Asian Americans are a mixture of extremely successful students--mostly from South Asia (India and Pakistan)--and a large undereducated class. The author of the study, Heather Kim of Sacred Heart University, also studied students from Korea, the Philippines, China, Japan and Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia). The study was based on data from the federal National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, which has been following students who were eighth-graders in 1988.

Among the major findings:

• South Asian parents had more education than parents of other Asian American high school seniors, and fathers from this group also had the highest occupational status; these students discussed college plans and grades more often with their parents than those from other groups and spent more time on homework and extracurricular activities.
• High school dropout rates for schools with high concentrations of Southeast Asians are around 50 percent, but the family incomes in this group also are much lower than for other groups--about $14,000 for the Hmongs, for example.
• Regardless of their ethnicity, parents have very high expectations for their students; 100 percent of the South Asian parents expected their children to finish colleg, as did more than 90 percent of parents from Japan, Korea and China; this was true for about 79 percent of Southeast Asian families.
• A majority of Asian American students believe that hard work is more important than good luck in determining their success in life. Also, five of the six Asian American groups studied are over-represented in the top two quartiles in math performance, compared to all high school seniors.

The ETS report, "Diversity Among Asian American High School Students," is available from ETS for $9.50 prepaid (ETS Policy Information Center, Rosedale Rd., Princeton, NJ 08541-0001; for information, contact pic@ets.org).