Amy Hsin

Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites

Significance We find that the Asian-American educational advantage over whites is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success. The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

Is Biology Destiny? Birth Weight and Differential Parental Treatment

Time diaries of sibling pairs from the PSID-CDS are used to determine whether maternal time investments compensate for or reinforce birth-weight differences among children. The findings demonstrate that the direction and degree of differential treatment vary by mother’s education. Less-educated mothers devote more total time and more educationally oriented time to heavier-birth-weight children, whereas better-educated mothers devote more total and more educationally oriented time to lower-birth-weight children. The compensating effects observed among highly educated mothers are substantially larger than the reinforcing effects among the least-educated mothers. The findings show that families redistribute resources in ways that both compensate for and exacerbate early-life disadvantages.

When Does Time Matter? Maternal Employment, Children’s Time With Parents, and Child Development

This study tests the two assumptions underlying popularly held notions that maternal employment negatively affects children because it reduces time spent with parents: (1) that maternal employment reduces children’s time with parents, and (2) that time with parents affects child outcomes. We analyze children’s time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and use child fixed-effects and IV estimations to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that working mothers trade quantity of time for better “quality” of time. On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children’s development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children’s development. Stratification by mothers’ education reveals that although all children, regardless of mother’s education, benefit from spending educational and structured time with their mothers, mothers who are high school graduates have the greatest difficulty balancing work and childcare. We find some evidence that fathers compensate for maternal employment by increasing types of activities that can foster child development as well as types of activities that may be detrimental. Overall, we find that the effects of maternal employment are ambiguous because (1) employment does not necessarily reduce children’s time with parents, and (2) not all types of parental time benefit child development.

Asian children’s verbal development: A comparison of the United States and Australia

Using longitudinal cohort studies from Australia and the United States, we assess the pervasiveness of the Asian academic advantage by documenting White-Asian differences in verbal development from early to middle childhood. In the United States, Asian children begin school with higher verbal scores than Whites, but their advantage erodes over time. The initial verbal advantage of Asian American children is partly due to their parents socioeconomic advantage and would have been larger had it not been for their mothers English deficiency. In Australia, Asian children have lower verbal scores than Whites at age 4, but their scores grow a faster rate and converge towards those of Whites by age 8. The initial verbal disadvantage of Asian Australian children is partly due to their mothers English deficiency and would have been larger had it not been for their Asian parents educational advantage. Asian Australian childrens verbal scores grow at a faster pace, in part, because of their parents educational advantage.

How selective migration enables socioeconomic mobility

ABSTRACT Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s new book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox, revives Asian American scholarship from a period of relative stagnation and elevates the discussion from the morass of cultural essentialism. Its major contributions are to extensively articulate: (1) how much cultural explanations are actually class-based explanations and (2) how selective migration creates the conditions that promote social mobility. This book resolves empirical paradoxes in the scholarship and engages broader debates on race, immigration and inequality.

Life-course changes in the mediation of cognitive and non-cognitive skills for parental effects on children’s academic achievement

We assess life-course changes in how cognitive and noncognitive skills mediate the effect of parental SES on childrens academic achievement using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. Our results show: (1) the direct effect of parental SES declines while the mediating effect of skills increases over time; (2) cognitive and non-cognitive skills differ in their temporal sensitivities to parental origin; and (3) in contrast to the effect of cognitive skills, the mediating effect of non-cognitive skills increases over time because non-cognitive skills are more sensitive to changes in parental SES. Our results offer insights into the dynamic role skill formation play in status attainment.

The Effects of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the Educational Outcomes of Undocumented Students

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is the first large-scale immigration policy to affect undocumented immigrants in the United States in decades and offers eligible undocumented youth temporary relief from deportation as well as renewable work permits. Although DACA has improved the economic conditions and mental health of undocumented immigrants, we do not know how DACA improves the social mobility of undocumented immigrants through its effect on educational attainment. We use administrative data on students attending a large public university to estimate the effect of DACA on undocumented students’ educational outcomes. The data are unique because they accurately identify students’ legal status, account for individual heterogeneity, and allow separate analysis of students attending community colleges versus four-year colleges. Results from difference-in-difference estimates demonstrate that as a temporary work permit program, DACA incentivizes work over educational investments but that the effect of DACA on educational investments depends on how easily colleges accommodate working students. At four-year colleges, DACA induces undocumented students to make binary choices between attending school full-time and dropping out of school to work. At community colleges, undocumented students have the flexibility to reduce course work to accommodate increased work hours. Overall, the results suggest that the precarious and temporary nature of DACA creates barriers to educational investments.

Saving Face: The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth:

respectability. In cities, all men grapple with a general culture of hypergamy, in which women seek to trade up, choosing wealthy and powerful men in a kinship culture where men are responsible for providing economic security. One man, ‘‘Ng,’’ is moved by a higher-earning but compassionate girlfriend who chooses inexpensive gifts and restaurant meals, but then is crushed when her parents object to their dating on the basis of his precarious finances. When he is deserted by the object of his affections, he returns home, where his parents arrange his marriage to a local village woman, a tepid union to which he has resigned himself. This is a finding that complements observations of women migrants: because women can leverage patriarchal expectations to optimize marriage choices in cities, men fare better in rural communities, where traditional kinship norms yield automatic status and authority. Masculine Compromise tracks as well the changing division of household labor within migrant families. Choi and Peng offer a spectrum of gender relations: in some families, men exempt themselves from household labor; in others, they strategically avoid it; still others accept household labor selectively; and, finally, some share household responsibilities equally. They organize their analysis as a typology, an approach that calls to mind Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung’s The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. Like Hochschild and Machung, Choi and Peng let their informants describe their own gender ideologies, then point out discrepancies between their claimed views and their actual practices. One minor quibble must be made. Choi and Peng’s study does not address widespread Chinese reforms, including a 2011 ‘‘New National Urbanization Plan,’’ that selectively grant rural migrants more substantive access to cities. The validity of the study of course does not require the most up-to-date survey of rural-urban citizenship policies. But discussion of these changes could have allowed the authors to analyze structural foundations for variations in masculine practice. For example, do better rural pension coverage and higher rural welfare subsidies for aging farmers weaken expectations that men establish patrilocal residence so they may care for aging parents? Likewise, does increased enrollment of migrant children in urban schools reduce men’s expectations that women abstain from migration? Masculine Compromise presents a true-tolife depiction of the experience of rural men living on the margins of urban society. It does so with subtlety and sensitivity, quietly documenting men’s private aspirations and personal failures rather than attempting overdetermined structural statements on the character of masculinity under crisis. Smartly, it quickly references then dispenses with categorical terms like hegemonic or failed masculinities (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), concepts too functionalist to capture symbolic self-definitions of manhood. One hopes Choi and Peng’s approach will spur future studies of masculinity in other contexts of rapid economic change.