Will the Next Generation Slack Off?
Timothy Egan of the New York Times reports on the current Asian “demographic moment” at UC Berkeley. While California is only 12 percent Asian, the freshman class at Cal is 46 percent Asian. Some argue that the number would be higher if Asian applicants were held to the same standards as non-Asian applicants.
To me, one of the highlights of a very interesting article is the finding that 95 percent of the Asian freshman are the sons and daughters of at least one immigrant. I’ll wager that when these freshmen become parents, they will have a much tougher time cracking the educational whip on their acculturated-to-a-fault children. Generation, I predict, will be a good predictor of educational achievement in Asian-Americans, with first-generation being the highest achievers and later generations getting drawn to the American mean.
That said, I don’t think even later generations will come anywhere close to the American mean because the relative wealth of Asian-Americans will ensure that future generations are attending better than average high schools. The advantage income gives an applicant can be seen in Egan’s finding that “about 60 percent of white freshmen’s families [at Berkeley] make $100,000 or more.” To me, it’s not that there are too many Asians or whites at Berkeley, but rather that there are too few poor kids. And it’s not the admissions process that is the problem so much as American public education. As Eric Liu says in the article:
Until all students — from rural outposts to impoverished urban settings — are given equal access to the Advanced Placement classes that have proved to be a ticket to the best colleges, then the idea of pure meritocracy is bunk, he says. “They’re measuring in a fair way the results of an unfair system.”
