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So I was reading ‘Too Asian’? which says The upshot is that race is defining Canadian university campuses in a way it did not 25 years ago. Here's a post about it by angry asian man.
I have encountered anti-Asian attitudes a lot as a maths major and tutor, I think the dynamic here is moderately similar to Canada.
It would be nice if instead of handwringing that Asian kids are getting BETTER GRADES THAN WHITE PEOPLE OMG anyone cared about the fact that rich white kids remain and have always been SIGNIFICANTLY overrepresented at universities in Canada/Australia etc.
I hope I'm not being derailing bringing class into it, but I think it's worth bringing up as part of the same overall imbalance.
I imagined how it would look if it was about rich kids in Australia, since that inequality struck me going to a private school and then uni as a white working class kid. Obviously you could do the same thing with race, but I didn't trust myself to do so myself without going to a weird place. Also rich people are a minority who do not fit in with the values Australia was founded on (as a penal colony)
“Rich kids get more support from their parents financially and academically.”
“At graduation an Australian—i.e. working class—mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the rich kids in the country are taking up university spots,”
“I do have traditional upper middle class parents. I feel the pressure of finding a good job and raising a good family."
“If I feel like it’s going to be an event where it’s all working class people, I probably wouldn’t want to go,” she says. “There’s a lot of just drinking. It’s not that I don’t like working class people. But you tend to hang out with people of the same class.”
In my experience, yes, international students from East Asia do work harder on average, since if nothing else their parents have outlaid a significant investment getting them here. I'm not sure that they work harder than other sorts of international students though, and if they're taking all the spots then I don't have a problem with universities limiting the number of places allowed for international students at public universities, it is important to make sure that our own citizens get an education. But that is not the same thing as limiting the number of Asians.
Either we have a "meritocracy" which judges just on marks, or we don't. If we care that certain groups are under/over represented, we should worry just as much about poor, disabled, Indigenous, rural etc students as rich white ablebodied urban ones. If we don't care then: suck it up white kids! Actually, I like a mix of both of those options. Oh noes white kids aren't getting the world handed to them on a platter quite as much as they are used to! My heart bleeds.
Some miscellaneous thoughts:
Chinese Indonesian students were a small but notable proportion of my private all-girls highschool: The Indonesian government had (still has?) a quota for how many Chinese Indonesians were allowed at university, so Chinese Indonesian parents sent their kids here for highschool to get a handle on the culture/language before sending them to Australian universities (how dare they demand an education and support the Australian economy!). According to their parents maths leads to finance leads to jobs, while we Australian girls had that "girls don't do maths" thing and so my calculus class was roughly half Chinese Indonesian girls, half other (mostly Anglo Australians), divided very obviously down the middle with me as the only white girl on the Chinese Indonesian side (not a deliberate choice on my part, I took quite a while to notice). And you know what? While I was only friends with one of them, as a group the Chinese Indonesian girls were more accepting and friendly to me as an awkward geeky working class white girl than the rest of the class (mostly cliquey rich white girls(*)), especially since a lot of them didn't actually like maths very much and I was willing to explain it to them. They were also (shock!) actual human beings who were fun to be around. They were less prone to talking about boys and drinking and drugs but I was ok with that (and I met many Asians at uni and school who were all about the drinking/drugs/boys/parties etc).
I think it's very important not to confuse international students from Asia with Asian Australians (or Asian Canadians), since there are complex cultural differences (and Asian Australian culture is not just Asian culture "diluted" by white Australian culture). It's also important not to flatten the cultural difference between Asians: Chinese Indonesians are different to Chinese Singaporeans are different to Indian Singaporeans etc, plus of course there are a great many mixed race Asian Australians who have even more complicated cultural attitudes. And even within a given cultural ethnic and national group people are individuals and will differ greatly!
Having worked as a maths tutor I find the "Asians are naturally better at maths" stereotype really annoying. If anything, the Asian maths students I met were worse at maths on average since they were less likely to go "I suck at maths, may as well give up and major in something easy". If they didn't understand they would ask questions until they did rather than giving up in despair, I think a lot of Asian cultures (Singapore in particular) value maths more than Australia tends to, and as a mathematician I can only approve. (Of course I've met plenty of mathophobe Asians too, this is a generalisation)
When I signed up as a tutor online I decided to put my picture up since I have a friendly nonthreatening face. I had one student actually tell me that she hired me because I didn't look Asian, when I looked aghast she back-pedalled and said something about wanting someone who spoke English. I took down my picture after that, and wondered if such attitudes were part of my subconscious reasoning.
(*)Though some weren't cliquey, or weren't rich, or weren't white.
I have encountered anti-Asian attitudes a lot as a maths major and tutor, I think the dynamic here is moderately similar to Canada.
It would be nice if instead of handwringing that Asian kids are getting BETTER GRADES THAN WHITE PEOPLE OMG anyone cared about the fact that rich white kids remain and have always been SIGNIFICANTLY overrepresented at universities in Canada/Australia etc.
I hope I'm not being derailing bringing class into it, but I think it's worth bringing up as part of the same overall imbalance.
I imagined how it would look if it was about rich kids in Australia, since that inequality struck me going to a private school and then uni as a white working class kid. Obviously you could do the same thing with race, but I didn't trust myself to do so myself without going to a weird place. Also rich people are a minority who do not fit in with the values Australia was founded on (as a penal colony)
“Rich kids get more support from their parents financially and academically.”
“At graduation an Australian—i.e. working class—mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the rich kids in the country are taking up university spots,”
“I do have traditional upper middle class parents. I feel the pressure of finding a good job and raising a good family."
“If I feel like it’s going to be an event where it’s all working class people, I probably wouldn’t want to go,” she says. “There’s a lot of just drinking. It’s not that I don’t like working class people. But you tend to hang out with people of the same class.”
In my experience, yes, international students from East Asia do work harder on average, since if nothing else their parents have outlaid a significant investment getting them here. I'm not sure that they work harder than other sorts of international students though, and if they're taking all the spots then I don't have a problem with universities limiting the number of places allowed for international students at public universities, it is important to make sure that our own citizens get an education. But that is not the same thing as limiting the number of Asians.
Either we have a "meritocracy" which judges just on marks, or we don't. If we care that certain groups are under/over represented, we should worry just as much about poor, disabled, Indigenous, rural etc students as rich white ablebodied urban ones. If we don't care then: suck it up white kids! Actually, I like a mix of both of those options. Oh noes white kids aren't getting the world handed to them on a platter quite as much as they are used to! My heart bleeds.
Some miscellaneous thoughts:
Chinese Indonesian students were a small but notable proportion of my private all-girls highschool: The Indonesian government had (still has?) a quota for how many Chinese Indonesians were allowed at university, so Chinese Indonesian parents sent their kids here for highschool to get a handle on the culture/language before sending them to Australian universities (how dare they demand an education and support the Australian economy!). According to their parents maths leads to finance leads to jobs, while we Australian girls had that "girls don't do maths" thing and so my calculus class was roughly half Chinese Indonesian girls, half other (mostly Anglo Australians), divided very obviously down the middle with me as the only white girl on the Chinese Indonesian side (not a deliberate choice on my part, I took quite a while to notice). And you know what? While I was only friends with one of them, as a group the Chinese Indonesian girls were more accepting and friendly to me as an awkward geeky working class white girl than the rest of the class (mostly cliquey rich white girls(*)), especially since a lot of them didn't actually like maths very much and I was willing to explain it to them. They were also (shock!) actual human beings who were fun to be around. They were less prone to talking about boys and drinking and drugs but I was ok with that (and I met many Asians at uni and school who were all about the drinking/drugs/boys/parties etc).
I think it's very important not to confuse international students from Asia with Asian Australians (or Asian Canadians), since there are complex cultural differences (and Asian Australian culture is not just Asian culture "diluted" by white Australian culture). It's also important not to flatten the cultural difference between Asians: Chinese Indonesians are different to Chinese Singaporeans are different to Indian Singaporeans etc, plus of course there are a great many mixed race Asian Australians who have even more complicated cultural attitudes. And even within a given cultural ethnic and national group people are individuals and will differ greatly!
Having worked as a maths tutor I find the "Asians are naturally better at maths" stereotype really annoying. If anything, the Asian maths students I met were worse at maths on average since they were less likely to go "I suck at maths, may as well give up and major in something easy". If they didn't understand they would ask questions until they did rather than giving up in despair, I think a lot of Asian cultures (Singapore in particular) value maths more than Australia tends to, and as a mathematician I can only approve. (Of course I've met plenty of mathophobe Asians too, this is a generalisation)
When I signed up as a tutor online I decided to put my picture up since I have a friendly nonthreatening face. I had one student actually tell me that she hired me because I didn't look Asian, when I looked aghast she back-pedalled and said something about wanting someone who spoke English. I took down my picture after that, and wondered if such attitudes were part of my subconscious reasoning.
(*)Though some weren't cliquey, or weren't rich, or weren't white.