bennybox

Gee, this seems like a silly premise for a book, but Dr. Soo Kim Abboud, a sugeon and clinical assistant professor and Jane Kim, an immigration specialist with a law degree, have released: Top of the Class - How Asian Parents raise high achievers and how you can too.

Ever wonder why Asian kids consistently outperform others in the classroom, or why the top colleges are filled with Asians students? Or why a much higher percentage of Asian Americans go on to medical, law, or graduate school?

While Asians do not on average have higher IQs than their non-Asian peers, they somehow manage to stand out in the classroom. If you don’t believe us, just take a look at the statistics.

Percentage of Asian American students at top universities
* University of Pennsylvania – 23%
* Columbia and Cornell – 25%
* Stanford – 24%
* Harvard – 18%
* University of California at Berkeley – 42%

More stats:
* 47% of Asians over 25 hold Bachelor’s degrees (compared to 27% overall)
* The median income for Asians is $10,000 higher than the median incomes of other ethnic groups
* 16% of Asians hold advanced degrees (compared to 9% overall)

Contrary to what the public may believe, Asian students are no more intellectually gifted than non-Asian students. The reason that Asian students outperform their peers in the classroom has nothing to do with how they are born and everything to do with how they are raised.

As you can imagine, the book describes all those wonderful strict Asian parent traits - kids who have minimal exposure to television and friends, mandatory involvement with piano or violin, and of course very high pressure to receive high grades. I’m sure there’s a lot to be said about a single life principle of career achievement, but man being an Asian kid is really stressful, and I think that quite often it’s too easy to burn out trying to live up to the parents’ farfetched standards, and I think I’d feel sort of empty being an accomplished surgeon and not having much else to my name.

It’s great that my parents weren’t this intense. Though they shouldn’t have let me watch so much tv growing up.