Education Attainments of Ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese Vietnamese: More Insights about Asian American Education Paradox

• In Event: 3181 - Section on Asia and Asian America Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 02. Education and Schooling

Abstract

The Asian American education literature demonstrates that 1.5- and second-generation Vietnamese have one of the most remarkable intergenerational mobility in the United States. There are three major structural explanations for Asian American immigrants’ education achievement: immigrant selectivity, host-country reception, and ethnic community organization. Structurally, educational electivity are less applicable to the Vietnamese case, given that most Vietnamese refugees arrived with few job skills, minimal education and no English language ability. Host-country reception appears to be a more plausible explanation because Vietnamese received generous governmental and institutional assistance. Lastly, ethnic communities and social networks have been shown to powerfully shape the educational outcomes of Vietnamese immigrant children (Lee and Zhou 2015; Lee and Zhou 2017). What has been lost in these studies, however, is the substantial intra-national ethnic differences in educational attainment and their implications to our understanding of Asian American education as a whole. Additionally, previous studies are mostly qualitative and limited in specific geographic locations (Lee and Zhou 2015; Zhou and Bankston 1998), and there is a dearth of quantitative research using national representative data. Using 1980, 1990, 2000 censuses as well as 2010 American Community Survey, we document intragroup educational heterogeneity among Vietnamese refugees by examining two distinctive subgroups—ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese Vietnamese, and three cohorts—first-, 1.5- and second-generation. Our results consistently show that first-generation Chinese Vietnamese have much lower levels of education compared to ethnic Vietnamese, but their children’s education achievement is better than 1.5- and second-generation ethnic Vietnamese and even closer to that of Chinese immigrant children. Our findings lend indirect evidence to the ethnic community hypothesis.

Authors

• Jie Min

• Jing Li, Rice University