However, Asian immigrants do better than white, Hispanic, or black immigrants, although success for all those groups varies by country of origin. Immigration selection doesn’t explain why some immigrants do better than other immigrants.
Immigration selection affects different national origin groups differently. For example, Mexican immigrants tend to be lower educational attainment (something like 6% with bachelor’s degrees) than either Americans or Mexicans generally, the opposite of immigrants from India, China, Nigeria, and many (but not all) European countries.
https://moguldom.com/154502/nigerian-immigrants-are-more-likely-to-have-a-ba-than-chinese/
or
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-most-educated-in-the-U-S-1600808.php
Not sure what your measure is of “do better” if not level of education. Income?
@OHMomof2
The terms black and Nigerian are not interchangeable.
@roethlisburger No they are not. “Asian” isn’t interchangeable with Chinese or Laotian, either. And there are vast differences between those two groups too.
Maybe the overall comparison is dumb.
It may be irrelevant to the legal issues. I’ll give you that much.
This is mentioned in another thread, but it’s an interesting example of what might happen if admission were based on test scores alone. There are some flaws in the study. They combine black/African American and Hispanic/Latino into one category. It’s unclear how mixed race students are counted by the study. SES takes into account the subjective ranking of occupational prestige.
I completely missed the discussion on recent immigrants of African descent and the differences in educational outcomes in comparison to multi-generational African American households. Those immigrants and their offspring make up a small amount of the African American population, but have had great results academically. I don’t normally separate Black people (our ancestral heritage of being of African descent is a bond and we are seen in the same light by American society as a whole), but let’s talk about Black immigrants.
The general academic successes of Black immigrants shows that there is a path towards educational attainment and that the current “system” is not the only reason for the academic achievement gaps in multi-generational African Americans students. The model Black immigrant group from an academic achievement standpoint (Nigerian immigrants) has higher levels of parental educational attainment, fewer broken homes, higher SES households and those advantages are partly due to a cultural emphasis on education and family. It is one of the things that I believe is missing in a lot of cases from multi-generational African American households (generalization). I see that most multi-generational Black households that I have been around have “talked the talk”, when it comes to education, but I don’t always see the same sacrifices that I see from the many immigrant groups I live around whose cultures emphasize education.
Nigerian-Americans get the benefits of AA despite their successes in higher education. I talked to a good friend recently who was the 1st generation born in America (Nigerian) and who has multiple grad degrees and lives a very prosperous life with his family. For his offspring (or mine for that matter) to ever receive an AA boost (African Americans in every academic decile got accepted at higher percentages than White and Asian American students in those same academic deciles in the Harvard lawsuit is one such example) is just a form of reverse discrimination. It would be easy to prove and comes down to a simple question (would the acceptance rates with all other factors being the same, change at a significant level if the race of each student is shielded during the admissions process?).
My bigger concern (much more than AA) deals is decreasing the gaps across all measures of academic achievement. So whether it is the ACT data that I have seen (50% of all African American students score between a 13-17) back on the last African American data sets released by ACT (2012 and 2013) or the African American/Hispanic male high school graduation rates (I have seen numbers between 60 and 70 percent mostly in the last 5 to 10 years), closing the gaps by those at the bottom of societal hierarchy helps our society as a whole.
On the first point, often they do not. The Nigerian-American family that sued Sidwell Friends in DC included a claim that her counselor rec letter made reference to her Nigerian background and that harmed her chances for being considered for AA. They may be wrong, but it’s in the lawsuit.
On the second point, I wholeheartedly agree.
@ChangeTheGame Elite schools are always going to want diversity. Top AA students (I’m talking about those with comparable scores to the rest of the applicants) are not actually getting an AA boost. But there aren’t enough of them to go around; not even close. The answer can’t be to exclude all of the other strong AA students with slightly lower scores from our top institutions. How does that benefit the AA community long term? It doesn’t. How is that fair that legacies, athletes, and development candidates can get preferences but minorities cannot? Doesn’t that perpetuate the cycle of inequality and opportunity in this country?
@OHMomof2 Didn’t that student end up graduating from UPenn?
@itsgettingreal17 I agree with you that there are not enough African Americans with comparable scores to the rest of the applicant pool. So lets help more underrepresented minorities get to comparable scores to apply to top schools with outreach, resources, and time. I just do not believe in a different standard and I believe that African Americans can compete at similar levels, but we are not because we do not have to. I do not believe in legacies, developmental candidates, or athletes (of sports who are not revenue generating) either. But I don’t believe that those preferences are illegal like AA (although I would like the federal government to reduce government funds provided to schools who have legacies and developmental candidates).
@ChangeTheGame Do you really believe AA students aren’t achieving because of affirmative action? There is no support whatsoever for that position. None. It’s quite ridiculous actually.
And you might not agree with AA, but to say it’s illegal is unsupportable until the current law of the land changes.
Note that the immigration system selects Nigerian (and Indian, Chinese, …) immigrants for higher educational attainment (as skilled workers and PhD students). Any “cultural emphasis on education” is likely due to parents with high educational attainment, not because they are Nigerian (or Indian, Chinese, …). Note also that bachelor’s degree attainment in Nigeria (and India, China, …) is much lower than among immigrants from there, or the US population generally, so immigrants are a non-representative sample of the origin population with respect to educational attainment.
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@itsgettingreal17 I have 1st hand seen African American students who stop trying to improve parts of their resume because they think it is “good enough” to get into their schools of choice (even though they are at the 25 percentile or lower statistically) to selective schools. I disagree with the premise of AA because it is wrong (discrimination) and despite my family being able to reap the benefits, I choose to speak out against it. You are right about the laws of the land not seeing AA as discrimination today, but it is only a matter of time as the Supreme Court has said as much in a 2003 decision. I just prefer to prepare and be ready for the day that AA is ruled illegal. Because it is going to really hurt if we as African Americans have not stepped up as a group from an academic achievement standpoint or don’t come up with more innovative methods that do not involve race.
Yes she did @changethegame
And ucb is correct that immigrants from anywhere other than Mexico/further south are selected by our visa system for higher education so it’s more than fair to say that their children are more academically successful for that reason.
The success of Nigerian immigrants does challenge the idea that black people naturally have a lower IQ and other similar assertions posted here in the past. To me it is very complex, not easily placed just on family values or slavery or current discrimination or lack of reparations or policies that deliberately kept black Americans from pursuing an education for many generations, arguably continuing to the present (but not arguably just a generation ago). There are a lot of factors at play that do not affect Nigerian immigrants at all or the same way.
@ChangeTheGame You make such broad generalizations based on a few students you’ve encountered, but those are in the minority. I don’t even know any AA students like you describe, and I grew up in the hood and have been a mentor to low income students all of my adult life.
@itsgettingreal17 I have been mentoring African American students as well since my sophomore year in college and also have many other resources (parent in non-profit and social work in black communities for 40 years and a wife who has taught in all manners of high schools that I visit often in her teaching career). The observations I spoke about (holding with 25 percentile scores) above has happened more in my own area of middle class kids as the kids from my own inner city and among the inner city kids I have dealt with in Atlanta (through my Church lately) have not had the “stats” to even worry about AA and often chose HBCUs, for profit schools, state directionals, trade schools and community colleges if they can go to college at all.
@ucbalumnus I live in an area close to a few vibrant immigrant communities and one trend I have noticed is that the Black immigrants from some Caribbean Islands (especially Haitian) are achieving at higher levels in school despite not having the same natural advantages as Nigerian immigrants (parents are not as educated) and who are coming from one of the poorest countries in the world. I do not know if this is the norm, but some of those Haitian students are really high achieving despite many disadvantages which I did not see in my inner city upbringing among multi-generational Black students. Even if this group of Haitian students are outliers, it would sure be nice to bottle up whatever those households have figured out.
@OHMomof2 I definitely agree that there are many complex factors involved.
@ChangeTheGame A lot of Jamaicans I know talk about the phenomenon of brain drain - the best educated leaving the country for US, Canada, UK etc. It may be a similar story for Haitians.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/datahub/MPI-Data-Hub_EduAttainment-Nativity%20&%20byCOB_2017.xlsx indicates that immigrants from Haiti and other Caribbean countries tend to have lower bachelor’s attainment than the general US population. However, encounters with specific Haitian students and families in the US may or may not be representative of the entire group.
But probably higher bachelor’s attainment than African Americans.
Of course anecdotes are not data - ought to be a given. Often isn’t, but ought to be 