The Academic Trajectories of Immigrant Youths: Analysis within and across Cohorts

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Population Association of America, Springer are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Demography Two nationally representative cohorts-from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) and High School and Beyond (HSB)-were used to examine the effects of generation and duration of residence on students 'performance on standardized tests over a two-year period. In multivariate models, generational status predicts variation in students 'performance on baseline (sophomore) tests, with effects stronger for the later age cohort (NELS) than for the earlier age cohort (HSB). With regard to the trajectory of achievement, generational status has a greatly reduced role for both cohorts. The best predictors of the trajectory of achievement are not those that are based on nativity per se, but those that reflect the social environment experienced in the United States (i.e., ethnicity and family s socioeconomic status).A s it did approximately 100 years ago, immigration is reshaping the composition of the American population. As of 2000, about one tenth of Americans (10.4%) were born abroad, and about another tenth were in the second generation, having one or both parents who were born abroad (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). This evolution in demographic composition once again places into relief issues of the adaptation of immigrants and their immediate descendants. Just as debates arose a century ago, questions now arise as to the rate of adjustment and the pattern of accommodation of the immigrants and the host society (Alba and Nee 1997). Given that the population of foreign stock (the first plus the second generation) has been rising for several decades and promises to continue to do so as current immigrants have children, issues surrounding adjustment become all the more pertinent to discussions of immigration policy.Recent cross-sectional comparisons have pointed to immigrants' inferior socioeconomic positions. For instance, compared with natives, immigrants (on average) exhibit lower levels of school attainment, lower personal income, higher levels of poverty, and so on. It has also been argued that immigrants of more recent vintage are even more disadvantaged (or are falling further behind natives) than were earlier arrivals (Borjas 1999;Camarota 2001). Yet another complication is the extraordinary internal diversity of the flow of immigrants. While the foreign born may be less educated, on average, than U.S.natives, recent flows of immigrants have been distributed more toward the extremes than has the native population. Whereas 13.4% of natives (aged 25 and older) lack a high school education, 33.0% of recent immigrants (who immigrated within the past 10 yea...

Getting Ahead: Educational and Occupational Trajectories of the ‘New’ Second-Generation in Switzerland

“…The most powerful determinant of educational and occupational attainment is parental socioeconomic background, in particular for immigrant youth (Glick and White 2003;Kao and Rutherford 2007). Socioeconomically better-off parents obtain the relevant financial and non-monetary resources to better support their children's route to socioeconomic success.…”

“…Glick and White 2003;Portes and Rumbaut 2001) and created a composite measure to capture the parental socioeconomic status of our respondents by including the following information: Mother's and father's education and occupation, the number of books in the family home and a dummy variable indicating whether a quiet place to study for the child was available at home. 5 We have to bear in mind that the grouping of educational and occupational trajectories does not include information on labour market careers after leaving the education system and before the current occupational status.…”

Age of entry and the high school performance of immigrant youth

“…That is, teen immigrants perform worse than earlier entering immigrants and the native-born. A notable exception, Glick and White (2003), use two national longitudinal surveys of 10th graders and find that late entrant immigrants earn lower scores on 10th grade exams relative to earlier entrants, but find no such differences in 12th grade exams or graduation outcomes. Using Current Population Survey data on 1990 households, Chiswick and DebBurman (2004) find that teenage entrants (ages 13-19) obtain the least schooling, relative to earlier and later entrants.…”

Asian children’s verbal development: A comparison of the United States and Australia

“…Specifically, parents with limited English proficiency may adversely affect their children's verbal development by engaging in fewer verbal interactions, providing limited exposure to vocabulary words, and relying on grammatically simple sentence structures when communicating with their children (Hart and Risley, 1995;Farkas and Beron, 2004). Immigrant parent's limited English proficiency may also influence children's academic performance, including verbal performance, indirectly by preventing their parents from effectively communicating with teachers and engaging in school activities (Glick and White, 2003;Turney and Kao, 2009). Finally, having an unfavorable language background may have a more pronounced effect on children's verbal development at older ages as the English content of course materials becomes more complicated.…”

“…Specifically, studies show that Asian American children start out with a verbal advantage over White children at the time of school entry, but this advantage declines during the first few years of elementary school Levitt, 2004, 2006;Goyette and Xie, 1999;Han, 2008;Stiefel et al, 2003). By the time they reach high school, Asian American children are doing less well than Whites from similar socio-economic backgrounds (Glick and White, 2003). With few exceptions, this trajectory of verbal development is observed consistently across different Asian subgroups in the United States, although there is considerable heterogeneity http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.02.010 0049-089X/Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.…”