Why immigrant students prevail at Canadian universities

03/04/2014

Most people who have attended Grade 12 graduation ceremonies or spent time on university campuses in Vancouver or Toronto have seen the signs.

But some may still be surprised by a study by Garnett Picot and Feng Hou, of Statistics Canada, that verifies that young Canadians with immigrant backgrounds are almost twice as likely to go to university as students whose parents were born in Canada.

The study’s hard numbers confirm impressions obtained on Canada’s major urban university campuses – where visible minorities tend to prevail on honour rolls and in business, science and engineering programs.

“Students with immigrant backgrounds in Canada display a significant advantage regarding university attendance,” write Picot, of Queen’s University, and Hou, of the University of Victoria.

The social policy experts found 50 per cent of students who immigrated to Canada go to university, compared to 31 per cent of students who had one parent who is an immigrant and only 25 per cent of students whose parents were both born in Canada.

The university success story is strongest among ethnic Chinese.

“Students with Chinese origins are 40 percentage points more likely to attend university than those with Canadian-born parents,” write Picot and Hou.

“That means that almost three-quarters of students with Chinese origins attend university, more than twice the rate among students with Canadian-born parents.”

What are the policy implications of this? The Picot and Hou study, which is supported by emerging research across Canada and the U.S., highlights an awkward reality for governments and school officials.

Public officials are still formally required to channel energy into affirmative action programs for visible minorities, English-as-a-second language students and immigrants. But these studies show it is the students of those with Canadian parents who are falling behind.

Some scholars are calling for a shift in education priorities in light of studies done by Picot, Hou and Grace Kao in the U.S., where data also show that children of immigrants have, on average, higher wages and educational levels than children of the American-born population.

One of the many revealing reality checks to come out of the Picot and Hou study is its confirmation that most students in North America who learn English as a second language — contrary to official policy — are not at a disadvantage because of it.

While many immigrant background children do relatively poorly on standardized literacy tests at age 15, the vast majority have dramatically overcome the language challenge by Grade 12. This is especially the case, say studies, for Chinese students and Asian females.

“Poor performing secondary school students (at age 15) … with Chinese backgrounds were seven times more likely to attend university than their poor-performing counterparts with a Canadian background. Low-performing students with other Asian backgrounds were four times more likely.”

Almost as an afterthought, the Picot and Hou survey notes that students in Canada who have immigrant backgrounds in Europe don’t do any better at university than third-generation Canadians.

What’s behind the incredible university success of Canadian students with Asian backgrounds?

That’s the question Yale law professor Amy Chua wrote about in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and her latest book (co-written with husband Jed Rubenfeld), The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.

Breaking the unwritten rules of multicultural discourse, Chua argues people of Chinese and Jewish backgrounds, along with Iranians, Koreans and South Asians, have three traits that gear them to success: a group superiority complex, individual anxiety and the ability to control their impulses.

Picot and Hou offer their own perspective on the reasons for positive university outcomes among immigrant-background youngsters.

For one, they say Canadian schools do not follow the European practice of “streaming” students into vocational or academic programs in their early teens. This gives ESL students in Canada time to master a new language before applying for universities.

In addition, Picot and Hou believe Canada’s immigration policies, which favour skilled and wealthy immigrants, have led to many Asian immigrants being more educated and often more affluent than third-generation Canadians. They’re also more urban; Metro Vancouver’s population is 45 per cent foreign born.

Perhaps most importantly, however, the researchers follow the lead of Chua, the famous Tiger Mom, and maintain that Asian immigrant parents put far more emphasis on working to ensure their children succeed in Canadian universities (they did not measure colleges or vocational schools).

“University aspirations among students and their parents account for the largest portion” of factors explaining the “advantage” that immigrant-background students have in Canadian universities, Picot and Hou maintain.

So what should policy-makers do in response to these unforeseen university trends?

A similar imbalance has arisen in British educational systems, where Oxford economist Paul Collier has found that “the success of immigrants can demoralize, rather than inspire” the less-successful students of British background.

“Faced with decades of frustration of their hopes, the dominant narrative of the indigenous underclass has evolved as fatalism: Avoid disappointment by not trying,” Collier writes in Exodus: How Migration is Changing the World.

“Demoralization may be compounded by competition: Those working-class children who buck the pressure to conform to expectations of failure are, in effect, competing for space … with the children of aspiring migrants.”

Collier, whose previous book was The Bottom Billion, says high-immigrant Western countries such as Britain, the U.S. and Canada have never figured out how to address the problems of the under-achieving domestically born.

These Western countries have developed either universal programs or affirmative-action plans for identifiable minority groups, Collier says. None of them has ever designed a way to respond to the more “nebulous” needs of the general “indigenous” population.

Paul Bennett, an education specialist, says the “biggest and toughest question of all” is coming up with a strategy to help underperforming non-immigrant Canadians.

Bennett, who teaches at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, is concerned about the “lack of motivation” among average students of Canadian background. His research has found many are languishing.

Yet no one in government or education has come up with a solution. Even though it might not seem too concrete a strategy, maybe there is at least a bit of hope in some kind of ethno-cultural exchange.

Like Chu, Picot and Hou, Bennett says the “cultural attitudes of the parents” has much to do with why immigrant-background students tend to perform better.

Yet he echoes Chua in emphasizing there can be a severe downside to students who are driven by family pressure. Many immigrant background students “burn out,” he says, succumbing in particular to mental illness.

As a result, Bennett, who maintains a website called Educhatter, believes students from immigrant and Canadian backgrounds have something to learn from each other.

“Average kids who are content with mediocrity would benefit from spending more time with the kids who are excelling,” Bennett says. There is not much wrong, he suggests, with going to summer school to improve your grades.

At the same time, Bennett believes super-achieving offspring of immigrants could learn something from Canadian-background students – that sometimes it’s best to “contain the unbridled and unhealthy pursuit of high marks.”

Is it possible to bring these two distinct attitudes closer together in Canada?

dtodd@vancouversun.com

The Vancouver Sun