Culture and Immigrant Selectivity in Shaping Asian American Education: Evidence from Historical Census Data

Asian Americans, even those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, achieve extraordinary educational outcomes, defying the expectations of the well-established status attainment theory that family background is strongly associated with educational attainments. This phenomenon is known as the Asian American Achievement Paradox (AAAP). Positive selectivity of Asian immigrants and cultural accounts are two competing explanations, but they are rarely disentangled empirically due to the high collinearity between immigrant selectivity and culture. This study offers a modified version of cultural explanations, clarifies the distinctions between competing explanations based on the same criteria, and tests them by investigating the educational achievements of second-generation Asian Americans using the full-count 1940 Census matched to the 1930 Census. During this period, Asian immigrants were not hyper-selected, so the entanglement of immigrant selectivity and culture is less of a concern. The results are largely consistent with the cultural explanation, revealing the AAAP to be a century-old phenomenon with a previously unknown complexity. The transmission of culture from the society of origin is further evident in that the AAAP is limited to East Asians and does not apply to Filipino Americans, even though contextual selectivity in education is similar across Asian ethnic groups in 1940.