Facing the possibility of discrimination and lacking necessary political resources and social capital, Asian Americans who strive to achieve high status look for paths that present few barriers. In the market economy, where fair competition is at least held as a norm, upward mobility through channels of higher education, independent business, and science and engineering is preferred to that through, say, politics and management of large corporations, where subjective criteria predominate. It is in this context that some cultural symbols shared by Asian Americans, such as the honorific significance of children’s educational achievement to the family, facilitate the mobility of Asian Americans.

Similarly, economic and social structures affect the social mobility of marginalized Asian Americans. For example, societal barriers to social mobility differ across occupations/industries and over time (Hout 1988; Xie 1989b, 1992; Yamaguchi 1983). In the highly industrialized economy of the United States, there is a large demand for technically-trained personnel (Mare 1995). As Xie (1989a, 1992) has argued elsewhere, science uses more objectively based criteria than many other comparably high status occupations. Thus, science and other technically-based occupations provide a channel of upward mobility previously unavailable to Asian Americans prior to the rapid growth of the science/engineering labor force after World War II (Xie 1989a). Similarly, Asian Americans can find refuge in other segments of the American economy (such as small-scale retail and restaurants) where discrimination against them is either less severe or less consequential than in other occupations.

According to our strategic adaptation perspective, it is the interaction of culture, structure, and marginality that promotes Asian Americans’ reliance on educational channels of mobility. Given their marginal status, Asian Americans seek upward mobility through academic channels, as they may perceive other channels less accessible to them. In this context, Asian Americans bring their cultural “tool kits” Asian Americans, and adapt them to American society, using family resources to facilitate their children’s movement up educational ladders. That is, Asian American youth place a heavy emphasis on education not just because some of their parents have resources or value education, but also because they have been socialized to think that academic achievement is the surest way to upward mobility. As a Korean American student puts it, “We know we are a minority in this society, and we have to do better than other Americans. ... That’s the only way we’ll get ahead” (quoted by Hsia 1988, p.92).

While cognizant of the ethnic differences among Asian Americans (see Goyette and Xie 1999), we contend that the strategic adaptation perspective is applicable to Asian Americans as a whole. We base this contention on Asian Americans’ own awareness that they are perceived as a homogeneous group (Oyserman and Sakamoto 1997). Further, regardless of ethnicity, Asian Americans all have marginal status and consequently may similarly perceive blocked opportunities. In choosing among alternative channels of mobility, they gravitate toward those through which other Asian Americans have been successful.

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Numerous scholars have observed that Asian Americans have, on average, better academic performance, higher educational ambitions, and more years of formal schooling than their white counterparts (Barringer, Takeuchi, and Xenos 1990; Caplan, Choy,and Whitmore 1991; Endo 1980; Fejgin 1995; Goyette and Xie 1999; Hirschman and Wong 1986; Hsia 1988; Kao 1995; Nee and Sanders 1985; Nee and Wong 1985; Zhou and Bankston 1994). However, no research to date has yet attempted to systematically theorize the causal processes through which Asian Americans achieve high educational and occupational status.

In this paper, we advocate a synthetic perspective for understanding the social mobility process of Asian Americans, called the “strategic adaptation perspective.” We argue that Asian Americans consciously choose certain high status occupations where they can avert disadvantages as newcomers and succeed with marketable credentials. In other words, Asian Americans mobilize their cultural and material resources in planning and pursuing particular educational paths in response to existing social and economic structures. In sharp contrast to the purely cultural explanation, our perspective places a premium on the instrumental value, rather than the intrinsic value, of formal education to Asian Americans. It is our thesis that, being marginal racially, culturally, and politically, Asian Americans favor formal education, particularly formal education in fields of high demand in the economy, as their preferred channel of mobility.

Extending the classic Wisconsin model of status attainment, we also identify social-psychological factors as the core of the process of mobility among Asian Americans. Similar to the Wisconsin model, our model gives an important role to educational expectation in bridging family background and motivation to later achievement. Differing from the Wisconsin model, though, we place premium importance on occupational expectation and hypothesize that a respondent’s occupational expectation is causally prior to his or her educational expectation. We further specify the causal effects of occupational expectation and educational expectation on college attendance. For both educational expectation and college attendance, we analyze both the level of education and the intended and actual fields of study of students who expect to and actually enroll in college.

In this paper, we examined the relationship between Asian Americans’ pattern of occupational choice and occupational characteristics derived from Census data on the young adult labor force. We found that Asian American youth indeed tend to choose occupations with high average earnings and with a large proportion of incumbents who hold at least a bachelor’s degree. We also observed an association between occupations chosen by Asian American youth and the proportion of Asian American workers in the labor force, although this latter association is slightly weaker than the former. Further, our analysis revealed that Asian American youth plan to pursue college education in fields that reward them with high financial gains. A sizeable proportion (about 26 percent) of this association is explained by white-Asian differences in expected occupation. Finally, we showed that, behaviorally, Asians are indeed more likely than whites to enroll in college and to major in fields that have high financial payoffs, and these racial differences are attributable to both educational expectation and occupational expectation.

Our empirical work is preliminary and limited. The implications of our theoretical framework regarding completed schooling and occupational attainment remain to be tested in future work. The research reported in this paper is only a small step toward understanding how and why Asian Americans, as a minority, are able to achieve equal and sometimes superior social status to that of whites.

Understanding the social mobility process of Asian Americans will also help us gain deeper insights into broader racial/ethnic inequalities in the US. In particular, why do African Americans, American Indians, and Hispanics continue to fall behind whites in socioeconomic status long after the lifting of legal barriers to their advancement in society? Obviously, this is a grand question that is worthy of the attention of a whole generation of social scientists. From our limited work on Asian Americans, we can only suggest that it would be naive to think that the experiences of Asian Americans can be easily Asian Americans, transported to other minority groups. Let us invoke two unique features of Asian Americans. First, most Asian Americans are recent voluntary immigrants who are selectively ambitious in seeking economic opportunities in the U.S., and this feature sets them apart from caste-like/involuntary minorities (Ogbu 1978). Second, although many Asian American immigrants began their lives in the U.S. at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, there are still many more Asian American immigrants who came to the U.S. with physical, human, or social capital typically unavailable among the native minority underclass and recent immigrants from Latin America. Furthermore, it is possible that the earlier success of some Asian Americans in certain areas, such as technical fields and small businesses, breeds more success, becoming a powerful psychological stimulus for later generations of Asian Americans (immigrants and native-born alike), who emulate their predecessors’ success by following similar paths. In conclusion, we do not think that there is one simple explanation for Asian Americans’ success, and thus we see no single easy solution to overcoming the obstacles to mobility faced by other minorities in the U.S.