Socioeconomic Attainments of Asian Americans Arthur Sakamoto, 1 Kimberly A. Goyette, 2 and ChangHwan Kim 3 1 Department of Sociology, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712; email: asakamoto@austin.utexas.edu 2 Department of Sociology, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122; email: kgoyette@temple.edu 3 Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045; email: chkim@ku.edu Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2009. 35:255–76 First published online as a Review in Advance on April 6, 2009 The Annual Review of Sociology is online at soc.annualreviews.org This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-115958 Copyright c  2009 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved 0360-0572/09/0811-0255$20.00 Key Words educational attainment, labor market, earnings, majority-minority paradigm, model minority myth, post–Civil Rights era Abstract According to the majority-minority paradigm, racial and ethnic mi- norities have lower socioeconomic characteristics than whites owing to discrimination. Asian Americans defy this conventional view, how- ever, at least on average. Asian Americans tend to have higher mean levels of educational achievements, and several recent studies indicate approximate parity with whites in most arenas of the labor market for those Asian Americans who were schooled in the United States. Their favorable socioeconomic outcomes stand in contrast to the widespread discrimination and labor market disadvantages that Asian Americans encountered during the earlier part of the twentieth century. The im- proved opportunities for Asian Americans suggest increasingly success- ful interrelations with whites in the post–Civil Rights era, with its more multicultural ethos. Less encouragingly, the favorable average socio- economic profile of Asian Americans in the post–Civil Rights era in part reflects the rising significance of class resources and associated inequalities. The latter trend is evident in the notable socioeconomic variability within the racial category of Asian Americans. 255 Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2009.35:255-276. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org by UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON - HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARIES on 05/23/11. For personal use only.