Word: math
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...almost every educational gauge, young Asian Americans are soaring. They are finishing way above the mean on the math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test and, according to one comprehensive study of San Diego-area students, outscoring their peers of other races in high school grade-point averages. They spend more time on their homework, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Education found, take more advanced high school courses and graduate with more credits than other American students. A higher percentage of these young people complete high school and finish college than do white American students. Trying to explain...
Many Asian Americans come from an educated elite in their native countries. Their children seem to do especially well. Julian Stanley, a Johns Hopkins psychology professor, studied 292 preteen high scorers on the math portion of the SAT, nearly a quarter of them Asian Americans. He found that 71% of the Asian-Americans' fathers and 21% of their mothers had a doctorate or a medical degree, vs. 39% of the fathers and 10% of the mothers of the non-Asians...
...Such achievements are reflected in the nation's best universities, where math, science and engineering departments have taken on a decidedly Asian character. At the University of Washington, 20% of all engineering students are of Asian descent; at Berkeley the figure is 40%. To win these places, Asian-American students make the SAT seem as easy as taking a driving test. Indeed, 70% of Asian-American 18-year-olds took the SAT in 1985, in contrast to only 28% of all 18-year-olds. The average math score of Asian-American high school seniors that year...
This inclination for math and science is partly explained by the fact that Asian-American students who began their educations abroad arrived in the U.S. with a solid grounding in math but little or no knowledge of English. They are also influenced by the promise of a good job after college. "Asians feel there will be less discrimination in areas like math and science because they will be judged more objectively," says Shirley Hune, an education professor at Hunter College. And, she notes, the return on the investment in education "is more immediate in something like engineering than with...
...commonly credit the influence of parents who are determined that their children take full advantage of what the American educational system has to offer. For many parents, personal sacrifice is involved. Daniel Pak, an 18-year-old from Dallas entering Harvard next month, shines in everything he does, from math to violin. His brother Tony, 20, is studying physics at M.I.T. Their parents had such colleges in mind when they moved to the U.S. in 1970. The boys' father gave up his career as a professor of German literature in South Korea. Unable to get an academic position...