In the past three years, as universities across the country have abandoned standardized testing requirements and moving to more holistic models of admission, a persistent but largely unexamined question has arisen: Would these changes take place if white students were at the top of the academic food chain? The achievement gap between Asian-American and white high school students on standardized tests has grown over the past decade. In 2018For example, Asian-American students scored 100 points higher on the SAT on average than white students. Just three years later, by 2021, that gap had increased by more than 25 percent to 127. Many of the universities that have dropped the SAT requirement have quoted a desire for diversity and equality and a de-emphasis on harsh academic competition. (This has always been erroneous and, frankly, selfish reasoning to me. If elite colleges want truly economically and racially diverse campuses, free from the academic stressors that plague high school students, they should take their own advice and stop being so fierce. compete to prove they are the most exclusive higher education places in the world.)
All this seems like a noble goal. But is it possible instead that the shift towards greater diversity and away from academic competition could also be a way to ensure that students from white, wealthy families can still compete with high-achieving Asian-American students? In other words, how much of these changes should we attribute to an evolution in the way we think about equality in education, and how much should be attributed to white parents who now fear that their children will be outcompeted?
Natasha Warikooa sociology professor at Tufts, has published a fascinating and valuable book on this phenomenon entitled “Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites Pursuing the American Dream in Suburban Schools.” Warikoo describes her findings from a three-year ethnography of an anonymized suburb she calls Woodcrest. Like many suburbs around major cities, Woodcrest has a browning of the population the past 50 years. In 1970, the city was more than 95 percent white, thanks to years of discriminatory zoning. Beginning in the 1990s, educated Asian immigrants who came to the United States to work in the tech industry began moving to Woodcrest in search of better schools. Now about a third of Woodcrest’s population is Asian-American.
So what happens when a large influx of wealthy Asian immigrants, mostly from China and India, comes to a liberal, wealthy suburb that has always been proud of its academic achievements? Warikoo rightly notes that for years scholars and sociologists have simply assumed that these relatively privileged and upwardly mobile Asian Americans would simply merge into the upper middle class. What she found during her research is that the transition isn’t as smooth, largely because many of the white families living in these suburbs fear that the new competition from Asian students will reduce their own children’s chances of getting into the elite. , will harm colleges. As a result, some white parents in Woodcrest called for less emphasis on academics and a prioritization of mental health. Like the steps away from the SAT, these changes sound worthwhile, but it’s worth examining the motivations behind them.
I spoke with Dr Warikoo about her book and the issues it explores, including her theories about why Asian-American students in Woodcrest have fared so well, the limits of assimilation and what she thinks needs to be done about the mindset of scarcity she believes drives all this.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
First of all, we must acknowledge that Woodcrest is a pseudonym and you do not state what state it is in. But can you tell us where some of these upper-middle-class Asian-American and white suburbs are located?
To find a site for this research, I looked at cities with median household incomes in the top 20 percent — over $100,000 in 2010 — and where the Asian-American population was at least 20 percent in 2010 and since 2000. had grown. There are 34 cities across the country that fit that description, including Cupertino and Saratoga in Northern California, Sugar Land in Texas (a suburb of Houston), Syosset on Long Island, and Lexington in Massachusetts. Both white and Asian parents move to many of these places to send their children to their top-rated public schools. Many are suburbs that grew during the era of school desegregation, when whites left the cities in droves and passed laws designed to keep working class people out, such as minimum lot size requirements and a ban on the building multi-family houses.
Why are Asian families moving to these affluent white suburbs?
For the same reason that white American families move to them — in pursuit of the public schools, because of the school system, strong reputation, high level of achievement, and partly because the community is so well-educated. Some Asian immigrant families are also attracted to this city because there is a quorum of people from their own country, especially Indians and Chinese immigrants, so they like the diversity.
How are these families received by the people who already live there? You note in your book that many of these communities resemble Woodcrest in that they are filled with affluent, white progressives with Black Lives Matter signs in their yards.
On the one hand, I think there is appreciation for the diversity that these immigrant families bring. They enable those white families to say, “We live in a diverse city.” And they do. Some types of diversity are obviously lacking — there aren’t many Black or Latinx families, for example — but it’s not an exclusively white city.
On the other hand, I think over time, as the Asian-American population grows and their children do quite well academically, there’s – among some white families – a bit of unease about these new Asian families. Those white families might be thinking, these Asian families do things a little bit differently, they focus more on academics than a lot of the white families, they prioritize other things. That raises concerns about how the community is changing.
This only really happens when the immigrant population there reaches a certain number. If it’s just a few, the culture doesn’t really change, but as they grow, concerns arise, such as: Is high school getting too competitive? Are too many people putting their kids in extracurricular math classes so now you can’t get honors unless you take these classes? Or is it now impossible for my child to say goodbye to the class?
In the book you describe what some white parents in Woodcrest see as a loss of status. How does this manifest itself?
There are two reactions I talked about in the book. One is that there is a small minority of white families who take their children out of public schools and send them to private school so they can have a less competitive, less intensive environment.
The other is that they are pushing for policies to reduce academic competition. The school had already finished the class ranking, they don’t mention a farewell student – all that had happened before I started this investigation. Then they reduced the homework. And this was something that many of the white parents talked about, is important to them. Many Asian families disagreed. The neighborhood actually ended up with homework in primary schools. And many Asian families also disagreed.
Interestingly, there was never any limitation on the number of extracurricular activities children can participate in or the number of hours on the field that sports can take, or anything like that.
How much of some of the current shifts in education policy — whether it’s getting rid of the SAT or the push to eliminate test-in-magnet schools with large Asian populations — stems from these loss-of-status concerns?
It is true that black activists have been talking for decades about how the SAT is problematic; the way students are admitted to these exam schools is problematic. The NAACP has worked a lot on this for decades and has not made much progress. And is it a coincidence that white people are listening now? I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental.
Still, I see this shift as positive. If we’re going to have elite colleges and high schools, they really need to be accessible to kids of all races and neighborhoods. Currently, the exams seem to make elite colleges and especially exam schools much less accessible to black and Latinx youth, especially those who live in neighborhoods and attend high schools where very few students have attended exam schools in the past.
One of the questions the book raises is to what extent we should attribute Asian success to cultural differences. This is a very controversial topic for the understandable reason that when you say that there are Asian-American cultural norms that help them do well academically, the question arises why other populations don’t do so well. What has your research on this question yielded?
What I reject is the idea that Asians consider education as important as white or black families. The school did a survey, and one of the questions they asked kids was how much pressure your parents put on you to get good grades. And the group that reported the highest level of pressure were the black children. Most of those kids are actually kids who are part of the bus program, so they come from the city center; they don’t live in Woodcrest.
So I think the idea that Asian parents pressure their children and therefore do well in school is not true. What I do see is this: I use this idea of ’cultural repertoires’ in the book. The idea is that we all have a toolkit to move forward. We get these tools from our parents, from our neighbors, from our cousins and aunts and uncles.
So most of these immigrant parents went to school and did well in China and India. That’s how they ended up in Woodcrest. And almost all of these people would have gone to additional academic classes after school when they were kids, because that’s exactly what you do in those countries, right? And that’s the toolbox they bring with them. And because they come from countries where these decisions are made by evaluating their scores on standardized tests, they are preparing for it. And they pass that on to their children.
The American-born, mostly white parents in this city also attended selective colleges. They understand that those colleges want a more complete student; they understand the path to sport through recruiting and having a talent beyond academics. So that’s something that’s going to be important to them. Again, different toolkits.
When I think of families that don’t belong to this community – mostly black and Latinx families – they have their own strategies and they try to do that, but they may not have an additional classroom center in their neighborhood. They may not have relatives who went to a residential four-year college who can explain: What does it take? What does that look like? What do you need?
And so it’s not that they want it any less, it’s just that those strategies aren’t there. For me, those cultural repertoires are a way of thinking about what people do differently.
Jay Caspian Kang (@jaycaspiankang), a writer for Opinion and The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Loneliest Americans.”