The “Model Minority” from Education to the Workplace

THE EARNINGS (DIS)ADVANTAGE OF ASIANS IN THE US LABOR MARKET

Asian Americans’ educational achievement, on average, exceeds that of other US racial groups. While most studies attest to Asian Americans’ academic advantage (see Lu et al. 2022 for an exception), research on how their educational achievement translates to labor market outcomes has yielded mixed evidence.

STRATEGIC ADAPTATION FROM EDUCATION TO THE LABOR MARKET

Aware of potential barriers to career mobility, Asian Americans strategically adapt to navigate these challenges. Faced with real and perceived impediments in the labor market, Asians in the US tend to pursue career options that are most likely to shield them from or minimize exposure to societal and organizational bias. Educational attainment plays a foundational role in this strategy. Education is perceived as an institution that (should) reward individuals for ability and hard work, rather than for “functionally irrelevant” (Cole and Cole 1973) characteristics such as race, gender, or socioeconomic status. Therefore, Asian Americans often view education as the most reliable path to attaining prestigious, high-paying careers. This belief is reinforced by the contemporary emphasis on education as the single most important engine of mobility in East Asian countries like China, Japan, and Korea, as well as historical connections between educational attainment and securing socially prestigious careers in these traditionally Confucian countries (Ho 1962; Tran 2016).

Stanley Sue and Sumie Okazaki (1990) characterize the educational strategy adopted by Asian families to navigate potential barriers to social mobility as “relative functionalism.” Specifically, parents prioritize academic achievement for their children to compensate for their limited political capital, lack of mainstream social networks, and experiences with societal and institutional discrimination. The focus on education is rooted in a deep belief in the connection between hard work and success (Chen and Stevenson 1995; Hsin and Xie 2014), motivating Asian immigrant parents to invest heavily in their children’s education to overcome potential challenges to future mobility.

Xie and Goyette (2003) elaborated on the concept of relative functionalism with their framework of “strategic adaptation.” They argued that Asian Americans strategically choose careers with high educational requirements—such as physical sciences, medicine, engineering, and computer science—to ensure a smoother path to high earnings and career mobility. These career options have not only the highest percentages of individuals with bachelor’s degrees but they also offer higher salaries. Since this earlier work, more recent research has examined how Asian American individuals and their families strategically plan for both educational and career success (Chen 2025; Dhingra 2020; Huang 2021; Lee and Zhou 2015; Tian 2023; Warikoo 2022). While not all of this research explicitly frames Asian Americans’ choices as deliberately strategic, we argue that, collectively, these studies show how Asian American individuals and families make decisions that enhance their own and their children’s educational prospects with a focus on future career outcomes.

One key aspect of this strategic planning is the prioritization of high-performing schools by Asian families, along with their deliberate approach to educational expenditures and extracurricular activities (Goyette et al. 2023; Tian 2023). Asian students also make strategic decisions regarding college selection and field of study. They are more likely to apply to and attend selective, “reach” schools, even after adjusting for standardized test scores and grades (An 2010; Ayalon et al. 2008; Espenshade and Radford 2009; Goyette et al. 2023; Hsia 1988). Once enrolled, they are more likely to major in business, medical, and STEM fields. These strategic decisions are part of what Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou (2015) coined as Asian Americans’ “success frame,” which leads them to aspire to gain admission to top colleges and land high-paying jobs, as we will elaborate later.

NEIGHBORHOODS, HOUSING, AND SCHOOL SELECTION

First, Asian American parents are strategic in selecting elementary and secondary schools for their children, often residing in neighborhoods with academically competitive, high-performing public schools (Lee and Zhou 2015; Park 2020; Warikoo 2022). To access more competitive and higher-quality schools, Asian American families with K–12-aged children spend more on housing than comparable White families (Tian 2023). While many of these schools are located in predominantly White suburban communities, the rise of Asian American middle-class “ethnoburbs”—particularly in California, New York, and New Jersey—has led to high concentrations of Asian American students in public high schools characterized by high average test scores, universal graduation rates, and high admission rates into competitive four-year colleges (Drake 2022; Huang 2010; Kye 2018; Li 1999).

Consequently, Asian American students often find themselves in highly competitive academic environments, surrounded by other high-performing peers (Kim and Gasman 2011; Massé 2019). Among these peers are international students from upper- and middle-class East Asian families, some of whom immigrated to the US alone—often referred to as “parachute kids” (Zhou 1998). Others arrived with one parent (typically the mother) while the other parent remains in their country of origin to provide financial support, but flies across the ocean seasonally to visit their families—an arrangement known as the “wild geese fathers” (Lee and Koo 2006). The presence of these international students further intensifies the academic pressure experienced by Asian American students (Kim and Okazaki 2014).

While Asian American students are not more likely to attend private schools than other students (Goyette and Xie 1999), they are significantly more likely to attend selective public high schools. They constitute a disproportionately large share of the student body in nationally renowned public schools like Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science in New York City, Whitney High School in Los Angeles, and Lowell High School in San Francisco. For example, Asian American students comprise 72 percent of the student body at Stuyvesant High School, while Asian Americans account for only 12 percent of New York City’s population. Similarly, at Whitney High School, Asians make up 79 percent of the student body, yet account for only 12 percent of the population in Los Angeles. At Lowell High School, Asian Americans account for 57 percent of its students, yet make up only 37 percent of San Francisco’s population. The overrepresentation of Asian students coupled with the severe underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students in these selective public schools has spawned heated debates about the meaning of opportunity, merit, bias, and fair admissions in cities like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia (Allensworth and Rosenkranz 2000; Chuang 2001).

EDUCATIONAL EXPENDITURES, EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES, AND SUPPLEMENTAL EDUCATION

Beyond school selection, Asian American families strategically invest in their children’s education by spending more on extracurricular activities during primary and secondary school than do White families, even after adjusting for socioeconomic status. While Asian families spend less than their White counterparts on children’s sports and recreational activities, they spend more on extracurricular activities overall, particularly on supplemental academic and enrichment programs (Tian 2023). For example, East Asian students are more likely to participate in test preparation and other private supplemental academic programs, such as Kumon and Sylvan Learning Centers, compared with students from other racial backgrounds (Byun and Park 2012; Park et al. 2016). East Asian parents also enroll their children in math- and STEM-oriented extracurricular activities, music lessons such as piano and violin, and weekend heritage language schools (Zhou and Kim 2006), while South Asian parents opt to enhance their children’s skills through participation in spelling bee competitions (Dhingra 2020; Shankar 2019).

The key to supplemental education for Asian students is that rather than using it to “catch up” with school work like White, Black, and Hispanic students do, they leverage it to secure a competitive edge to “get ahead” of their peers (Ho et al. 2019). For example, Asian American students will take algebra or geometry the summer before they are required to take it during the academic year to ensure they receive an A in the course (Lee and Zhou 2015). Furthermore, compared with White families, Asian American families tend to stress the competitive aspects of education, often encouraging their children to compete with their peers in grades, test scores, honors, and extracurricular activities such as piano contests. The emphasis on competition stems partly from the belief among Asian American parents that their children will be evaluated primarily against other high-achieving Asian American students—rather than their White American peers—during college admissions (Tian 2023; Warikoo 2022).

In addition, hyper-selected Asian immigrant groups like Chinese and Koreans often create educational services within their communities—sometimes at low or no cost in community centers, ethnic churches, and temples—making supplemental education accessible to members of their ethnic group regardless of class (Lee and Zhou 2015; Zhou and Kim 2006). Given the ready availability of ethnic-specific supplemental education resources, the significance of parental education consequently diminishes for the children of Asian immigrants compared with White or Black American children (Liu and Xie 2016). Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when large in-person classes were cancelled, Asian American students did not experience a disruption in supplemental education (Lee et al. 2023). Unlike their White peers, East Asian students continued with private tutoring, and South Asian students continued to utilize test preparation and other online supplemental services.

PAYING FOR THE PRESTIGE

Compared with White students, Asian American high school students are not only more likely to apply to and enroll in college, but they are also more likely to aim for and enroll in selective colleges and universities (An 2010; Ayalon et al. 2008; Carnevale and Rose 2004; Fishman 2020; Goyette et al. 2023). While this racial difference could be attributed to Asian American students generally having higher GPAs and SAT or ACT scores compared with students from other racial backgrounds, Ann L. Mullen and Kimberly Goyette (2019) found that even after controlling for these indicators of academic achievement, Asian Americans are still more likely to attend selective institutions. In fact, Asian American students are more likely than White students to apply to “reach” institutions—institutions where a student’s own SAT or ACT scores are in the 25th percentile for the overall student body (Fishman 2020; Mullen and Goyette 2019). These patterns suggest that Asian Americans are more likely to seek to maximize the prestige of their college degree relative to their qualifications compared with other groups—what Kimberly Goyette and colleagues (2023) aptly describe as “paying for the prestige.”

This focus on selective school attendance leads Asian American families to save more and invest a larger amount than other racial groups in their children’s education, including college and supplemental education (Tian 2023). This financial commitment is often driven by the belief that the high cost of attending a selective university is justified by the potential returns (Dondero and Humphries 2016; Goyette et al. 2023; Ouyang et al. 2019). Prior research has confirmed the multidimensional rewards of attending a selective university: these institutions boast higher graduation rates (Long 2008), are associated with higher future earnings for graduates (Brand and Halaby 2006; Thomas and Zhang 2005; Witteveen and Attewell 2017), and garner greater esteem from students’ peers and families’ social networks (Lee and Zhou 2015).

CHOOSING FIELDS THAT CONVEY COMPETENCE

Strategic adaptation continues into the college years for Asian Americans. Once enrolled, Asian American college students are more likely to choose majors and fields of study that lead to high-paying careers, such as physical sciences, engineering, computer science, and business (Goyette and Mullen 2006; Xie and Goyette 2003). Self-stereotyping may also influence Asian American students’ choice of college majors: those who internalize stereotypes of Asians as academically talented but less proficient in English tend to gravitate toward math and science majors (Shen 2015). While the high concentration of Asian American students in STEM and medical fields tends to decline across immigrant generations, particularly among men (Min and Jang 2015), it remains consistently higher than that of White American students for both men and women across generations.

Furthermore, Asian American students tend to choose fields with higher starting salaries compared with their White peers (Alba and Barbosa 2016). However, such significant differences between Asian men (except Southeast Asians) and White men disappear after accounting for potential confounders that influence their likelihood of attending college (Song and Glick 2004). The same does not hold true for women: Chinese, Filipino, and Southeast Asian women are more likely than White women to select fields associated with lucrative careers, ceteris paribus (Song and Glick 2004).

In sum, attending prestigious, selective undergraduate institutions and choosing specific fields of study are key components of Asian Americans’ strategic adaptation to the US workplace. STEM majors at elite institutions are perceived as more reliable pathways to high-earning, high-status careers, especially in the face of scarce social networks, limited political and cultural capital, and the persistent stereotypes that Asian Americans are competent but not visionary, creative, bold, or warm (Lee 2021; Lee et al. 2024; Lee and Fiske 2006; Lin et al. 2005; Zou and Cheryan 2017). However, recent research has brought to light the limits of strategic adaptation, which emerge in professional schools like law and business and become evident in the workplace.

THE LIMITS OF STRATEGIC ADAPTATION

Educational investments, high status degrees, and prestigious titles are no guarantees of a career free of bias. Despite their strategic adaptation, many Asian American professionals—East Asians, in particular—face the limits of these strategies, beginning in professional schools.

A PREVIEW OF THE ARTICLES AHEAD

Drawing on new and existing data, the authors in this issue use diverse data sources and research methods to examine facets of Asian Americans’ labor market experiences and outcomes. By leveraging evidence-based research, these social scientists expand the field of Asian American studies, which has been dominated by the humanities, while also broadening traditional social science disciplines that have long ignored or relegated the study of Asian Americans to niches.

The first set of articles shows how conclusions about Asian American advantage change when we shift the focus from national to local. Manduca and Furey begin by presenting what has become a familiar statistic: Asian Americans have the highest median household income of all US groups, earning 107 percent of White American households. However, the authors question whether national-level statistics are the optimal way of studying the Asian–White household income gap given the geographic clustering of the US Asian population. What does the income gap look like within the same metropolitan areas?

Focusing on equivalized family incomes within commuting zones, Manduca and Furey analyze median income within core-based statistical areas (CBSAs), which represent metropolitan economic zones where workers are likely to commute. Within these zones, Asian Americans earn less than White Americans. Specifically, they earn only 88 percent of what White Americans earn, on average. Thus, despite earning 7 percent more than White Americans nationally, Asian Americans earn an average of 12 percent less than the White residents of their metropolitan areas. By distinguishing between national and local measures—what Manduca and Furey refer to as the “national-local divergence”—the level of inequality changes by nearly 20 percentage points. Critically, they show that this gap exists across virtually all educational, nativity, and national origin subgroups and cannot be explained by differences in the cost of living. They conclude that geography is an independent and important factor contributing to Asian–White inequality in the United States.

The implications of Manduca and Furey’s striking finding are far-reaching and help to reconcile tensions that Lee and Sheng (2024) highlighted in the Asian American assimilation paradox—in particular, the way social scientists typically measure inequality and the way that Asian Americans experience it. While national-level quantitative studies point to an Asian American advantage, qualitative studies focusing on localized contexts—such as residents of a neighborhood or workers in a firm—often reveal an Asian American disadvantage. Because social scientists typically rely on national level statistics to show that Asian Americans have achieved a great deal of socioeconomic success in the aggregate, these findings mask the ways in which Asians continue to experience substantial disadvantages in their daily lives compared with White residents in the metropolitan areas where they live and the organizations in which they work.

Like Manduca and Furey, Kim and Kim (2026) zero in on commuting zones to underscore the significance of the local context. But rather than focusing on median household earnings, they shift to men’s earnings. By analyzing commuting zones as the unit of measurement—that is, the local labor market where workers are likely to commute—Kim and Kim compare the earnings of Asian American and White men between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four. This comparison is critical, as seven out of ten Asian Americans live in the top two richest commuting zone quintiles, while less than 15 percent live in the bottom two poorest quintiles. By stark contrast, White Americans are more evenly distributed across all commuting zone income quintiles.

While Asian men earn more than White men at the national level, Kim and Kim find that this advantage reverses at the local level, regardless of level of education and immigrant generation. The only exception is the 1.5 generation (foreign-born Asian Americans who migrated to the US at a young age) who hold advanced degrees—the most educationally selected group. Among the most highly selected, Asian Indian men are the only group with a statistically significant earnings advantage over equally educated White men—pointing again to a pattern of South Asian exceptionalism (Lee and Ramakrishnan 2020). Korean men with advanced degrees have a slight but statistically insignificant advantage, while Chinese and Vietnamese men have reached parity with equally educated White men. Kim and Kim offer an additional keen insight: when they control for occupation, all Asian American men with advanced degrees earn less than equally educated White men.

The research by Kim and Kim, as well as Manduca and Furey, raises an important question about the residential clustering of Asian Americans. Specifically, their findings beg the question of whether the choice to live in high-income communities reflects a strategic trade-off, in which Asian Americans accept lower earnings relative to White Americans to access amenities such as stronger school districts for their children or proximity to ethnic enclaves. This trade-off appears especially relevant for less-educated Asian Americans, who experience an even wider income gap in areas with a large concentration of highly educated coethnics. Kim and Kim present some evidence that these patterns partly reflect rational, calculated choices aimed at prioritizing educational opportunities for their children (see also Tian 2023). While they may sacrifice higher earnings, Asian Americans gain in other dimensions that may enhance family mobility.

The next set of articles shifts our attention to the ways gender, family, and marriage penalties and premiums influence Asian Americans’ labor force participation and earnings. Ho and Park (2026) examine the wages of prime-age workers between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four. Expanding their analysis to the national level, they explore earnings disparities between Asian and White workers. Controlling for factors such as gender, ethnicity, and education, they unveil some noteworthy findings. One of the most compelling is that the so-called Asian American advantage in labor market earnings is largely driven by Asian American women. College-educated Asian American women across the five largest Asian ethnic groups—Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean—experience an earnings advantage relative to college-educated White women. In contrast, Asian American men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four do not exhibit an advantage over their White male counterparts. They suggest that the wage gap among Asian American women is largely due to their increased labor force participation and occupational clustering: Asian American women tend to work more hours than White women, and they are also more concentrated in higher-paying occupations.

Among Asian Americans without a bachelor’s degree—a group that Ho and Park refer to as a “minority within a minority”—gender remains significant. Asian American men experience a consistent wage disadvantage compared with White men without a college degree. The wage gap among less-educated men is, in large part, a function of their lower labor supply: Asian American men without college degrees work fewer hours annually compared with similarly educated White men. However, this wage gap does not exist for Asian American women without a college degree. Hence, according to Ho and Park, there are two separately significant ways in which the gendered wage gaps drive the Asian American–White earnings gap at the national level: college-educated Asian American women earn more than White counterparts while Asian American men without college degrees earn less than similarly educated White men.

While Asian American women in the aggregate earn more than White women, Sassler and Sorresso (2026) zero in on a specific industry to explore why Asian American women’s earnings might differ from both Asian American men and White women. Drawing on data from the American Community Survey, the authors compare the earnings of White, Chinese, and Asian Indian men and women in computer science—a rapidly growing, high-earning industry where college-educated Asian Americans cluster. They also examine differences within Asian Americans by focusing on the two largest national origin groups: Chinese and Asian Indians.

Traditional economic explanations of earnings disparities between men and women emphasize differences in human capital: men earn more than women due to their higher human capital. By contrast, sociological explanations tend to focus on how gendered expectations of partnership and parenting disproportionately affect women’s labor force participation and earnings. Sassler and Sorresso bridge these two bodies of research and extend this line of inquiry by considering how gendered behaviors—such as investing in human capital and fulfilling time-consuming family roles—vary across gender, race, and ethnicity.

The authors find a gender wage gap in computer science: Asian and White women in the field earn between 17 and 18 percent less than Asian and White men, yet they also find that women are not uniformly disadvantaged. The gender wage gap is twice as large among Asian Indians than among Chinese and White women, even after controlling for human capital and family characteristics. Their analyses point to unequal marriage and parenthood penalties among women: Asian Indian women marry and become mothers earlier, and they also have more children, on average, than White and Chinese women. In addition, Asian Indian women experience a marriage penalty for occupational homogamy while White and Chinese women experience a marriage premium when their partners are also computer scientists—further widening the gender wage gap among Asian Indian women on the one hand and Chinese and White women on the other. All men, by contrast, benefit from a marriage premium compared with unmarried men. Sassler and Sorresso convincingly conclude that the gender wage gap in computer science is, in fact, a family wage gap.

Like the authors in this issue, Greenman (2011) similarly found that Asian American women tend to out-earn their White counterparts, and attributed this advantage to their stronger attachment to the labor force after motherhood. How do Asian American women achieve this? One possibility is their reliance on extended family members—particularly their parents and parents-in-law—for childcare support. A large body of sociological literature has documented the importance of extended families in Asian households (Cheng and Xie 2023; Zeng and Xie 2014). Within an extended family, Asian grandparents often view child-rearing as their responsibility in addition to that of the parents and, as such, they actively contribute to the well-being of their grandchildren. This cultural perspective differs from mainstream American societal norms, as Zeng and Xie (2014, 603) noted: “In contrast to the US pattern, where grandparents tend to substitute for parents, Chinese grandparents tend to supplement parental presence.” By supplementing parents’ childcare, grandparents not only add to childcare support but also alleviate some of the responsibilities of Asian mothers, thereby enabling their fuller participation in the labor force.

To test the effect of extended family support on women’s labor force participation, Lim and Jeong (2026) analyze data from the 1990 and 2000 US Censuses and the 2001–2022 American Community Survey. They assess whether coresidence with parents and parents-in-law contributes to Asian–White differences in women’s labor force participation. For coresidence to contribute to higher labor force participation among Asian women relative to White American women, two conditions must hold: First, Asian Americans must have significantly higher rates of coresidence with parents or parents-in-law than White Americans; and second, women’s labor force participation must be higher when living with parents or parents-in-law.

The authors find support for both conditions. First, Asian American women are much more likely to live with parents or parents-in-law than White women—a trend that holds across all Asian ethnic groups and immigration generations. Second, Asian American women’s labor force participation is higher when they live with parents or parents-in-law, particularly among Asian immigrant women and those with young children. Hence, coresidence with extended families appears to enable Asian American women to be more likely to remain in the labor force compared with White women, even when they have young children. Lim and Jeong document this critical role of family structure and investments in contributing to Asian American women’s greater attachment to the labor force compared with similarly educated White women.

Uchikoshi and Liu (2026) add to the body of literature by examining the effects of mothers’ educational level on the likelihood of a nonmarital birth and the prevalence of married households with children under twelve. The authors compare the patterns of Asian Americans to other racial groups as well as within Asian American ethnic groups. Using 2015–2019 data from the National Vital Statistics System and the 2013–2023 Current Population Surveys, Uchikoshi and Liu (2026) find that educational gradients in the likelihood of a nonmarital birth are weaker among Asian Americans than White Americans. In addition, they find that young Asian American children are more likely to reside in households headed by a married couple, and especially so among foreign-born and racially endogamous Asians. That the educational gradient is stronger among native-born and interracially married Asians emphasizes the diversity in family inequality among Asian Americans.

The implication of Uchikoshi and Liu’s findings aligns with the views of other authors in this issue: Asian Americans consider the family unit when making decisions about their children’s well-being. This research provides suggestive evidence that Asian American family behavior—particularly among those who are foreign-born and racially endogamous—departs from that of White Americans in ways that may create more favorable family environments for their children’s achievement. Their findings support the notion that family behavior and environments may be strategically employed to enhance children’s opportunities for mobility.

The final set of papers explores new ways in which Asian Americans strategically adapt to the labor market in response to its increasing financialization, while also acknowledging the limitations of the strategy. Grigoryeva (2026) charts new territory in how social scientists measure wages and compensation. In addition to wages, Grigoryeva highlights the rise of stock-based compensation—an increasingly common form of compensation in which employees receive company stock. The growth of stock-based compensation in the past four decades is astounding: In the early 1980s, fewer than one in eight American workers in the private sector received stock-based compensation, but today, nearly one in four workers do. Moreover, stock options are offered not only to engineers in Silicon Valley start-ups and executives of Fortune 500 companies but also to baristas at Starbucks. Grigoryeva examines the implications of this surge in the shift toward stock-based compensation for Asian Americans.

Analyses of the General Social Survey and the Survey of Consumer Finances show that Asian Americans are more likely than White Americans to receive stock-based compensation. Grigoryeva finds, however, that this is because Asian Americans are more likely to work in occupations in which stock options are offered. After controlling for occupation and adding sociodemographic controls, she concludes that the Asian–White gap in the likelihood of receiving stock-based compensation disappears. She also finds no significant difference in the amount of stock-based compensation received by Asian and White employees.

Given Asian Americans’ higher likelihood of working in occupations where stock options are offered, and the finding that this type of compensation is at parity with White workers, Grigoryeva proposes that Asian Americans’ selection into these jobs may reflect a form of strategic adaptation. Choosing jobs that offer stock options may help assuage the local labor market earnings disadvantages identified by Manduca and Furey and Kim and Kim. Grigoryeva’s innovative work introduces a novel dimension to the literature on racial inequality, emphasizing how corporate wage-setting practices and the availability of stock options may close economic disparities between Asian and White workers. Her study paves the way for more comprehensive scholarly and policy discussions on the diversification of income sources and its broader implications for racial inequality in an increasingly financialized labor market.

In yet another variant of strategic adaptation, Agius Vallejo and Keister (2026) shift the focus to self-employment and explore why college-educated, second-generation Chinese in Los Angeles choose to bet on business over the professional labor market. Their research fills a theoretical gap in the literature on Asian American entrepreneurship, which has mainly focused on the first generation. Previous literature painted self-employment as a last resort option for hyper-selected, college-educated immigrants who are unable to transfer their human and cultural capital from their countries of origin to the United States. Yet Agius Vallejo and Keister find that entrepreneurship does not cease after the first generation. Among second-generation Chinese, 11 percent are self-employed, and among this group, an astonishing 91 percent have a college degree or higher. Drawing on in-depth interviews with second-generation Chinese business owners, the authors find that family wealth, ethnic capital, transnational connections, and the marketization of mainland China and Taiwan lead one in ten to buck professional careers and bet on business.

While some—particularly firstborn sons—inherit lucrative family businesses, other second-generation Chinese strategically adapt to the labor market by drawing on family wealth as a financial launching pad to seize opportunities in an increasingly globalized economy. Agius Vallejo and Keister also show that self-employment is a rational and calculated choice among these college-educated second-generation Chinese, thereby reframing entrepreneurship as a mobility strategy among the US-born. Their findings challenge and expand the success frame for second-generation Asians, which had been narrowly defined as entry into one of the four coveted professions: medicine, law, science, and engineering (Lee and Zhou 2015). Entrepreneurship is not only a viable pathway for mobility among second-generation Chinese, but it can also be a highly lucrative one.

The limits of strategic adaptation become painfully evident in Chien and colleagues’ (2026) portrait of Asian Americans in the law. While gaining entry into top law schools and elite law firms is not a problem for Asian Americans, advancing and attaining leadership positions in these institutions is. Unlike other US minority groups, Asian Americans are not underrepresented in the field. They comprise nearly 9 percent of graduates from the top 30 law schools in the country and have high rates of entry into major US law firms. Despite this, they exit private practice at a higher rate than any other group and are rarely promoted to the ranks of equity partners. In the public sphere, they make up less than 6 percent of all federal judicial clerks, and in 2017, they comprised a mere 0.3 percent of elected prosecutors and Senate-confirmed US attorneys. For reference, 94.8 percent were White.

While Asian Americans in the legal profession have attained the success frame, their experiences point to troubling patterns that hinder their career mobility. Adopting a subject-centered approach that focuses on the experiences, sense of belonging, and group position of Asian American attorneys, Chien and colleagues examine how these professionals perceive their workplace experiences. The authors identify some disquieting and persistent patterns: perceptions of racial and gendered bias, lack of formal leadership training, insufficient mentorship, and work that goes unrecognized. In their focus group interviews, the authors learned that Asian American lawyers acknowledged that they are perceived as hardworking, responsible, logical, and careful by their partners and associates, but are also deemed to lack the traits necessary for leadership. For Asian American women, the intersection of race and gender produces a unique stereotype of passivity, meekness, and submissiveness—a death knell in the legal profession.

The authors underscore the limits of strategic adaptation. For Asian Americans in law, even the highest badges of prestige—a pedigreed law degree, a coveted title, and a job in an elite law firm—often fail to yield professional recognition and leadership opportunities. The underrepresentation of Asian Americans—especially Asian American women—in leadership roles is worrisome given that diversity in the legal profession is crucial for strengthening democratic institutions.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Taken together, the authors in this issue show both the strategic adaptation that Asian Americans employ to navigate the challenges they face in the labor market and the limitations of these strategies. Adaptation includes entering into self-employment, managing perceptions of discrimination in professional relationships, and, though perhaps not always consciously so, pursuing careers that provide high wages and substantial compensation through stock options. The authors also reveal the challenges Asian Americans face in achieving labor market mobility and parity with native-born White Americans.

Comparisons of earnings advantages between Asian American and White workers are highly context-dependent. For example, Asian Americans’ chosen field of study plays a significant role in explaining their earnings advantage, with variability among Asian American men depending on their education level, nativity, and place of education. Furthermore, unlike native-born Whites, Asians are geographically clustered in the United States, with the majority residing in metropolitan areas with higher earnings, higher costs of living, and a higher percentage of college-educated residents. When we shift the lens from the national to the local and control for region and local geography, the Asian American earnings advantage for men disappears, and Asian households earn less than comparable White households.

While Asian American women consistently exhibit an earnings advantage over White women, the authors delve deeply into the underlying reasons for their labor market advantage. Asian American women are more likely to remain employed after they have children, less likely to leave the workforce when their children are young, and more likely to raise children in married-family households. Coresidence with family members—including parents and parents-in-law—enables Asian American mothers to remain in the labor force and contribute to household earnings, thereby ensuring family stability and enhancing the prospects for mobility for the next generation. While this multigenerational household arrangement may be economically beneficial, it can come with psychological costs and extra household labor burdens that often fall on women (Howard et al. 2023; Olivieri et al. 2024).

A recurring theme in the articles is the strategic management of careers and household resources undertaken not only by individuals but by families. Family strategies for mobility involve decision-making about marriage, child-rearing, and investments in Asian American women’s employment. Choices such as returning to the workforce when children are young and relying on coresidence with extended family members for childcare are made with the collective well-being of the family unit at the fore. Together, the authors point to an understudied area of research: While family strategies for children’s education have been widely studied, family strategies concerning career choices and trajectories—particularly those affecting mothers—have received far less attention.

Additionally, family strategies for mobility may involve decisions about choosing to live in high-cost areas where their earnings are lower compared to their White neighbors, not because they are constrained by their employment, but because they prioritize their children’s education when deciding where to live. States vary in their investments in public schools, cities differ in the types of educational opportunities they offer, and neighborhoods are diverse in the levels of resources they offer children—all of which influence children’s educational opportunities, resources, and peers. The within-area earnings disadvantage that Asian Americans may encounter may thus reflect parental decisions that prioritize their children’s well-being and social mobility over their own careers. Ziyao Tian’s (2023) research supports this interpretation.

The authors also make clear that educational investments and attaining high-status careers do not shield Asian Americans from bias and discrimination. Asian American workers often confront external perceptions that hinder their advancement, as in careers in law. Because nine in ten Asians in the US are immigrants or the children of immigrants, they may have less access to professional networks and mentorship that help to address their workplace disadvantages, especially compared with their native-born White peers. Their limited network of relationships can also lead the second generation to buck the professional labor market altogether for self-employment or seek jobs in firms that offer stock options as compensation.

This issue builds on the growing body of research on how Asian American individuals and their families judiciously plan educational trajectories by shifting the focus from education to the labor market. Similar to the challenges faced in education, Asian Americans often contend with stereotypes that portray them as foreign overachievers who lack creativity, boldness, authority, and warmth (Lin et al. 2005; STAATUS Index 2024; Zou and Cheryan 2017). But unlike in educational institutions—which typically rely on a narrower and perhaps more objective set of criteria for judging success—workplace success is assessed by a broader range of criteria and more subjective evaluation, thereby leaving more room for stereotypes, bias, and discrimination to affect career trajectories and outcomes.

The articles in this issue focus explicitly on labor market experiences and, collectively, offer a snapshot of Asian Americans—particularly those who are college-educated—illustrating how they have largely succeeded academically but still face challenges in translating that educational success into career mobility comparable to their White American peers. This aspect of the Asian American experience remains understudied. However, this portrayal cannot and should not be the only representation of Asian Americans in the US labor market, as it overlooks many subgroups and their distinct experiences. For example, this issue does not address the experiences of recent refugees to the United States, undocumented Asian immigrants, or smaller Asian immigrant groups like Laotians, Hmong, and Bangladeshis, whose experiences differ significantly from those of the dominant Asian American ethnic groups (Hein 2006; Hsin and Aptekar 2022; Takei et al. 2013). Moreover, while much of the research on Asian Americans has focused on children and young adults, there remain notable gaps in research on Asian Americans over a longer life course, particularly middle age and old age.

In conclusion, Asian American educational achievement and high median earnings are often touted as an exception or a paradox in the United States, as reflected in terms such as “model minority” and “Asian American assimilation paradox” (Kao 1995; Lee and Sheng 2024; Wu 2013). How can a racial minority group in the US attain social mobility comparable to or exceeding that of the majority group while still experiencing discrimination? There are many potential answers to this question. This issue enriches the answers to this question by highlighting the disjuncture between national level statistics and the local contexts in which Asian Americans live and work as well as the diverse labor market outcomes among various Asian American subgroups. The authors call into question the notion of Asian Americans’ supposed workplace advantages and uncover ways they strategically adapt to achieve mobility despite the persistent challenges. As we noted at the opening, we offer this introduction and journal issue as a starting point—not an endpoint—for social scientists to study the career trajectories of Asian Americans as they navigate the transition from education to the labor market. We hope this inspires others to follow suit.