Cultural valuation of education

From How upwardly mobile are Hispanic children? Depends how you look at it. by Nathan Joo and Richard V. Reeves.

I have in the past made the argument that culture has a lot more impact on current circumstances than we otherwise acknowledge. For example, while the US performs only at a middling level on the international education testing PISA, this can be attributed to some degree to the cultural hodgepodge which is the US. When you look at PISA scores by race (as a crude proxy for cultural origin), Americans do much better than every corresponding group. In other words, white Americans outscore all Europeans, Asian Americans outscore all Asians, Hispanic Americans outscore all Central and South Americans and African Americans outscore those countries with a black plurality.

These cultural influences can echo on for generations. In Great Britain, Scots are famous for their carefulness with money (says I as a Scottish descendant). In The Millionaire Next Door or one of his later books, Thomas J. Stanley identifies which groups in the US are the top of the wealth league. Among the top are Scots Americans even though we are centuries since the last big immigrant surge from Scotland and long since one would have guessed that they had assimilated culturally.

While I make the argument that culture has an underappreciated impact over long durations, I have also been cautious about just how certain that reading is. Joo and Reeves seem to provide some confirming evidence about the importance of culture over appreciable time frames.

They look at education attainment of different groups of immigrants in comparison to the first generation of immigrants. As might be expected, second-generation groups attain greater education than first generation. One could anticipate that the amount of education immigrants bring is highly circumstantial to their country of origin. However, once here, all their children likely have roughly the same degree of access to higher education as one another. There really shouldn't be much difference between groups unless cultural valuation of education is 1) different between groups and 2) transmitted across generations. And that is what Joo and Reeves find. Look at the differences between groups, i.e. the differences in cultural orientations towards education based on region of origin.

Fascinating.