Disaggregating Ethnic Categories: An Analysis of Educational Attainment for California Adult Asian Americans

Research on the educational attainment of Asian Americans largely focuses on their high achievement, masking the low achievement of varying Asian subgroups. The current study was designed to 1) assess the variance of educational attainment among Asian subgroups that may be hidden by studies that do not disaggregate the Asian population, and 2) determine the role of ethnicity as a predictor of educational attainment. Results from applying an analysis of variance (ANOVA) to data derived from the 2007 American Community Survey for California indicate that English language ability holds the largest explanatory power for educational attainment of Asian subgroups, while ethnicity has only a moderate effect on educational attainment. We conclude that wide variation exists across the educational attainment of Asian subgroups. The implications of this study can be used to inform policy makers, researchers, and higher education administrators of the varying needs of Asian American subgroups. Introduction The Asian population is becoming one of the fastest growing populations in California with an increase of over 500 percent between 1970 and 1998 (Public Policy Institute, 2001). The burgeoning enrollment of Asians on college campuses makes it imperative that the factors that influence educational attainment of Asian ethnic groups are understood. The Asian population has often been referred to as the "model minority" since the emergence of research in this area over four decades ago. This viewpoint asserts that Asian Americans possess the tools necessary to make it on their own and should be the model for other minority groups. This perception may, however, disregard the struggles and challenges that Asian ethnic subgroups face and implies that they are assumed to be uniformly successful in education, work, and society. Research on educational achievement and success often includes and is limited to the five most popular categories of White, Black, Latino, Asian, and Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. This broad categorization does not allow for investigation of variance within the ethnic groups. The widespread use of these categories can be traced to the definitions used by the federal Office of Management and Budget, which provides guidelines for collecting data on race and ethnicity to all governmental agencies. The United States Census Bureau, for example, uses these definitions of race and ethnicity in collecting data on the U.S. population. The definition of "ethnicity" is a person or the person's parents or ancestors nationality group, heritage, lineage or country of birth before arriving in the United States. The basic categories of ethnicity include Hispanic or Latino, or not Hispanic or Latino. Race is defined as the socially constructed definition used in the United States and does not reflect any biological, anthropological, or genetic criteria. This amalgamation of the Asian ethnicity does not allow for consideration of the influence of geographical regions or migration patterns on the educational attainment of Asian subgroups. Therefore, this study uses the term "Asian subgroups" to describe the variance between and within the Asian population. Asian subgroups include Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, Laotian, Vietnamese, Asian Indian, and Thai. Current discussions of Asian Americans in academic research primarily focus on their high-educational achievement (Goyette & Xie, 1999; Wong, 1990) and the value they place on hard work and education as paths to upward social mobility. Additional attention is paid to their likely success as engineers, computer scientists, or mathematidans (Song & Glick 2004). These findings, in large part, lead to the stereotype of the "model minority" label for all Asian students (Kao, 1995; Goyette & Xie, 1999; Song & Glick, 2004). Because of the wide acceptance of this stereotype, few studies have examined the differences among Asian Americans and the possibility that the "model minority" label could be masking important factors associated with educational achievement and social mobility. …