Trends in Asian American Educational Attainment: Evidence from the 2000 Census

Yu Xie, University of Michigan
Kimberly Goyette, Temple University

By "Asian Americans" we refer to American residents who are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from a general area in Asia. The economic conditions, political systems, religious practices, and languages are quite different across countries in Asia. As a result, Asian Americans vary greatly by country of origin, which we call ethnicity. However, Asian Americans as a group have different socioeconomic experiences and demographic profiles from whites and blacks. We call differences across these three major groups racial differences. A story about Asian Americans should tell us both how Asians differ from other racial groups and how they vary among themselves across ethnic groups. Furthermore, the experiences of Asian Americans have also changed over time. In this paper, we uses Census and other data to compare the educational attainment and achievement of Asian Americans relative to whites and blacks and across Asian American ethnicities over the 1960-2000 period.