16 ms·

Something that many HNers will probably be embarrased to admit being surprised by is how higher education attainment rates for immigrants don't exclude African

• codingslave 7y ago
  Most of the reason for immigrant children doing so well is the fact that immigrants are often more driven, ambitious, and at the top of their peer group. So the USA gets a biased sample of immigrants from countries like Nigeria. None of this is happening in a vacuum, and interpreting it as such is misguided propaganda.
  • glofish 7y ago
    Correct. A self-selecting sample if there ever was one. Immigrating and deciding to live in another country takes a lot determination. If you take ambitious and motivated black parents in America I am quite sure their children far outcompete the averages.
    • plopz 7y ago
      How long in the family history does it take to lose that ambition/motivation? The colonists back in the day had to have had those same qualities. Maybe even more so with all the added risk and dangers of the time.
      • watwut 7y ago
        Afaik, next generation takes up values and habits of society they are in and their children are like everybody else.
  • naravara 7y ago
    Immigrants are also forced to develop their own peer communities and support networks since mainstream culture, stores, and media don't cater to them. Growing up I was surprised by how low the expectations were for my American classmates from their parents. A "goof off" from my community would be struggling to get Bs while a goof from the non-immigrant groups would be struggling to pass at all. And being a "straight-A student" was a baseline expectation rather than a marker of being a rare and special talent. The bar for how many sacrifices parents are willing to make to set their kids up for success is higher too. I got a B- in Math ONCE and my parents immediately hired me a tutor and started forcing me to do remedial exam drills, which is a reaction I don't think I would have seen in the average or median American household among my peer group. I don't think it's any special level of intelligence among the immigrant community, but I think there is sort of an "Overton window" of cultural expectations for what are normal ways to spend your time, what's an appropriate spread for grades to be at, or what things you should be prioritizing in life. I think immigrant communities maintain an Overton window that prioritizes scholastics over the mainstream culture. This is probably in large part due to selection bias since the immigration process chooses the cream of the crop, but the durability of this tendency across generations is probably set up by the higher standards I talked about.
    • bsanr2 7y ago
      That educational attainment was a priority for my extended family, and that there are high-profile fights for educational equity in cities across the country, lead me to believe that even non-immigrant black families and communities do have similar values. I wonder how much resource access, rather than intention, matters.
    • GcVmvNhBsU 7y ago
      One of the books that I read last year, I can’t remember which [1], said that the greatest contributor to wealth over the long run is education. My unfounded assumption that explains the reasoning of why you did not experience American families reacting the same way that yours did is: the American belief in rugged individualism. I think that most Americans would say that “hard work” is the biggest contributor to wealth [2]. Being an immigrant, I guess that your family, and probably society they are from, adhered to the former belief, and that is why they took your education so seriously? [1] Could have come from: Can American Capitalism Survive?, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, maybe Enlightenment Now. [2] It could very well be luck: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068
  • danans 7y ago
    It is simultaneously the case that those African immigrants benefit from intact family and community structures, just like other immigrant groups. For example, they have people in their community they can trust to care for their children, or to offer them job opportunities at businesses that serve their communities specific cultural needs, like a Nigerian grocery. Trust networks are extremely valuable, and they underpin a lot of the wealth, or lack thereof, in communities. Poorer African Americans often have limited community and cultural support systems and the implied access to trust networks. They instead have to contend with the massive and continuous structural damage inflicted upon their communities through the history of the country, including Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, social isolation, and the war on drugs.
    • kaitai 7y ago
      History echoes and echoes and echoes. Redlining is still huge in its effects on generational wealth: housing is the single largest mechanism for wealth transfer in American families, and systematically and intentionally excluding black Americans has resulted in billions in dollars of vanished wealth. Go back in history and look at the Freedman's Bank: established during Reconstruction for freed slaves, it was placed under different oversight than other banks of the time and was used by Henry Cooke (a white guy) to give unsecured loans to his other foolish investments. He wiped out the bank, losing $57 million dollars (mildly inflation adjusted) of black American's money in 1874. Imagine if black families from 1874 had retained their $57 million dollars and been able to invest -- the capital they'd have today would be dramatically different. Then look again at today: in Detroit, families are still losing their homes because of confusing tax rules. Many families were exempted from property tax, but didn't get the paperwork properly completed and renewed every year, so they didn't pay property tax as they thought they had the exemption, but now the city is foreclosing on them due to back taxes even though they're now exempt and -- AND -- the city owes them a refund for overstating the same taxes when these families did pay! It's amazing when you stack up the numbers from redlining, the Freedman's bank failure, these tax shenanigans, and the impact of differential sentencing for minor drug offenses propagating through to inability to access student loans and housing assistance.... (remember, if you rape someone, you can get government student loans, but if you had a baggie of marijuana, you cannot). So much money. And immigrant families, because they're coming here now, have not faced the same systematic impacts.
  • bsanr2 7y ago
    I hear this a lot, but I don't know if it's particularly true. For black immigrants, I find more compelling the notion that their comfort with, and belief in, pursuing higher education isn't rocked so profoundly by white supremacy, as is so for native blacks. They're simply not as exposed to anti-black messaging, from the history of discrimination in America to the demographically disproportionate reporting of crime in American media. Add to that the arguably superior education of black Caribbeans, who are free to support higher standards with the requisite resources and are not stymied by regressive funding policy, and you have a population that is often more prepared for the rigors of higher education. Which is pretty damning of the way America treats its own people. Edit: I want to add that this is not simply my own speculation; this is the explanation that I've heard in part from several friends and acquaintances. They're often horrified by the leniency of standards for even high performing American students, and they will often state that they are not "black" in the way that native African Americans are, and are therefore not subject to the same biases and limitations.
    • GavinMcG 7y ago
      African immigrants can have racist beliefs about black Americans just as much as anyone. (Including black Americans.) Kendi's "How to be an Antiracist" gets into this in a way I found to be eye-opening.
• rhacker 7y ago
  Indeed. While you're covering multiple topics, I wanted to touch on the education specifically. I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job. Beyond that the US education system, and the EPA works this way too, is that as we find the numbers don't add up to what we want, we lower the standards until we're at a point we think we can achieve some goal. If they simply made standards that were wwaaaay higher, they would be forced to realize everything is underfunded.
  • leetcrew 7y ago
    > I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job. I don't think the two have much to do with each other. being a good k-12 teacher is much more about the teaching skills than the subject mastery. anyone who can complete a stem major should be able to understand all the concepts they would have to present in a high school math class.
    • twoheadedboy 7y ago
      I used to think this was true, until I got older and realized just how bad I am at writing, and how not everything is just math and science.
      • leetcrew 7y ago
        sure, but someone with a BA in english would do a fine job teaching writing intensive courses. outside of stem, people aren't facing the huge pay differential from industry anyway.
  • 7y ago
• jeffdavis 7y ago
  "...there is something about the American education system - and perhaps our overal culture - that is failing our children..." Perhaps the whole idea that there's a "system" that's responsible for everyone's success is the problem?
  • booboolayla 7y ago
    ^^^ this. Whenever I hear someone blame "the system" I cringe inside.
  • bsanr2 7y ago
    Probably not.
  • manthedudeguy 7y ago
    Your username makes this comment pretty funny. And no, I don't think that idea is the problem.
• bobbyz 7y ago
  In all my years browsing HN I don't remember reading anything racist, overt or implied. If your first paragraph is true, I think it would have more to do with the media's portrayal of people of African American and Hispanic descent.
• kaitai 7y ago
  This is definitely worth thinking about, and in particular to put it into today's political context, Nigerian-Americans have the most PhDs per capita of any immigrant or native-born group -- and yet Nigeria was just put under travel restrictions. Having friends & colleagues from both American Black and African and Black Caribbean backgrounds has given me a tiny glimpse into some of the difference in background and treatment. A Caribbean friend who came here for her PhD in mathematics mentioned to me that she was shocked at how she was treated here in the US -- in her home country, she was universally respected as an educator and a professional, while in the US she was... respected in the classroom, but not on the street. A different friend whose family has been in the US longer than mine, on the other hand, talked about being discouraged from a career in the National Park Service: his grandfather in particular had stories of the violence inflicted on black people in the woods, and felt it would be a very unsafe career. There's a really complex interaction of history, current economics, and personal choice, mediated by our schools. Just looking at the numbers, the US education system is not doing well by black students in particular and many children overall. Rural white kids are also not being served well. No one is getting good math education. And as long as we continue to divide against each other in a fight for artificially limited resources, we won't do better as a nation.
  • rayiner 7y ago
    I was with you until the last point. The resources are not artificially limited. The US spends almost a trillion tax dollars each year on education. We’re at over 4.1% of GDP spent on education (excluding private money), well above Germany, Spain or Italy (about 3.6%), about the same as the UK (4.2%), and not too far below France (4.6%). https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-education.htm https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-educati... Those are the five largest EU countries comprising more than 2/3 of the EU population. We also spend more than Japan, Ireland, and about the same as Korea. I think we absolutely need to spend money to address disparities in the experience of African American kids in this country. I think the wrong way to do that is to funnel more money into disproportionately white teachers and school administrators. Direct cash payments to inner city families I think would go a lot further.
    • 7y ago
• acephal 7y ago
  Black SWE here, grew up on the west side of Chicago, I don't think most white people understand how bad the literacy situation is. I could read competently before I even got to school and I went to grammar school in the 90s. First day of first grade, I found out no one could competently read a sentence. In fact, whole school (which has closed) was on this remedial education program called Advanced Directives or something. I'd never seen a book where the words were broken up syllable-by-syllable before I got to this school and I'm like 7 years old, and kids struggled with that. Making this a little more personal, I ultimately had to be separated from the other kids, and you can imagine why: you can't have one kid making all the others feel embarrassed and inadequate. But this also was a major source of resentment and ostracization that I'm still dealing with to this day.
  • JabavuAdams 7y ago
    This. Systemic racism ... aaaand ... loser gangster culture. Would love to see the numbers on whether it's easier to become a chartered accountant or a rap artist. I'm seeing the other side of this, recently (disadvantaged white people). It's astonishing the loser mentalities and habits that many disadvantaged children learn from their early caregivers and peer group. As middle to upper middle class people, we often have no idea how many little bits of knowledge we pick up to work the system (legally), from those around us.
    • ianai 7y ago
      I think of it more as the bullying culture. I got bullied a lot for simply looking “nerdy” and doing my homework. Affects me to this day. It was “cool” to be dumb and flunk out. That’s a recipe for a system that holds people down.
    • bsanr2 7y ago
      >aaaand ... loser gangster culture. No. You have parents that are not able to attend to pre-school education, whether it's a time or money issue, or even an education issue themselves. And then you have children, let down by parents who were let down by society, who are ashamed of how far behind they are. The idea that you can further shame people into "shaping up" is farcical. Please stop being part of the problem.
• golemiprague 7y ago
  It's not the American education system problem, it works well for Asians or whites. It is the African American culture of being a gangster rather than studying and no school is going to change it, this is something they have to change within their own culture. Also fixing the families there, stop bringing children out of wedlock and behave properly like black families used to do 50 years ago. There might be some genetic traits also, maybe the slaves were not that smart to start with and they can't close the IQ gap. The new immigrants from Africa are the descendants of people who sold those slaves, so obviously they were better, at least in warfare. They might also be from the upper classes, basically just having a higher IQ to start with. An interesting thing is to look at England where blacks are all immigrants, there are more college educated blacks than whites percentage wise but the non educated ones are pretty problematic with the same gang issues as in the US. So maybe it is just black culture that is screwed up, who knows.
• wutbrodo 7y ago
  > All of this seems to suggest that there is something about the American education system - and perhaps our overal culture - that is failing our children, and our black children in particular. You're missing a huge cause before jumping to this conclusion. African immigrants don't just differ from African-Americans in that they weren't born here; they're also a subpopulation that's gone through the dramatic filter of the US's legal immigration policy. If you have a filter that is explicitly trying to select for the educated and economically productive, it's practically a tautology to say that the outcome of that filter will consist of a more educated and productive population than your control group. I can't imagine the same dynamic wouldn't hold for recent immigrants from most regions vs their many-generations-American counterparts.