Does the Asian Success Formula Have a Downside?

By Deanna Kuhn

The latest data show U.S. 12th graders performing below the international average for 21 countries in math and science. An October report from the National Academies, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” takes note of this fact and sounds a warning: “[W]e are worried about the future prosperity of the United States,” the panel of experts said.

Around the same time, another new publication, Top of the Class , a book by two sisters, both highly successful young Asian-American women, was released. In it, the authors advise parents who want successful children to raise them just as they were raised: in a strict household where their parents invested time and effort to inculcate a work ethic in them, making clear that they were expected to excel and that their failure to do so would reflect poorly on the family. Research suggests that the authors’ family is not at all extraordinary within the context of its culture. Asian-American parents (compared with European-American or Hispanic-American parents) are the only group, one study reports, that expects their children to obtain graduate degrees.

Does this formula for success from members of a high-achieving subculture offer mainstream American families the solution they need to set their children on a path to academic excellence and, ultimately, to success in a competitive global economy? At the very least, parental investment in children’s education seems unlikely to be a bad thing. Yet could there be a downside...