– The selective migration of Asian immigrants is the most important factor to their concentration in these fields of study and occupations.
– Asian immigrants as a whole are highly selective in these fields of study and occupations, compared to white Americans, with some Asian groups showing much higher levels of concentration.
– While younger-generation Asian groups whose immigrant generations have an extremely high concentration have experienced significant reductions in STEM, the other groups have experienced moderate or significant increases.
– All younger-generation Asian groups apart from Filipino have significantly or moderately higher levels of representation in non-nurse health-care occupations than their immigrant counterparts.
– There is great ethnic differences in the level of concentration in STEM among Asian immigrant women. Indian, Chinese and Vietnamese immigrant women, like their male counterparts, are far more highly concentrated in STEM fields than the other Asian groups, with the Filipino group having the lowest level of concentration.
2015 - The concentration of Asian Americans in STEM and health-care occupations: an intergenerational comparison
The theory the authors utilize stresses that younger-generation Asian American students have a great tendency to choose major fields related to STEM partly due to their awareness of their marginal status as racial minority members. However, they can choose these fields mainly because they have a strong maths and science background helped by their own parents and ethnic and pan-Asian networks.
The data comes from the combined 2009-11 American Community Surveys (ACS) from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). The 2009-11 ACS data include a large Asian American sample that has a college education and participates in the labour force.
The authors use two main dependent variables: field of study and occupational categories. For analysis of field of study, only those who received BA degrees are included. The authors divided foreign born Asians into first-generation immigrants and 1.5-generation Asians who came to the USA at the age of twelve or earlier. For occupational categories, the authors only included employed adults aged eighteen to sixty-four years. For this analysis, they selected the following three broad occupational categories in which Asian Americans are highly concentrated: (1) computing and maths; (2) architecture and engineering; and (3) health-care practices.