian, currently…and why does that matter? Why should American society be concerned about “too many Asians, not enough Latinos, not enough this, that… too much of that…” since this school has been known to take only the top 3% academic performers for as long as I remember? It is, after all, one of 2 public schools in Greater New York that was set-up to find those Einsteins of any race/ethnic group stuck in boring classes in primary school; classes that they were acing. It was really the job of the primary school teachers to recognize the gifted students and encourage them to apply to Stuyvesant. So, you took the test and rolled the dice.
Why does it matter, logically, if one ethnic group/race is more represented than others (at Stuyvesant..or I could insert Caltech) if they are all Americans – and, we will conceivably all benefit from their brilliance? I think it is important to find/encourage/nurture all geniuses and borderline-geniuses. Society needs the deepest thinkers; society needs the trailblazers; and, the most gifted should have a school where they can be amongst other high-intellectual-ability students- bullying would end for these kids stuck in district HS’s currently. We need more pull-out programs (schools would be nice) for gifted kids, not less. I don’t see this as some sort of moral dilemma; more like national economic survival.
I completely approve of intense tests of IQ, or whatever, to determine entry to a school like Stuyvesant. A student’s name, address, ethnicity and gender should be completely omitted, therefore, making it fair in my female brain. And, to make sure no one is gaming the test; give random, long and boring essays to test the students applying to StuyHigh about things like the meaning of the whale in Moby Dick, (or something like that) after reading a few chapters of the book (or any other classic.) Reading, critical thinking, and writing on demand about meanings, archetypes, foreshadowing, etc., in any given passage from a random classic, would force kids to cough-up their actual critical thinking skills/high literary ability, without the benefit of tutoring or cramming. Math ability is easier to assess, in that either you know the answer or you don’t. Random writing sections provoking deep literary thinking, would eliminate posers who might be good at math tests and multiple choice language arts tests, but can’t really think deeply, be innovative/creative, to save themselves. This is why firms in Silicon Valley still ask you for your HS SAT math score (below 700, fugedaboudid) even if you are over 50…and, especially, if you’re over 50.
I am so tired of people thinking that any teenager can do Calculus and write a dissertation about Hamlet. I believe it is just 3% (I’ll be charitable and say 10%) in every society, in every region in the world who could pass the entrance test to Stuyvesant. Why is it such a big deal if there are not equal parts of each ethnic/race group represented in the student body of Stuyvesant? Should we be most interested in nurturing as many innovators and exceedingly intelligent minds who aced the entrance exam? Shouldn’t there be schools where the most talented (raw score in math and raw score in language arts) children could be together? This is SO happening in other countries that the US competes with…much more Darwinian in their decisions about who gets to go to the toughest academic/highest achieving High Schools. Not everyone in UK gets into Cambridge or Imperial.
Kids in any given school know who the smartest kids are in their class/school/grade. They can sense it like vampires smell blood. It is really adults who still have so much trouble accepting that – hmmmm? – maybe because they are still bothered by the fact that they were not in that top 10%?.
And, I have traveled so much in this country (and elsewhere) where I have met remarkable teenagers (sticks of Nebraska, high deserts of Utah, mountains of Montana, Colorado, coasts of Alabama, Texas, North Carolina, almost all 50 states) of all races and ethnic groups who are within this 3-5%. The sad part is, the rural kids, in particular, who are bright, have fewer options for high ability HS education (or elite Universities later,) especially if they are middle class or below, as far as income. They also lack the notion that they would be recruited to Ivies on full scholarship if they applied. Most do not think about the Ivies. Exeter, Andover and Stuyvesant are unknown to them as well.
Private schools like Andover (36K+) have lots of mediocre-ability kids…that’s why wealthy parents send their kids there….so they have some shot (obsession for so many parents) to get into elite colleges if their kids are not top-ability students. THAT seems to be the new reason that private schools are popular….they still try to guarantee that they will get a kid into at least, one elite college. So, schools like Stuyvesant remain relevant to the exceptional kids and their families who can not afford private school.
Stuyvesant needs to restrict its size every school year out of realism, UNLESS American society decides to establish and BUILD more Stuyvesant-like HS’s. If there were more, in every city, maybe there may be relevance in lowering the standards of an entrance exam, or have a three tier system, so like…the top 30% get in. But, too many people would chime-in about unfairness, I suppose.
– on a tangent: I feel that Asians, who may be excellent students, may have some cultural issues that prevent them from being stand-outs/trailblazers/icons/innovators in the USA after university years (with regard to their majority status of the student population in schools like UCLA – mentioned earlier, Berkeley, etc.) When I was in graduate school (serious art & design, very competitive!) I noticed that the majority of the Asian students where very accurate with their architectural drafting…schematics…but were mezzo-mezzo as far as raw, screaming, visual-art capabilities…it’s like they didn’t have a creative bone in their body, but were convinced that they should venture into this very creative, edgy field.
I took it as a compliment that every other week, my designs from previous projects always washed up in one of their projects…carefully mimicked so not to be too obvious…but, we all knew. They had no idea that so many of my thoughts come from so many cultural and historical references; from the deep recesses of my restless mind, that I was always coming up with something new, because that’s what this field requires. I am a firm believer that visual talent is not universal. Helps to also be a bit intense, reckless, depressed…goes with the territory.
What I mean about Asian culture, is that I saw their inhibitions as their primary barrier to being creative, or being AS creative as my non-Asians ( we were a minority) peers in grad school. There is this culture of modesty in Asians that does not carry-over well into the world of the creative sphere. There is a fear of failure; embarrassment; embarrassing parents (like who gives a s—, YOU are in that class, in art school, not mom & dad); not being ultimately, good enough, that strangled most of the Asians kids in my grad program. One guy, an exceptionally funny and gifted Taiwanese guy (native) was super successful, super talented and, hilarious, and is now a really BIG DEAL in design in LA. We had a lot of laughs together, and, drank way too much alcohol at some of our NYC parties back in the late 80’s!- so miss the 80’s in NYC.
Being a visual artist requires a large ego, otherwise, you probably just don’t have the talent…and you simply will not succeed without ego. And, this pretty much goes for all of the arts. As much as there are lots of Asians who are exceptional string instrument musicians, I know of very few (famous) electric guitarists, choreographers, set-designers, painters, actors, rock musicians, composers, film makers in Asian families in the USA relative to their representation as young people in all of our elite colleges and universities. Part of the problem (I witnessed) is that culture of modesty that funnels Asian kids into the “safety/respectability” of med school…now computer science, BTW. Parents fear the idea of the hardship of the years after art school…the failure around the corner, the lack of financial safety, routine, normal hours, crappy apartments, conservative life-style.
Lastly, I thought science was immune from large egos, but my cousin, a microbiologist says that is not the case at all. Evidently, you need an ego, a big one, to really get the ball rolling on a crucial problem/venture in science. She is on her way to Stanford soon, to meet with other international professors to discuss the status of undergraduate education-would love to be a fly on the wall there.
Yulva
Mr. Kahlenberg, a graduate of Harvard, and his wife, also a graduate of Harvard, have three daughters who have all attended universities that are in the US News top 25. Of course those daughters attend public schools in Montgomery County, MD, that were more than 75% white and Asian. In addition, those daughters attend universities that are more than 75% white and Asian.
I have always found it odd that such elites always want to force middle class and blue collar whites to attend schools that are much less than 75% white and Asian. It is as if they want the value of their daughters education to increase by decreasing the value of the education of others.
The Asian diversity in city schools is striking.
Bengali, Nepali, Philipino, Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani…
Very vibrant and diverse. Funny that all these different people are classed as “Asian”.
I suppose we’re just skimming the top off the Bengali population? They do remarkably well, in comparison to their country overall…
What if Asians ‘took over’ the 20 most prestigious universities?
Essentially, nothing.
The most prestigious universities would no longer matter that much – less than they matter now.
And they would be that much less prestigious.
Right now, there are over 30 public universities in the AAU … http://www.aau.edu
As unprestigious as some of these places seem, they are highly ranked in the listings of world universities. And they have plenty of money. OK .. they are ranked as universities including graduate and professional programs.
And, given the glut of PhD’s, they can fill their faculties from the PhD programs of the Ivies and equivalent universities.
And, don’t forget that 50% of Chinese are below average. And they would be below average in the United States. There are a lot of US Asians that are from top 1% to top 5% of their native populations in terms of income and everything that goes along with it.
Microaggression sounds like Asian male sexual assault.
What’s funny about this is that it’s not even in the interest of underqualified black and Latino students to get into Stuyvesant. Being at such a competitive school only hurts your college prospects; the benefit is for gifted kids who would otherwise be bored out of their mind in class.
If you can get into Walter Payton based on your race but not otherwise, don’t go. At your local crappy public school you can get straight As in easy classes and have your pick of Ivies, as opposed to getting Bs at Walter Payton, feeling depressed at your low achievement and alienated from the school culture, and ending up at a second-tier school.
Ed Realist said:
“The thing is, it’s not really a work ethic to master or understand the material, something that is almost entirely irrelevant. They just want the grade. And so yes, they work, but sometimes the work is establishing a good way to cheat, because that’s more reliable. Other times, it’s memorizing material without any interest in the material itself, or what it’s used for.”
Yes, agreed.
The ‘work ethic’ in HK includes not just students, but their families as well. A common trope here is the utterly bemused western expat who’s chatting with a local colleague, and finds she’s taking several days — maybe even a week — off work.
‘Where are you going?’ the westerner asks.
‘Oh, we’re not travelling. My daughter has exams next week, so I have to help her study.’
‘Right. So she must be finishing secondary school and is taking her final exams/university entrance exam . . .’
‘Oh no — she’s five and in kindergarten.’
[Slapstick jawdrop ensues . . . .]
My daughter’s in a local school here, a ‘good’ one, so I meet a lot of these intense, achievement-oriented parents. On the one hand they all bemoan the 80-hour weeks their kids put in on school, homework, tutorial lessons, homework for the tutorial lessons, extra practice exercises they’ve assigned of their their own free will to their own children . . . but you see the progression, don’t you? Lots of the ‘crushing’ academic load here is self-inflicted.
Once in a while I have little talks with my daughter about thinking. The ideal in the Chinese conception of education is to remain safely a member of the flock of sheep following the teacher, but to strive mightily to be the lead sheep. All forms of studying/thinking/learning are subsumed under this axiom: if it doesn’t help teacher to see you emerging at the front of the flock, it’s not worth wasting time on. But then I tell my daughter that in the west sheep stories always have another character: the wolf, who’s outside the flock looking in, and who therefore has the freedom to think very differently, if not the comfort of being one of the flock. Sometimes, you might want to try to think like the wolf . . . .
I’m not trying to teach my daughter to be a psychopath or antisocial, but I do want her to stay off the conformity/striving treadmill as much as possible. It’s such a 20th-century artifact, i.e. the assumption that succeeding in education translates directly into Safe Career–High Status–Pleasant Lifestyle. Even in HK that equation has broken down. Parents here can sense this, but at present the urge is to drive those little sheep just a little harder. The psycho-social penalties for Junior coming home with a bad grade because he did things a little differently still feel too harsh.
I don’t know where all this ends, but it does mean we live in interesting times in terms of education.
About Sweden: “Great Copper Mountain (Swedish: Stora Kopparberg) was a mine in Falun, Sweden, that operated for a millennium from the 10th century to 1992. It produced as much as two thirds of Europe’s copper needs and helped fund many of Sweden’s wars in the 17th century. Technological developments at the mine had a profound influence on mining globally for two centuries. Since 2001 it has been designated a UNESCO world heritage site…”
This is the copper deposit famous in legend for being found by a goat: “…the goat named Kåre found the copper when it rubbed the horns to the ground and they turned red.”
Let me offer a perspective as an ethnic Korean who graduated from Stuyvesant a quarter century ago and who subsequently went on to an Ivy League university and a top ten Ph.D. program in my chosen field.
“Education realist” quoted a commenter on his website thusly:
“Leaving out the technical jargon, the Chinese and Koreans are definitely gaming and cheating tests overseas. When you read of recent Asian immigrants acing the NY tests despite limited English, it seems likely they’re doing the same thing over here.”
I arrived in the United States as a middle schooler 1 1/2 years before I took the test for Stuyvesant (and for Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech). At the time I had very limited English skills, but I could tell that in most other subjects (including history, which has been a passion for me since childhood), I was ahead of my peers by at least a year or two. In math, I was probably ahead by three or four. I realized right away that my lack of English ability was holding me back greatly.
So during the following summer, I went to the local library daily for about 8-10 hours a day (excluding Sundays which were for church and related activities). During this time, I looked up every word in an English dictionary. Then I looked up every definition for that word in an English-Korean dictionary. You could imagine what a tough slog this was. It was painfully boring, but I did it because I thought I needed to overcome my crippling weakness. By the third month, the edges of the pages of the English-Korean dictionary (made with very thin paper) had been completely worn and I had to purchase a second copy.
The only things I did during the awaking hours this summer were: studying English, reading, playing sports (I have been an athlete always and was specially selected for volleyball, rifle shooting and baseball in Korea; as well I have been a martial artist all my life and have trained in Judo, Tae Kwon Do and boxing since childhood). My parents allowed me to watch television occasionally, but only on the condition that I repeated after every word uttered on TV, including jingles (“Have you driven a Ford… lately” still rings in my brain). My parents wanted to ensure that I had no “Asian accent.” In this they were largely successful — my accent is a combination of Queens, NY and the Midwest (whence my ethnically German wife of nearly twenty years hails and where I spent much time).
Throughout this period and thereafter in high school, I also read voraciously in English. When Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” came out to great acclaim and popularity, I read this cover to cover, looking up every word I did not understand — and they were legion. I also ended up reading many of the books cited in that book.
I was not the only middle schooler at this library. During the same summer, roughly 25 other students my age were dropped off by their parents most days. Even though Asians were not numerous in my neighborhood at the time, all but two of my library compatriots were Asian. The remaining two were Russian immigrants who appeared to be as intensely academic as the Asians.
Although I do not doubt that some Asian students engage in cheating, my experience and observation are that cheating does not explain the phenomenal rate of Asian acceptance at Stuyvesant. Relatively high IQ and very intense work ethic likely explain the situation more than cheating.
In any case, I was rewarded with high scores. Reputedly, I scored in the top twenty among all test takers my year (subsequently I tested 99 percentile for both the SAT and the GRE; I never took the LSAT or the GMAT, but my prep testing also placed me in the top 1% of those tests as well).
There were two significant scandals during my time at Stuyvesant. One was, indeed, a cheating scandal. The ringleaders of the cheating scheme were mostly Jewish (they were only lightly punished — more on this below). The other scandal was a computer hacking scandal. One of my friends was actually arrested by the Feds and had his computer confiscated. Of the three I knew who were arrested, two were white (one Jewish, one gentile) and third was Asian. They all cut some sort of a deal with the Feds and the Air Force. I heard at the time that one of them went to work for the Air Force part time through high school and college and later full time professionally.
Among my peers at Stuyvesant, cheating was considered a high risk, low reward endeavor. In the first place, quite a few of my Asian peers were intense Evangelical Protestants and wouldn’t dream of cheating. It was considered extremely sinful. Also, for many lower and lower middle class (or “fresh off the boat”) immigrant Asian students without any connection or safety net, the potential consequences of cheating were catastrophic. It simply wasn’t worth the risk. Frankly, the largely white (including many Jewish) teachers and administrators were not likely to (and did not) look kindly upon cheating Asian students.
Those who engaged in cheating regularly at Stuy were more likely to be upper middle class students. They weren’t quite upper class enough to not care about academics entirely (most such types went to private schools, but there were some of those at Stuy). They had highly educated parents who put a lot of pressure on them. But having grown up affluently and easily, they often did not have the “do or die” attitude or work ethic of the immigrant Asian students. Some of them — gasp — did drugs and had sex, unthinkable among my Asian peers. Quite a few of them were more interested in drama and theater (SING! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SING!) than academic work.
Crucially, their parents were influential and aware enough to dig them out when they faltered at school, including cheating. (My own parents would have broken my legs if I had cheated.) Most such students were Jewish, not Asian, at least during my years there. One quite notorious example went on to be one of the “top” students at Stuy. But we all knew that she was a frequent cheater, only took very easy courses (“History of Science”) to maintain a perfect GPA while the rest of us were taking Dr. Irgang’s very tough AP American History, studying differential equations, and taking computer science courses at NYU. She was a joke to us. But both of her parents were Harvard alums, her parents had friends inside the Harvard administration and, unsurprisingly, she went on to Harvard.
I should also note that Asians were not the only economically down scale but intensely academic group at Stuy. There was a sizable Russian immigrant population who exhibited very similar “tiger” characteristics. They were also often poor, but their parents were extremely education-oriented as Asian parents were (the father of one Russian friend of mine was a scientist in Russia but drove a taxi cab in NYC). He would be beaten savagely by his father for minor mistakes on tests.
Finally, there have been several attempts to introduce “affirmative action” for blacks and Hispanics at Stuyvesant. All failed. Usually students and prominent or otherwise politically active parents — rarely Asian, usually Jewish — rallied to the anti-affirmative action cause and stopped it cold. During much of this time, the majority and subsequently plurality of students at Stuy were Jewish. Now that Stuy is overwhelmingly Asian, perhaps it will prove less immune to the political pressure. Or perhaps Asians of NYC today are more political and less “keep your heads down and just study and work” than during my time there. Only time will tell.
NYC did introduce free remedial and test prep programs for “underprivileged minorities” aimed at blacks and Hispanics over the years. I understand, however, that the rate of acceptance for that population has declined despite the free program. Certainly money not well spent from the cost-benefit point of view.
As a post-script, let me note that *I* personally would not encourage my own children to attend institutions like Stuyvesant. I think they serve a wonderful conduit for bright, but economically down scale students who do not have many other options. But for my own children, who have basked in the success and affluence of their parents and who have been thusly privileged and blessed, I have emphasized self-discipline and virtue (in the Aristotelian sense). My children will likely attend military schools or very traditional parochial schools that emphasize God, truth and beauty through a classical education program for their secondary schooling.
Twinkie, that’s an excellent post. It’s good to hear that you’ve decided your own kids should be educated in the classical style. If I had that option, that’s what I’d choose for my daughter as well.
In fact, it’s what I believe many contemporary parents — including East Asian ones — want for their kids, but it’s very hard at the moment for many — most? — of them to jump off that ‘striving treadmill’ I was talking about. Learning about ‘God, truth and beauty’ is risky when you’re going all-out to push your kid on down the path to the dollars.
On that note, though, I think one factor that’s changing the HK view of education — slowly, but perhaps with increasing momentum — is the growing number of Christians here. What do you think? Is the culture of educational attainment amongst Asian Americans also being tempered/transformed by the evangelical faith so many hold?
Lagertha said above:
“The sad part is, the rural kids, in particular, who are bright, have fewer options for high ability HS education (or elite Universities later,) especially if they are middle class or below, as far as income. They also lack the notion that they would be recruited to Ivies on full scholarship if they applied. Most do not think about the Ivies. Exeter, Andover and Stuyvesant are unknown to them as well.”
You’re right on target with that observation. That was me — blue-collar family; from a little town in the middle of nowhere; public schools; high test scores; never even glanced at college and university rankings when I was applying. College = college, when and where I came from. How sad it is, I’m not sure — I don’t feel too sad at the moment. But it’s a real phenomenon.
I also found your estimated percentages for high ability students interesting. You mentioned 3-5%, but also suggested that in some cases 10% might be reasonable. I could easily be convinced that 10% or more of HK Chinese kids could handle calculus, but that a significantly smaller percentage could attack Hamlet (or the Chinese equivalent). And I suspect those estimates might have been reversed among the students I attended school with . . . . So, to paraphrase an esteemed American stateswoman, what difference would that make?
“The Last Real Calvinist,”
While I keep hearing and reading that Christianity is growing explosively in China, I do not have much personal experience with Chinese Christians in China, so I cannot offer anything insightful.
However, I am much more familiar with the world of Asian-American Christianity at elite and major universities here. What many people don’t realize is that over the last several decades, elite American universities have become more, not less, actively Christian on average. There is a rather simple and somewhat astonishing reason for this — a sizable proportion of Asians in America are Christian, often intensely “Evangelical Protestant” or to a lesser extent, but still significantly, devoutly traditional-Catholic. I believe more than 50% of Korean immigrants are Christians, many quite active ones at that.
At places like Yale, for example, campus Christian organizations, long the refuge of austere, religious middle class WASPs in a sea of elite upper class liberal morality in the past, are now either entirely or mostly dominated by Asian students. This creates a stark constrast as the rest of the elite university population has become increasingly non-Christian and/or militantly atheist. I have to say, from my experience, the administration of such places often seems to sympathize with the latter rather than with the “AAEPs.” Indeed, the sense I have from my personal experience is that there appears to be a growing antipathy toward AAEPs from elite university administrations. Such an odd development, given how religiously oriented America’s top schools were at their founding.
On another note, Midwestern Anglo-Scandinavian-Germans are my wife’s people. So they are my children’s people and thus by marriage and assimilation, mine as well. As much as I think Asian-Americans are given the cold shoulder by elite university administrations and grudgingly admitted in many cases, I also think that blue collar rural Germanic types are not looked upon kindly by the same. I lived for many years in the rural Midwest. It is filled with many bright, hardworking (argh, farm hours!) and morally modest children. There is usually little to no recruiting among these talented kids by elite institutions. In that sense, they are very neglected indeed. What a terrible loss of human potential.
Still, many of these kids end up with the military, pick up useful skills and leadership qualities and later head to public universities of good reputation. They usually end up well as modest upper middle class folks in their home areas. Or they often go into specialized farming or profitable trades and end up running independent, small to medium businesses. But I wish our elite institutions would make greater use of this neglected pool of talent. Sometimes I feel as though I was a part of the last generation to be educated by professors from such areas at the Ivy League. My most significant mentor in college hailed from a tiny farming town in Iowa. A classic, bright farm boy athlete-scholar from a modest economic background who thrived academically. I understand that was much more common decades ago than it is today. One hardly runs into real rural types at the Ivy League now.
My erstwhile mentor passed away some years ago to my great sorrow. He seemed to have been one of the last of his kind at my alma mater.
Thanks for that reply, Twinkie — very thoughtful. I’m an Iowan myself by birth, and agree that a great deal of talent is squandered because of elite academia’s contempt for both ‘flyover’ white kids and for Asians.
My daughter is mixed as well, i.e. white and Chinese, and I sometimes muse upon a very contemporary conundrum: what would result in the highest level of discrimination against her, applying to Harvard as white, or applying as Chinese, or applying as both?
Your comments on the Christian student organizations at Ivy league schools are interesting. I wonder if their transformation from larval NGOs for WASPies to evangelical AAEP strongholds is behind some of the recent news stories I’ve read about various colleges and universities forcing Christian student organizations off campus and/or defunding them. It would make sense.
Twinkie, you are talking about 25 years ago. Your parents wanted you to assimilate. You married a white woman. I also find your story about being in 8th grade and reading voraciously all the books you describe to be one of two things: not credible or ridiculously atypical for any kid, Asian or not. While I’m certainly willing to grant that you were atypical, I draw the line at readily believing that there were all sorts of Asians and Russians behaving the same way. Since I wasn’t teaching back then, I’ll only voice mild skepticism and leave it at that.
But the very fact that you share this information as if it has some relevance to today’s situation reveals someone woefully out of touch with the situation on the ground today. Even if your description of the typical Asian immigrant were accurate, and I’m looking at you askance through the monitor, that’s not what is happening today.
But let’s address your story for what it is, and let me explain why I’ m not inspired.
If you are accurately describing facts on the ground at the time, I would still say that the system was not designed for 14 year olds spending 8-10 hours in the library, and that you”broke” the system.
Accept for the moment that all those immigrants were exactly as you describe. Today we don’t notice a huge influx of exceptionally talented Asian leaders successful in all walks of life. We don’t hear stories of Asian CEOs and professors who came here at 12 and obsessively studied English 14 hours a day, reading and enjoying Chekov and Tolstoy or whatever, and then using that drive and education to succeed and create jobs that helped Americans. That strongly suggests that the ferocious attention to learning you describe as typical did not lead to exceptional adult achievements. Normal “bright kid” achievements, sure. But nothing out of the ordinary.
I’m not saying that you personally should consider that a disappointment, or that I consider you anything but an individual success. What I am saying is that your parents came over here, pushed you to study 3000% beyond what our own kids here (Asian, white, Hispanic, and black) would ever consider doing, to present yourself as a high-achiever but otherwise similar to the other applicants. That presentation and the inordinate effort dedicated to study got you a nice college, presumably a nice job, a wife, and a lot of time in rural America. What, exactly, did New York and the United States get from it, given that you and those like you deprived a number of natives, also bright but not obsessively dedicated to surface metrics, of the advanced education opportunities you took from them? I’d rather the slots went to kids who spend a reasonable amount of time studying, having a life, not being obsessive. Instead, back then, we handed over a lot of slots to immigrants at the expense of natives, and the immigrants weren’t “naturally” smarter, but obsessively determined to get good grades and high test scores regardless of the cost to the personal lives.
So even back then, even assuming that everyone was as dedicated as you say—and I should stress that the reporting I’ve read from the late 80s does not support your assertions–then I still say you gamed the system in a way that I’d rather not see. And without question, the dedication to learning and genuine achievement you describe is not representative today, in my considered experience.
“What many people don’t realize is that over the last several decades, elite American universities have become more, not less, actively Christian on average.”
I’m well aware of this, but I also know a number of devout Christian Asians who cheat mightily.
According to one paper I read, the problem is not that bright rural kids fail to apply to the ivies, but that the fail to apply to the state U. And the state U would admit them, unlike the ivies.
“Education Realist,”
Sure, this might have been over 25 years ago, but I actually attended Stuyvesant. I speak from personal experience about the very institution, which is reputedly the topic of discussion in this thread. I have directly relevant experience to contribute to this topic. Your comment seems to comprise of unproven and general assertions about widespread cheating by Asian-Americans (including implications that cheating explains the high Asian acceptance rate at Stuyvesant in the main) and some nebulously connected points therefore that Asian immigration should be curtailed.
I won’t address your second point regarding Asian immigration here, except to state in passing that I am politically paleo-conservative mostly and lean immigration-restrictionist (but that has nothing to do with the allegedly widespread Asian cheating as asserted by you). My main point in providing my personal story here was to rebut your contention that cheating provides the significant explanatory variable to the phenomenon of the Asian majority at Stuy, my alma mater. I also wanted to provide some individual texture to an article like this that tends to treat students like so many numbers and matrices without faces and histories.
And, for the record, my parents did not push assimilation. They weren’t immigrants. My father was a mid-level Korean diplomat stationed in NYC and merely wished to expose me to the American education system and return to Korea eventually. *I* on my very own decided to forsake the land and language of my birth and become an immigrant and subsequently a naturalized American, because I fell in love with this country and its people very deeply. Yes, some Asian children do disobey their parents. Even some only sons (I am an only child, the last male of my line in my extended clan — and like Amy Chua’s unusual father, I am also a bit of a rebel).
You should stop assuming things about other people based on whatever axes you have to grind. I also don’t know what the fact that I am married to a white woman has to do with this specific line of inquiry, other than to suggest that like many other Asians, I am assimilated (which is not unusual among Asian-Americans, especially American-born ones, among whom even about a third of men intermarry).
It appears you cast doubt and by implication aspersions on my experience (“not credible”) simply because my experiences and observations lie outside your own preconception. I don’t mean to be boastful, but, yes, I was very atypical. BUT many, perhaps even most, students at Stuyvesant were (and likely are today) atypical. Stuy is, by some measures (under 3% acceptance rate), more selective than the Ivies. It admits many gifted children. Children who become chess grandmasters, successful actors, renowned computer hackers, and so on in addition to the usual debate champions, science nerds, and math competition winners. Gifted children — less than 3% of the general population — are atypical by definition.
In elementary school in Korea, I loved reading Sun Tzu and Luo Guanzhong (the author of the Chinese classic “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”). My Korean teachers used to be annoyed, because I’d hide books under my desk and read them during lectures. While studying at Stuy, I became fascinated with military history and began to obsess about writings and ideas of men like B. H. Liddell Hart, Heinz Guderian, Erich von Manstein, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky. In college I became something of an expert on “Deep Battle” and Russian/German military operational theory between the two world wars). When my university’s library proved inadequate I visited Newport and Carlisle Barracks (homes to the Naval War College and the Army War College, respectively). One summer I sought out Col. John Waghelstein, a premier theorist (and practitioner in El Salvador) of counter-insurgency/low-intensity warfare. Another time, I sought out Bill Lind who is now mostly known for his paleo-conservatism, but was at the time a prominent theorist of the Fourth Generation Warfare (thankfully, both men were remarkably approachable and were extremely generous with their time).
So, yes, I was quite unusual and precocious. But I was hardly unique among STUYVESANT students and graduates. Several of my friends, who also went on to the Ivy League and top shelf Ph.D. programs, were similarly advanced and driven to knowledge. My best friend at Stuy spent much of his free time reading Greek and Roman writings in the original languages (our Latin teacher, Dr. Blake, physically resembled Horace, especially when he put on a toga: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace#mediaviewer/File:Quintus_Horatius_Flaccus.jpg). He’s a well known physicist now and makes his living “smashing atoms together.” Another friend whose understanding of robotics at Stuy rivaled that of graduate students in the field is today an international expert on robotics. While not everyone from Stuy became world beaters, it was certainly a collection of atypical students.
I am quite speechless that you view my hard work and intense efforts by other similarly gifted students as “gaming the system.” You write “I’d rather the slots went to kids who spend a reasonable amount of time studying, having a life, not being obsessive.” Do you mean to suggest that kids who spend their time drinking, doing drugs, having sex, hanging out at malls, and playing video games — “having a life” as you put it — and get moderately good grades should have academic precedence over children who delay gratification and put themselves through an intense, self-disciplined pursuit of academic achievement? Do you speak from personal experience? Did you “have a life” as a youngster and feel that you should now stand above these “cheating” (i.e. hardworking) Asians? Forgive me, but you strike me so much as Matthew Broderick’s envious teacher character in the film “Election” (which has the then unknown Reese Witherspoon’s finest performance as an overachieving student from a modest background in the Midwest; as a side note, Alexander Payne capture the Midwest like no ther filmmaker in movies like “Election,” “About Schmidt,” and “Nebraska”).
Perhaps I am stereotypically Asian in this regard, but I tend to view the time of youth as a time of rigorous academic and physicial preparation and moral inculcation, a modern day Agoge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agoge). Time to “have a life” as you put it should be delayed. There is time enough later once one is established in life to engage in frivolous and indulgent pursuits.
On a final note, I taught and graded undergraduate students for several years while working on my Ph.D. Every year, I caught a few students cheating. Mostly they were athletes. The remainder were almost always upper middle class kids, usually white (but never the scions of the super rich and powerful — those kids just seem to float through life living large and dating extremely attractive peers). The common denominator among academic cheaters in my experience was a sense of entitlement, that they “deserved” to have good grades, but didn’t have to work for them.
Aside from the athletes (on whose behalf the university administration usually intervened), the cheaters also invariably had influential or otherwise “vociferous” parents who were all too willing to bail out their children from sticky situations. It was clear to me that the vast majority of cheaters came from environments who seldom experienced consequences for their transgressions. This was very consistent with my experience among my peers at Stuyvesant. I don’t think this fits Asian-Americans, especially recent immigrants, all that well. Of course, the story may be very different in Asia itself where I gather there are plenty of Asians with influential parents who can manipulate their systems.
Sorry, I meant “elicit,” not “illicit.” A thousand apologies.
Ooops. Wrong thread. Moderator, please delete my comment no. 46 and this message. Thank you.
As a relatively recent Stuyvesant graduate without the superlative written skills Twinkie
has displayed above (perhaps he’s a humanities scholar), I can try to relate some of my experiences as well. I was an upper middle-class kid who would score at about the 50th percentile in the general population on any reasonable measure of ‘conscientiousness.’ I enjoyed studying until about puberty, and I still enjoyed solitary study, unmotivated by authority, but had a hard time doing what I was told. I studied on the order of twenty hours for the SHSAT, mostly for the math section as I had not learned the relevant (pre)-algebra at my feelgood, academically lax private middle school. Mathematics is easier to pick up in a short period of time than language, for instance. Language has a more linearly learning curve while technical fields have a sigmoidal skill acquisition curve not unlike what you’d see in a the graph of a population with a Malthusian limit – exponential with a carrying capacity. Oddly I had a just passing score on the mathematics and was near the ceiling of the verbal. This ordering reversed over time, perhaps because I refused to read for several years.
The ‘character flaw’ (in quotes because it’s probably a heritable trait I’m stuck with) I mentioned has probably capped my potential, but may be useful in other domains. I’m a PhD student in a technical field at a top institution. I’ve realized that I lack the sitzfleish (and the cognitive ability) to make any lasting impact on my field of choice. If I were extremely conscientious I might waste more time fighting the good fight, but I’ve realized I can leverage my combination of skills in different domains. I may still finish the PhD, but likely will be a rich man instead of a scholar. I don’t know that I’ll be a civic-minded contributor in the sense the EducationRealist describes – I will hire individuals sorted so strongly by cognitive ability that it would be inaccurate to view my actions as for the common good. I’m not a financier – in principle the products I’ll offer will have real tangible economic value – but we shall see.
The SHSAT and Stuyvesant were good to me. As the test is taken at age 13, the SHSAT is gamed more easily than the SAT. 13 is a higher variance age than 17, and it’s easier to get an unmotivated 13 year old to sit and study than a 17 year old. The Asian test prep academies were particularly effective at motivating the already focused Asian Americans I went to school worth. I was once shown a Chinese newspaper with no less than five advertisements for prep academies (so I was told, I certainly couldn’t read them). Asian Americans continued to attend prep academies throughout high school, whether focused on improving course grades or prepping for standardized tests. After finishing high school, I briefly made a living tutoring mostly second generation Asian Americans for such tests. The prep culture is there and it is strong. There is a hard ceiling on how far striving will take you but it may be high enough to get you a decent software job. Most of the individuals I knew who have gone to do exceptional things are white Europeans, but of course my sample is biased. Time will tell.
StuyGrad said:
“There is a hard ceiling on how far striving will take you but it may be high enough to get you a decent software job.”
That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? At what point does a kid need something more than striving to get a legitimate shot at a decent middle- to upper-middle class life?
In the mid-2oth century, the road to modest success was straight, both in the USA, and especially here in Hong Kong: get into and through university, and you’re made. Striving paid.
But now that road’s finish line is being pushed farther and farther away from the expectant student. It’s a combination of the mass marketing of higher ed, government policies that grind away at middle class saving and buying power, and constantly raised expectations of what qualifies as a ‘good life’.
Time is indeed going to tell, and I suspect it’s going to have a lot to say . . . .
“The Last Real Calvinist,”
Where in Iowa were you born? Here is a little related trivia — the most prominent Asian-American who grew up in Iowa today is probably Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the first Asian-American head of an Ivy League university (Dartmouth) and currently the president of World Bank: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Yong_Kim
“Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1959, Jim Yong Kim moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. His father taught dentistry at the University of Iowa, while his mother received her PhD in philosophy.[6] Kim attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian, president of his class, and played both quarterback for the football team and point guard on the basketball team. After a year and a half at the University of Iowa, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in 1982. He was awarded an M.D. at Harvard Medical School in 1991, and a PhD in anthropology at Harvard University in 1993.[7] He was among the first enrollees of Harvard’s experimental MD/PhD program in the social sciences.”
As for your earlier question of whether being half-white or half-Chinese would be a greater detriment to your daughter being accepted by Harvard, I would suspect the answer would depend on what kind of “white” half she has.
Personally, I think an obsession with Harvard and the like is unhealthy for obtaining a real education (my legendary AP American History teacher at Stuy, Dr. Irgang, would rail frequently against visiting Ivy League recruiters so “You are the problem! You make my job of educating my pupils difficult!”). I have nothing against Harvard. I have many friends who are Harvard graduates (I chose another Ivy). It’s the premier and possibly the oldest university in the country (I say possibly, because I heard claims that The College of William and Mary in Williamburg, VA could be the oldest). However, more than anything else, Harvard along with other elite universities, including my alma mater, has become a marker of elite status, rather than an assurance of a highly educated young person in the traditional sense. I very much doubt most recent Harvard or other Ivy League graduates could read their own diplomas, which are inscribed in Latin.
In my view, this country is still full of opportunities for those who do not carry this elite marker. As an example, take my neighbors — husband and wife are both children of Korean immigrants — both graduated from the same mid-ranked public university. The husband was a civil servant but is now a founder and partner of a small intellectual property law firm and the wife is a very successful realtor. They live in a seven-figure house and live very affluently but reasonably frugally in many ways (no flashy cars, clothes or ostentatious luxuries aside from the expensive house, par for the course in our zip code). They are very pleasant, sweet neighbors and send their children to a Christian school. Predictably the children are polite and respectful as well. They are very rich indeed in friends and family, as there is usually a stream of visiting cars nearly every weekend (they frequently invite my family to these gatherings). Not a single Ivy League degree between them, but by most measures they seem to lead happy, satisfied and prosperous lives.
Mind you, I am not necessarily holding them up as exemplars of lives well lived. My own conception of that involves service to both God and the community at large; to be virtuous, chaste, and honorable. I merely present them as an example that with dedication and hardwork a Harvard or another elite degree is not necessary to attain material prosperity in this country. Certainly in the moral realm such a degree is absolutely unnecessary. So I would recommend against viewing this topic through the prism of “what would be more likely get my daughter into Harvard .” Okay, enough lecturing on that.
StuyGrad,
How’s the new building? I’ve never been inside that gleaming structure. Is it true that you get a panoramic view of the water from the cafeteria? How lucky you are to have had that. I attended the old building which was practically crumbling and in a sketchy area too! (A couple of my classmates were stabbed by druggies outside the building one year.)
As for this: “Most of the individuals I knew who have gone to do exceptional things are white Europeans, but of course my sample is biased. Time will tell.”
I think one can argue time has told where Asian-Americans are concerned. See the science and technology section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_American#Science_and_technology
This is obviously not an exhaustive list. But not bad for a segment of the population that is under (and in the past greatly under) five percent of the general population.
By the way, I know quite a few Stuy grads who studied science at graduate schools and eventually went “quant.” They do very well indeed even through the past recession… though I wish some of them had stayed on the academic track. Several are quite brilliant, world class brains, really, but were lured away by the Midas touch. I think very few men could resist the prospect of such enormous opulence with which they were presented. Pity, but of course it’s easy for me to say sitting pretty in my nice house all “fat, happy, and dumb.”
Good luck to you in your new direction.
Lagertha said:
“I feel that Asians, who may be excellent students, may have some cultural issues that prevent them from being stand-outs/trailblazers/icons/innovators in the USA after university years ”
Twinkie said:
“Time to “have a life” as you put it should be delayed. There is time enough later once one is established in life to engage in frivolous and indulgent pursuits.”
Ed realist said
“That strongly suggests that the ferocious attention to learning you describe as typical did not lead to exceptional adult achievements. Normal “bright kid” achievements, sure. But nothing out of the ordinary.”
Clearly, the Tiger Parenting gets the Asian kids into those elite school slots (displacing smart and creative and unconformist White farm kids who do enjoy some frivolous pursuits). Since we just are not seeing a mindblowing phenomenon of Asian trailblazers / icons / innovators after University, it must be that when those Asian kids grow up, they spend the rest of their adult lives engaged in the frivolous and indulgent pursuits they missed out on as kids. So….in what way does all this Asian Tiger Parenting (and the concomitant Asian Tiger Parent immigration) benefit us White Americans whose taxes funded those elite schools, but whose kids don’t get to attend?
Anonymous (51),
Am I not allowed hobbies after I’ve established my career? Or must I devote 100% of my waking hours until death for the glorious benefit of white Americans? Do you devote 100% of all your waking hours for the glorious benefit of fellow white Americans or is merely being born white by chance achievement and contribution enough for you?
Ivy League universities are privately funded (though they do take federal money for research, which presumably benefits all Americans, including whites). My family and I spent over $250,000 in tuition, fees, books, room and board and so on for the privilege of attending one of these institutions. As my parents were not rich (they were middle class in Korea), this entailed extreme sacrifice on their part (they had to sell their apartment and empty out all their savings) and not inconsiderable effort on my part.
As for tax and benefit, I probably pay considerably over 10 times the taxes of what median white American families pay (more like over 20 times due to progressive taxation) while drawing almost no marginal government benefits (aside from those we all benefit from such as national defense and so on). Does that mean my children should have over 1000%-2000% of the chance that the median white family’s kids have in qualifying for the Ivy League?
I don’t see why you take what “Lagertha” and ER’s claims about the lack of Asian-American innovators at face value without a little research. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_American#Science_and_technology
“Asian Americans have made many prominent and notable contributions to Science and Technology. Chien-Shiung Wu was known to many scientists as the “First Lady of Physics” and played a pivotal role in experimentally demonstrating the violation of the law of conservation of parity in the field of particle physics. Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work demonstrating that the conservation of parity did not always hold and later became American citizens. Har Gobind Khorana shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in genetics and protein synthesis. Samuel Chao Chung Ting received the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics for discovery of the subatomic particle J/ψ. The mathematician Shing-Tung Yau won the Fields Medal in 1982 and Terence Tao won the Fields Medal in 2006. The geometer Shiing-Shen Chern received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1983. Andrew Yao was awarded the Turing Award in 2000. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics and had the Chandra X-ray Observatory named after him. In 1984, Dr. David D. Ho first reported the “healthy carrier state” of HIV infection, which identified HIV-positive individuals who showed no physical signs of AIDS. Charles J. Pedersen shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his methods of synthesizing crown ethers. Steven Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research in cooling and trapping atoms using laser light. Daniel Tsui shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 for helping discover the fractional Quantum Hall effect. In 2008, biochemist Roger Tsien won the Nobel in Chemistry for his work on engineering and improving the green fluorescent protein (GFP) that has become a standard tool of modern molecular biology and biochemistry. Yoichiro Nambu received the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the consequences of spontaneously broken symmetries in field theories. In 2009, Charles K. Kao was awarded Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication” and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the prize in Chemistry “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. Ching W. Tang was the inventor of the Organic light-emitting diode and Organic solar cell and was awarded the 2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry for this achievement. Min Chueh Chang was the co-inventor of the combined oral contraceptive pill and contributed significantly to the development of in vitro fertilisation at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. David T. Wong was one of the scientists credited with the discovery of ground-breaking drug Fluoxetine as well as the discovery of atomoxetine, duloxetine and dapoxetine with colleagues.[62][63][64] Michio Kaku has popularized science and has appeared on multiple programs on television and radio.”
I am pretty sure some of these scientific achievements count as innovations. Considering that the Asian population in this country has been 5% or below, this is not bad, I think. And this list is hardly exhaustive or complete. There are countless more “ordinary” Asian-American innovators whose contributions and inventions are not covered here. Speaking of hobbies, one of mine is to collect LED flashlights. I am fascinated by them. The leading brand of flashlights in the world is probably Surefire, which is widely used by the military, police, and EMT personnel in this country, for the benefit of Americans, including whites. Guess who one of the the major technical innovators of this brand of flashlights was: http://blogs.militarytimes.com/gearscout/2013/01/12/paul-p-k-kim-leaves-surefire/
“Paul Kim has been the Vice President of Engineering since the earliest days of the company. He holds over 40 patents dating back to the 1980s, and many of his innovations are integrated into just about every modern flashlight. He was a pioneer in the industry, and has created some of the best-engineered and most revered illumination products ever made.”
Sorry Twinkie but cheating was rampant among Asians even back then – I’m sure someone with your memory hasn’t forgotten this:
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/21/nyregion/new-york-cancels-regents-exam-after-newspaper-carries-answers.html
Steve Johnson,
This was after my time. What does this particular scandal have to do with “rampant cheating by Asians”? Were the perpetrators all or mostly Asian?
And if that were the case, does this one episode, therefore, demonstrate that there is rampant cheating by Asians as a whole in the United States?
By that logic, do these scandals, as linked on another thread, (http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/13/us/an-inquiry-finds-125-cheated-on-a-naval-academy-exam.html and http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/07/12107246-78-air-force-academy-cadets-accused-of-cheating-on-math-test?lite) demonstrate that there is rampant cheating by whites or cadets at military service academies?
Twinkie says:
June 27, 2014 at 12:35 am
Steve Johnson,
“This was after my time. What does this particular scandal have to do with “rampant cheating by Asians”? Were the perpetrators all or mostly Asian?”
Yes. I had a copy of the answers to that regents exam before it was canceled because the Post published.
I was able to get the copy due to being friends with a bunch of the Asian kids. Basically all of them had all of the answer keys to multiple regents exams.
Steve Johnson,
Let me get this straight. *You* cheated with a group of Asian friends of yours, so there is rampant cheating by Asians in America?
It seems to me this anecdote of yours says little else but that you had unethical friends (who are Asian) and that you (who are presumably not Asian) were also equally unethical.
Were the cadets in the links I provided all or mostly Asian as well? And if not, what unwarranted inferences do you draw from those episodes?
I fully expected nothing but evasion from you and you didn’t disappoint.
The test was canceled so, no, I didn’t cheat.
Everyone who knew people knew that to get the answers you went to the Asian kids – not a few especially unethical ones that were probably corrupted due to being friends with non-Asians as you’ll probably imply – all of them.
Actually going out and stealing or selling the test answers and distributing them to your co-ethnics is far far more unethical than refusing to be the last holdout who doesn’t cheat on a test where everyone else is cheating.
Only chumps don’t cheat when you’re in school with Asians is the lesson here.
Twinkie,
I enjoyed reading some of your comments. Is it possible for me to message/email you somehow? I am a young Asian American man – recently graduated and working. I am seeking mentors for this stage in my life and could really benefit from any advice/life experience you are willing to share with me.
Thanks.
Steve Johnson,
You wrote: “The test was canceled so, no, I didn’t cheat.”
But you obtained answers prior to the test and intended to use them on the test. You were merely prevented from doing so because the test was canceled. You, sir, are a cheater, plain and simple. You can blame Asians or Martians, for that matter, but as a person with independent will and moral agency, *you* did something unethnical no matter how much you attempt to shift the blame to others.
You also wrote: “Everyone who knew people knew that to get the answers you went to the Asian kids…”
Oh, so now you speak for “everyone”? Who appointed you the omniscient arbiter of what “everyone” believes or knows?
Finally, you wrote: “Only chumps don’t cheat when you’re in school with Asians is the lesson here.”
The excuse of frauds, cheaters, and losers everywhere: “Everyone is doing it and only chumps don’t cheat!”
I guess I must be a chump then. I never cheated and never will. Not on a test, not on my wife, not on friends. Not on anybody. I do not care if 99% of the population cheats. I never will. And I only keep company with those who share my ethics, regardless of their ethnicity or race. Ancient Persian nobility is said to taught their young “to ride well, to shoot straight, and to speak the truth.” That is the motto I follow in life.
You obviously feel that your irrational and unwarranted prejudice toward Asians allows you to be unethnical, so as not to be “a chump.” Goodbye is all I can say about that.
Paul,
I am sorry, but I do not share my private contact information with those online.
Might I suggest you seek mentors among those you know and interact in person? I would also recommend that you not limit the search to men of your own ethnicity. Good luck to you.
“This was after my time. What does this particular scandal have to do with “rampant cheating by Asians”? Were the perpetrators all or mostly Asian?”
More cheating. And, yeah.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/02/11/audit-north-dakota-university-awarded-unearned-degrees/
quote: The audit examines the number of foreign students who took part since 2003 in a special program that allowed them to earn degrees both from Dickinson State and a university in their home country.
Only 10 of the 410 students who received degrees through the program completed all their course work and requirements, it said. About 95 percent of the students in the dual-degree program were Chinese, it said. The rest were Russian.
JSM,
I already acknowledged that there may indeed be mass cheating or corruption in Asia itself (especially in developing countries like China; certaintly so in even less developed countries in Southeast and South Asia, but still present even in Northeast Asia, including my birth country of South Korea).
However, we are discussing Asian-Americans here, not foreign students.
I also note the complete silence regarding the cheating scandals at service academies, which most likely involve very few or no Asians, as well as the widespread cheating by athletes (mostly black or white) at universities, a subject with which I am personally very well-acquainted, unfortunately.
On Razib Khan’s threads, there have been dicussions on how statistically the allegation of “wide spread Asian cheating” could be validated or falsified — mismatch of results. If indeed a lot of Asians cheated and attained entry to institutions for which they were unqualified, there would be high attrition (failed to graduate) rates as well as high failure rates to advance to the next levels of education and their success thereafter. That evidence is not there. Asian-Americans are overwhelmingly represented in fields like STEM and medicine (medical school is roughly 22% Asian) where “faking to know” is extremely difficult so as to make the effort not worthwhile.