Culture and Immigrant Selectivity in Shaping Asian American Education: Evidence from Historical Census Data

Asian Americans, even those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, achieve extraordinary educational outcomes, defying the expectations of the well-established status attainment theory that family background is strongly associated with educational attainments. This phenomenon is known as the Asian American Achievement Paradox (AAAP). Positive selectivity of Asian immigrants and cultural accounts are two competing explanations, but they are rarely disentangled empirically due to the high collinear