Destination college: Chinese-American students’ journey through the American education system
HGSE Associate Professor Vivian Louie

The United States’ history as a nation of immigrants continues to be the story of the nation, set, among other places, in American schools and universities. In this Q&A, HGSE Associate Professor Vivian Louie focuses on college students in New York City who either immigrated from China, or whose parents did so. Her research examines the unique challenges of these students’ educational journeys, and ways that primary and secondary schools can help this immigrant group make college a reachable destination.

Q1. Can you tell us about the background of the group of Asian American students that you have studied?

Asian American students are a very mixed group. They vary in their national origins, their social class background, and their status as either immigrants or the descendents of immigrants. In my own work, I have focused on Chinese American students who were either born in the United States to immigrant parents or who migrated here from abroad by the age of 12. Since they have spent all or most of their lives in the US, they are largely educated and socialized in the United States, but they are also part of the immigrant experience. My research examines these Chinese American students who have now made the transition to New York City colleges.

Q2. So these students have already made it through high school and are now in college. What are some of the lessons you have learned about how their families have supported their educational achievements?

I find that it is important to look at how their experiences vary by social class background. As immigrants, the parents share what researchers have called “immigrant optimism”: in short, they have high hopes and expectations for their children’s education because they believe that their children have greater opportunities here.

Parents’ strategies for supporting their children’s education achievement, however, vary by social class. Some immigrant Chinese parents have high levels of education themselves, often a bachelor’s degree or more, are fluent in English, and work in professional occupations. These families tend to settle in well-to-do, predominantly white suburbs. They have the financial and academic resources to support their children in school, and to send them to well-resourced suburban public schools or private schools.

Other parents are part of the working-class and have relatively low levels of formal schooling, are not necessarily fluent in English, and often work very labor-intensive jobs. They often have strong social or family connections with the Chinese community, in places like Chinatown. These ethnic networks tie them to relatives and friends who have been here longer and are doing well – which gives these parents a chance to learn about the public school system and which schools are higher performing. However, there is a good deal of variability within this group of working-class parents as well. Those parents who have higher status, for example, those who manage or own a small business, have greater financial resources to enroll their children in parochial schools or private academic preparatory institutions, which are owned and run by fellow Chinese. Other parents do not have these resources, and their children report feeling on their own at school and with the transition to college.

Q3. We often hear about the struggles children of recent immigrants face in school and the job market. But we also hear about their success, and their high motivation for achievement. Can you help us begin to understand the complex picture of these students' school experiences?

As I noted earlier, immigrant optimism helps to explain the high motivation for achievement among the children of recent immigrants. Whether a student succeeds or struggles in school and the job market depends on many factors that have to do with contexts and motivations. Residential segregation, for example, is important. In New York City we know that Chinese and Russian immigrants tend to be less residentially segregated – they are more likely to live in or near neighborhoods with native whites than are other groups, such as West Indians, and Dominicans. This means that, compared to some other immigrant groups, Chinese immigrants will be living in neighborhoods with more public services, lower levels of crime, and higher-performing public schools.

This doesn’t mean that success is easy to achieve among working-class immigrants. As immigrants, they still need to adjust to a new physical space, and new cultural and social landscapes. They have to work towards economic survival, which can be complicated by lack of time to take adult English language classes and lack of better job opportunities. In some cases, the children of recent immigrants are able to locate adults and peers who can help them achieve their college goals with concrete strategies. In other cases, the children of recent immigrants feel lost and on their own in school, and use what we might consider haphazard strategies because they do not have the relevant information when it is needed. Given this mix of pressures and resources, it’s no surprise that there is a lot of variation in Chinese-American students’ experiences in school.

Q4. Asian-American students are sometimes considered the "model minority." How does this stereotype affect Chinese-American students' experience?

The “model minority” stereotype obscures the needs of many Asian American students and their families. Working-class Chinese American children report feeling on their own in school, regardless of whether their parents managed to get them into a higher performing public school. They feel they did not get adequate supports to help them in school. However, they also feel that their own teachers and peers did not believe they needed support in school, whether it was in the classroom or information about college. After all, they were supposed to be the high achievers, who knew the answers. Working-class Chinese American students also have other family-related experiences, such as the pressures of helping their parents navigate mainstream America, a sense of inadequacy because they sometimes did not know the answers to the questions their parents had, or the generational disconnect between immigrant parents and their children in terms of cultural norms.

Q5. You have written about national educational policy, from the perspective of the education of immigrant students. What's your take on the current No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)? Do you think the act is meeting the needs of newly arrived families, or that we should take some new directions?

According to NCLB, immigrant parents are entitled to the same kinds of rights as everyone else. For example, they have the right to be informed of their children’s progress on assessments, the evaluations of their schools, and the right to transfer their children to another school if the child’s current school is not meeting mandated academic standards. All of this, however, assumes that parents have a great deal of knowledge about the system. In theory, I think that NCLB has introduced the kinds of rights that all parents should have. It is the practical aspect that needs attention. Just as one matter, how can schools overcome language barriers in order to communicate with immigrant parents about their children’s progress? Also, while there are commonalties in the immigrant experience, there is unlikely to be one practice that fits the needs of all groups, due to language, socio-economic, and cultural variation. Attention needs to be paid to these issues.

Q6. Based on your interviews with college students, do certain features of students' K-12 school experiences seem critical for helping Chinese-American students make the transition to college? In other words, are there specific things that schools can do to support these diverse students in getting to the post-secondary level?

There are a number of school-level practices that can facilitate the transition to college among immigrant students, and the children of immigrants, particularly those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. These include:

1. forming partnerships between schools and community-based organizations to work on increasing parents’ knowledge about the U.S. educational system and the schools their children are attending. On the flip side, schools can also work to increase teachers’ knowledge about the children and families they are serving.
2. Giving families college prep planning information when children are as young as the sixth grade, for example, about what courses to take, and what is available in the middle and high school curriculum.
3. Providing services directly to students during the PK-16 years that prepare them for job internships, provide enrichment classes, and prepare them for the college application process in its various stages, from the decision to pursue college, through the search and application process, and the choice of institution to attend.

Information on how to pay for college is typically a subject that both children and their families would benefit from having. Colleges can also provide programs for first-generation students, encouraging them to persist in their college studies.

It’s worth noting that some of these practices would benefit all children from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, regardless of their immigrant status. Other strategies need to take into account the language and cultural needs of immigrant groups.

Interview conducted by Maria Fusaro, doctoral student in Human Development and Psychology at HGSE