– On average, immigrant students have significantly higher rates entering and persisting in STEM fields compared to their native counterparts.
– The immigrant attainment advantage is particularly large among first-generation Asian and white immigrant students who attended foreign K-12 schools.
– The immigrant STEM advantage is largely due to better academic preparation in math and science in high school. This indicates that improvements in students’ college STEM attainment may depend crucially on policy efforts devoted to strengthening the quality of high school math and science education.
– The immigrant-native gaps appear to be declining with immigrant generational status.
– Immigrant students are more likely to have taken advanced math courses than natives.
– The immigrant-native STEM achievement gap is not primarily due to different motivations and preferences between immigrant students and native students.
– For first-generation immigrants, approximately 23% of the immigrant-native difference in STEM entry is due to variation in socioeconomic characteristics and individual preferences.
2017 - Laying the Tracks for Successful Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education: What Can We Learn from Comparisons of Immigrant-Native Achievement in the USA?
The main analysis sample is based on restricted-use data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study 2004/09 (BPS: 2004/09). The sample used for this study contained 11,720 students (rounded).
IV: Immigrant generation (first-generation immigrants are foreign-born students, second-generation immigrants are US-born students who have at least one foreign-born parent, and higher-generation immigrants are native students born to US-born parents; 1.5-generation immigrants are those who came earlier and received all of their K-12 education in the USA, whereas recent first-generation immigrants are those who came to the USA in later years and were educated in their home countries before college); Age; Gender; Race (White, Black, Asian, Hispanic); Family income percentile; Parent education (whether at least one parent had a college degree); Math preparation (number of years of high school math and having taken a calculus class in high school);
DV: STEM field (mathematics; physical sciences; biological/life sciences; computer/information sciences; and engineering/engineering technologies and science technologies); STEM entry (whether or not they reported a STEM major in either the 2003/2004 or the 2005/2006 academic years); STEM persistence (still enrolled as STEM majors in 2009 when the survey was last conducted, or had attained a STEM degree by 2009);