'Tiger Mother' meets reality: Asian-American students struggle, too
With purported discrimination against Asian applicants at upshot in a lawsuit against Harvard, not all Asian students end up at elite colleges, as we've reported.
PASADENA. Calif.—Angela Lo grew upwardly in a strict household, under abiding pressure to become grades good enough for admission to a top university. But in stark contrast to stereotypes of Asian pupil success perpetuated in Amy Chua'due south new bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Lo put off going to higher and instead got a job.
"I felt that by me not succeeding, I kind of let my parents down," said Lo, who at 30 even so lives with her Chinese-American parents and works equally a dish-washer. "As a kid, I felt like garbage or worthless." She said she recently enrolled at Pasadena Urban center College to get her parents off her dorsum.
Like Lo, about half of the nation's Asian-American students enroll in community college, where they often struggle to pay for classes and scramble to find room in remedial courses. They get far less attention than overachievers like Chua's highly micromanaged daughters, whose rigid babyhood is described in a volume that's sparking debates about Asian-American student success.
Yale Law School professor Chua's prescription for producing über-accomplished children meant replacing play-dates and sleepovers with hours of math issues and endless practice sessions on the violin and piano.
An online extract from Chua's book in The Wall Street Periodical last month garnered more than 7,500 comments—the most of any article in the site'south history—and prompted impassioned responses, many of them taking effect with Chua's approach to parenting. "Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian-Americans similar me are in therapy," one self-confessed D-educatee wrote.
With 48 distinct groups living in the U.S. that speak more than 300 different languages, many Asian-Americans exercise not neatly fit the "model minority" stereotype of high-achieving, straight-A students, as the responses to Chua's excerpt illustrated.
"In that location's such despair, alienation and unhappiness in students who have failed to live up to those expectations," said Hugo Schwyzer, a history and gender studies professor at Pasadena Urban center College, a public, open up-admissions two year school where well-nigh one-third of the student body is Asian . "I take gay and lesbian Chinese students. I have overweight Chinese girls. I have Chinese students of barely boilerplate intelligence who piece of work hard and get Cs."
Preconceived notions most race and academic accomplishment mask the many challenges facing Asian-American students, where there'south a glaring disparity betwixt students who excel versus those who don't fifty-fifty graduate from loftier school.
For example, it'south true that Asian Americans are unduly represented at elite U.South. universities. Fifty-fifty though they account for just 5 percent of the nation'south population, they encompass nearly xx percent of enrollments at Ivy League institutions similar Harvard, where more than 30,000 students vied for 1,664 spots in last twelvemonth's freshman course. Asian Americans fabricated upwardly 22 percent of admitted students last year.
But it's also true that the academic operation of Asians isn't uniformly high.
This reality is in plain view in California, which boasts the nation's largest Asian-American population—an estimated five meg people, or well-nigh 13 percentage of California'southward inhabitants. Here, Asians scooped up twice as many bachelor'due south degrees from the University of California system every bit their white counterparts in 2008, according to a 2010 report, "The State of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Education in California."
Yet 40 to 45 percent of those belonging to less well-known Asian indigenous groups—such as Hmong, Cambodians and Laotians—don't even take high school diplomas, the study constitute.
"There are a lot of misconceptions almost who Asian-American students are, and this is truthful in institutions that have big concentrations of Asians and ones where there are very few Asians," said Robert Teranishi, associate professor of higher education at New York University. "It results in being omitted from a lot of broader discourse about the needs of these students. They remain invisible in a lot of means."
Few data exist near Asian-American students every bit a whole, added Teranishi, who constitute that only thirteen out of 3,000 articles that ran in top college-education journals from 1996 to 2006 addressed the needs of this various group.
Asian-Americans' reputation for academic success is a double-edged sword when it comes to college admissions, according to Princeton University sociologist Thomas Espenshade, who has found that they demand stronger Sabbatum scores and grades than other students to land coveted spots at elite colleges.
"They [admissions officers] don't think these students add as much," said Mitchell Chang, a professor of higher education and Asian American Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. "If you first to go afterward this admissions consequence, it tin easily turn into a trouble and an assault on race-conscious admissions, and by attacking race-witting admissions, you undermine the civil-rights agenda."
The more pressing issue for one-third of the Asians living in California is their struggle to acquire English language, according to the 2010 report on the country of Asian-American education, which was prepared for California State Associates Fellow member Mike Eng. The same report found that some groups—amidst them, Hmong and Cambodians—have poverty rates double the country boilerplate.
"We find that Asian-American students, as they stop up in college now—compared to previous years—are more likely to need special tutoring, or remedial piece of work in English—1 in v reported this," added Chang, a co-author of the report.
Schwyzer says the less successful students at Pasadena Metropolis College seek solace in video games, with some of his male students spending half of their waking hours glued to computer screens. Others cut themselves or attempt suicide. Many need treatment for depression just may not seek it because of cultural norms.
"Chua's assumption—that the pressure cooker of perfectionism will cause brusque-term pain only long-term success—merely isn't borne out by the evidence," Schwyzer wrote in a recent web log post.
Asian-American girls aged fifteen-24 have the highest suicide rates of women in that age grouping, according to the U.South. Department of Health and Human being Services. Just at that place's been little to no research looking at whether "Tiger Mom" parenting pressures are partly to blame.
Students like Mon-Shane Chou, a 19-year-old student at Pasadena Urban center College, are amid those who say that beingness raised in a strict, loftier-pressure level household is psychologically damaging.
"When I was small, if we misbehaved, there was this bamboo dorsum-scratcher that my mom or dad would hitting us with, and we would not be allowed to weep," said Chou, who hid her report cards from her parents. "Non being allowed to weep is really somewhat mutual in Chinese families."
Chou now hopes to transfer to a school in the University of California system and earn her bachelor's caste in sociology, simply she didn't fit in with the driven Asians in her high school.
"My peers all wanted to exist in AP classes and to have 4.0s," Chou recalled. "I wasn't quite sure why they wanted it. It seemed like they had these goals in academics that didn't brand sense to me because they acquired so much stress."
Source: https://hechingerreport.org/tiger-mother-meets-reality-asian-american-students-struggle-too/
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