Members of the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles drive with signs reading: "#Stop Asian Hate," in a caravan around Koreatown to denounce hate against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in Los Angeles on March 19, 2021. Damian Dovarganes/AP
Damian Dovarganes/AP
Almost six in 10 Asian Americans reported they have faced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity, and 63% said they felt not enough attention was given to anti-Asian discrimination, according to a new Pew Research Center survey released Thursday.
"For many Asian Americans, discrimination experiences are not just single events, but instead come in several often-overlapping forms," the report said.
Seventy-eight percent of Asian American adults said they've been treated as a foreigner, even if they were born in the U.S., including having their names mispronounced, being told to go back to their country, being scorned for speaking a language other than English and facing assumptions that they can't speak English.
Anti-Asian hate crimes spiked during the pandemic. The survey showed that 32% of Asian adults say they know another Asian person in the U.S. who has been threatened or attacked because of their race or ethnicity since the pandemic began.
Thirty-seven percent of Asian adults say they've been called an offensive name. Among that group, Asian adults born in the U.S. (57%) reported being called an offensive name almost twice as much as Asian adults who immigrated here (30%).
"In many cases, Asian adults who grew up in the U.S. are more likely than those who immigrated as adults to say they have experienced discrimination incidents," the report said. "This could be for a number of reasons, including recognizing discrimination more than other Asian adults, having more non-Asian friends, or being racialized in America during adolescence."
South Asians were less likely to be called offensive names (29%) than East (41%) and Southeast (39%) Asian Americans. However, more than twice as many South Asian Americans (35%) reported being stopped at security checkpoints than East (14%) and Southeast Asian Americans (15%).
"After 9/11, things changed a lot," said a U.S.-born woman of Indian origin in her early 30s who participated in a 2021 Pew focus group. (Pew did not name the participants.) "I remember my parents putting out American flags everywhere — outside the house, on the mailbox, like wherever they could stick them. And even now, I do get ... constantly pulled over when you're in line at the airport, by TSA."
Among religious groups, Asian American Muslims and Hindus were more likely to be stopped at security checkpoints.
Fifty-five percent of those surveyed had not heard the term "model minority" before, but about six in 10 Asian Americans reported facing assumptions associated with the stereotype, such as being well off financially and being academically skilled, particularly at subjects like math and science.
"I feel like Asians are kind of known as the model minority," said one focus group participant, a U.S.-born man of Chinese origin in his early 20s. "That kind of puts us in an interesting position where I feel like we're supposed to excel and succeed in the media, or we're seen in the media as exceeding in all these things as smart. All of us are not by any means."
Additionally, one in five Asian Americans said they experienced workplace discrimination, about one in 10 said their neighbors made life difficult for them because of their race or ethnicity and about 1 in 10 said they were stopped, searched or questioned by police due to their race or ethnicity.
Pew surveyed 7,006 Asian adults living in the U.S., from July 2022 to January 2023. The sample group largely included Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Indian and Vietnamese Americans. Those are the six largest ethnic groups among Asian Americans, and make up about 81% of Asian adults in the U.S.
Asian Americans increasingly find themselves at the center of scorching debates over educational opportunity and fairness, whether related to admissions practices at highly selective colleges or pressing concerns over social exclusion in school.
Now research evidence demonstrates that they face racial isolation simply by entering the classroom. A recent study of wealthy California suburbs finds that white families drift away from public schools as more Asian students enroll in them — and fears over academic competition, rather than outright racism, may play the biggest role in driving the departures.
Circulated this summer by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the paper offers an unusually granular view of population-level changes in a highly affluent and desirable milieu. It also reveals a stark and somewhat disturbing response to the presence of Asian Americans, one of the fastest-growing and highest-achieving ethnic groups in the United States.
In measure after measure, Asian Americans are shown to be America’s top-performing student racial category. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal standardized test often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, has historically found large gaps separating Asian students from their white, African American, and Hispanic peers. Asians achieved similar results on college entrance exams, tallying 43 percent of all test takers scoring over 700 on the SAT math section while making up less than 6 percent of all K–12 students.
This year’s landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, brought on behalf of Asian students who argued they were victims of discrimination, dramatically rolled back the use of racial preferences in college admissions. (David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images)
Older federal data also show that, apart from testing, Asian high schoolers earn higher GPAs than students of other backgrounds, and the proportion of Asians earning college credit through Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate coursework is nearly double that of whites.
While they’ve ascended to lofty altitudes in U.S. schooling — significantly ahead of whites, America’s most historically advantaged group, and vastly more so relative to other non-whites — Asian Americans have often received a frosty reception from policymakers and communities. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated against Asian applicants in order to cultivate more racial diversity on their campuses, a historic blow to the legality of affirmative action. And for nearly two decades, news accounts have highlighted areas (including in California cities like Cupertino) where white families disenrolled from local schools following an influx of Asian children, with some parents openly complaining of increased academic competition from the new arrivals.
The new study reveals that those cases were not merely anecdotes. Study co-author Leah Boustan, an economist at Princeton University, has previously investigated instances of postwar “white flight” that saw whites quickly abandon neighborhoods as the percentage of African American inhabitants grew. But at the project’s outset, she said, the idea of flight from high-flying schoolchildren seemed “the opposite” of what one would expect from local parents.
“I would have thought that a school district with a growing number of Asian students would be seen as a positive thing,” Boustan reasoned. “Because we have these perceptions — partially based on real data about the educational background of Asian parents, but also partially stereotypes that are expanded beyond the reality — that somehow, Asian kids would be better prepared, that they would be better peers who would elevate classroom discussion.”
‘White kids are generally falling behind’
Those assumptions may indeed have guided the white parents featured in the research, though perhaps not in a predictable direction.
Boustan and her colleagues collected public school enrollment figures from the California Department of Education between 2000 and 2016, which included demographic information about families’ racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. They focused on a group of 152 school districts that were suburban and comparatively well-to-do, determined by their local average incomes and percentages of students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch (a common measure of poverty in education research).
They also used U.S. Census records to determine the growth rates of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian students within those districts. Over 6 million people of Asian descent live in California, roughly one-third of their numbers within the United States as a whole, and Asian students make up proportionally larger shares of suburban districts than urban ones. While large divergences exist between Asians of different national origin, on average, households headed by Asian Americans earn 38 percent more than the U.S. median income.
The results of the authors’ calculations were unmistakable: With each arrival of an Asian American student in a high-income suburban district, .6 white students left — mostly departing the community entirely, rather than relocating to a private or a charter school. After adjusting their observations for moving patterns (different sub-groups enrolled at schools at markedly different rates, with South Asian and Chinese populations growing faster than Koreans and Japanese) the effect was even greater, such that each Asian student was associated with the departure of 1.5 white students.
The strength of the correlation between Asian entrance and white exit was clear, even if the motivation wasn’t. The research team considered multiple explanations behind the trend, but found reason to doubt each.
First off, no statistical relationship existed during those years between Asian American student enrollment and that of students from other groups, such as African Americans or Hispanics; therefore, white movement was a reaction not to the broader emergence of non-white neighbors, but to Asians specifically.
But additional qualitative evidence indicates that the movement was unlikely to have been primarily generated by anti-Asian prejudice either. In responses to the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of public attitudes administered by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, highly educated participants were vastly less likely than their less educated peers to say they “feel cool” toward Asian Americans, or to say they don’t trust them. And yet the suburbs included in the study were overwhelmingly populated by high-income residents with college and advanced degrees.
Leah Boustan
“If we just look at the basic correlations, we don’t see this kind of white flight from low-income suburbs,” said Boustan. “To me, this very clearly rules out basic racial animus.”
But the out-migration could be related to another factor: relative performance in school. According to results from California’s mandated math and reading tests, as well as its high school exit exam, the presence of Asian students in a given school during the period under observation was tied to elevated average test scores in that school — but typically not for white students. In other words, the new Asian American pupils were bringing stronger academic performance to the schools they enrolled in, but also potentially making their white classmates look somewhat worse by comparison.
Boustan said that possibility could be viewed with dread during college admissions season, when high school seniors are often considered on the basis of their class GPA rank.
“Someone is showing up in the district who scores better than they do. On some of the tests, maybe that pulls the white scores up a bit too, and on other tests, it looks like white scores might even be falling. But in relative terms, the white kids are generally falling behind.”
‘Race at the Top’
The theme of white and Asian families jostling for educational opportunity has been sounded more frequently in recent years, especially in highly educated, middle-class settings. This summer, the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard showcased the comparatively superior academic credentials of many Asian applicants to elite universities, as well as the various alternative criteria — including legacy and donor status, racial preferences, extracurricular activities like sports — that colleges use to select their classes.
A similar dynamic plays out during the K–12 years. In 2022, Tufts University sociologist Natasha Warikoo published Race at the Top, an account of fierce academic competition among high schoolers in a wealthy, but unidentified, East Coast community. Some of the white parents she spoke with expressed worry about the high-stakes atmosphere building in their local schools and fear that their own children would struggle to keep pace with their Asian classmates.
Lurking behind the discourse is the decade-old cultural figure of the “Tiger Mother”: a hyper-motivated Asian parent who pushes her child to excel in high-level coursework and seek extra instruction outside of class. Viewed as a model by some and an offensive stereotype by others, the notion appears to guide how some white parents perceive their Asian neighbors.
It may also reflect some bedrock truths about what different families prioritize in education and child-rearing. In a study published this summer, researcher Ziyao Tian used microdata from consumer surveys for different families across the U.S. to show that white and Asian families differ dramatically in their annual expenditures on K–12 education. Not only did Asian families outspend white families overall, they were also more likely to direct their spending toward tutoring and instruction outside of school. By comparison, whites outspent Asians on sports and cultural activities like trips to parks, concerts, and museums.
Notably, the gap in expenditures was at its greatest among highly educated families like those populating the California suburbs that Boustan studied. Asian parents with graduate degrees spent 22 percent more on tutoring for their children than similarly credentialed white parents; among parents with a high school education or less, Asians spent just 6 percent more on tutoring. In spite of the escalating disparities in spending, the Asian-white achievement gap is actually greater among families with less educational attainment.
Private tutoring centers, many employing the popular Kumon method, saw explosive growth in the 1990s and 2000s. (Wikimedia Commons)
Those findings provide an echo of a 2021 study looking at the incremental growth of private tutoring centers. The number of such brick-and-mortar centers (including many employing the popular Kumon method) more than tripled between 1997 and 2016, an explosion that was heavily concentrated in highly educated and high-income cities and towns. They were also disproportionately likely to be located in areas with larger percentages of immigrant and Asian residents.
Eddie Kim
Eddie Kim, a mathematics professor at Bentley University and one of the tutoring study’s co-authors, said that the purchase of additional learning opportunities outside of traditional schooling might be a partial outgrowth of middle-class status. While the top priority for many striving families is to move to a neighborhood with strong public schools, the same households must pursue alternate routes for their children’s academic development after that step has been taken.
“Once you’ve moved to a particularly good school district, and you see that everyone else is already [academically] good, how do you give your child an advantage? It can’t be through the school system because every child gets the same thing,” Kim posited. “The only advantage is to look outside the school system.”
The findings of the Boustan paper “clicked with” some of Kim’s own instincts about middle-class parents’ strategies around education and admission. If they feared that their children would be outshone in the classroom, they might well change schools — or even move — he said.
“When you say it out loud, it sounds very intuitive: Of course, parents aren’t just going to lie down and do nothing. If they notice something, even semi-subconsciously, they’re going to take action to support their individual child’s success.”
Watch out, San Francisco elected officials and political candidates, because a new nonprofit is looking to give out “Asian scores” to rate your performance.
A team of Asian American political activists has formed the Association for the Advancement of Asians, or “Triple A,” to boost political engagement and better inform voters about officials’ records on issues that Asian Americans often prioritize, such as public safety and public education.
“If we can galvanize the Asian community for the benefit of the issues, I think we win,” Chris Do, who founded Triple A and sits on its board, told The Standard. “We can start getting stuff for our community by just voting, and that's the dream I have for the organization.”
It’s unclear what the “Asian scores” will be based on as the group is still finalizing specifics, but the board said that it will be completely issue-focused and “basically colorblind.” Volunteers will read the details of various pieces of legislation and track voting records on pertinent topics, like funding for police.
The first report is expected to come out before the March 2024 election. Do emphasized the rating process will be transparent and include feedback from a wide range of political spectrum to ensure the credibility of the scores.
However, the group may align with the more moderate factions of San Francisco politics, as some board members were active during the 2022 Board of Education and district attorney recalls.
“How are we continuing the infrastructure and connections to the community that we built?” Ho said. “How do we keep this going?”
Ho acknowledged that San Francisco’s Asian community is not monolithic, but that Asian voters should be better informed on issues they care about instead of being diluted and divided.
“If you're not even Asian and you get a high Asian score, God bless you,” Do said. “If an Asian candidate doesn't get a high score, so be it. I am OK with that.”
BANGKOK (AP) — Shares were mixed in Asia on Tuesday after Wall Street benchmarks edged lower as investors waited for updates on inflation and how American consumers are feeling about the economy.
Tokyo and Hong Kong fell while Shanghai, Seoul and Sydney gained.
On Tuesday the Conference Board will issue its latest report on consumer confidence, which has remained solid throughout the year. Economists polled by FactSet expect another solid reading for the October report.
On Thursday, Wall Street will be closely watching the government’s October data on the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation. Economists expect that measure to continue easing, as it has been since the middle of 2022.
Investors have grown cautiously optimistic that inflation has cooled enough for the Federal Reserve to put a definitive end to its aggressive interest rate hikes. Meanwhile, the broader economy has remained strong enough in the face of rising interest rates and inflation to avoid a recession.
Signs the U.S. economy is slowing, and that conditions in China remain uncertain are weighing on sentiment, analysts said.
After U.S. new home sales slowed more than expected in October, “The Conference Board’s consumer confidence survey could well show a deterioration in mood,” Robert Carnell and Min Joo Kang of ING Economics said in a commentary.
Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index lost 0.4% to 33,323.13.
The Hang Seng in Hong Kong slipped 0.6% to 17,419.42. Sensetime’s shares sank 5.6%, having fallen as much as 9%, after Grizzly Research accused the artificial intelligence software company of inflating its revenue figures. In a notice to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Sensetime said the allegations were “without merit” and showed a lack of understanding of the company’s business and its financial reporting.
Grizzly also has taken aim at other major Chinese tech companies, including online clothing retailer Temu.
Elsewhere, South Korea’s Kospi jumped 0.8% to 2,514.45 and the Shanghai Composite index edged 0.1% higher, to 3,034.80.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added 0.3% to 7,011.10 and India’s Sensex was up just 18 points at 65,980.48. Bangkok’s SET gained 0.4%.
On Monday, the S&P 500 fell 0.2% to 4,550.43. The Dow Jones Industrial Average also edged 0.2% lower, to 35,333.47, and the Nasdaq composite slipped 0.1% to 14,241.02.
The S&P 500 remains on track to close out November as its best month of the year.
Shopify rose 4.4% after announcing a Black Friday record for worldwide sales of $4.1 billion from its merchants. Consumers were scouring the internet for online deals as they capped off the five-day post-Thanksgiving shopping bonanza with Cyber Monday.
Health care, communication services and industrial stocks were among the biggest drags on the market. Eli Lilly & Co. fell 1.6%, Meta Platforms slid 1% and Union Pacific closed 2% lower.
Technology stocks and companies that rely on consumer spending were bright spots. Chipmaker Nvidia rose 1% and Amazon.com gained 0.7%.
In the bond market, Treasury yields fell broadly. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which influences interest rates on mortgages and other loans, fell to 4.40% from 4.47% late Friday.
The price of U.S. crude oil fell 0.9% Monday, remaining mostly stable ahead of OPEC’s meeting on Thursday. The cartel has maintained tight supplies, though prices have been falling over the last month. Lower energy prices could further ease inflation’s squeeze on consumers and help fuel economic growth.
Early Tuesday, U.S. benchmark crude was up 18 cents at $75.04 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Brent crude, the international pricing standard, gained 22 cents to $80.09 a barrel.
The main focus through the end of the year will be on the Fed and what it does next. It has been holding its benchmark interest rate steady at a range of 5.25% to 5.50% since its last quarter-point hike at its July meeting. Investors increasingly expect the Fed to cut rates in mid-2024, easing it off its highest level in two decades. The central bank is aiming to cool inflation without slowing economic growth to the point of causing a recession.
In other trading Tuesday, the U.S. dollar fell to 148.16 Japanese yen from 148.68 yen. The euro slipped to $1.0953 from $1.0955.
___
AP Business Writers Alex Veiga and Damian J. Troise contributed.
SINGAPORE, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Asian stocks edged higher on Tuesday, while the dollar was at its lowest in three months as investors remained convinced the Federal Reserve was done with its rate-hike cycle and looked ahead to a crucial inflation report later this week.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan (.MIAPJ0000PUS) was 0.39% higher and set for a near 7% gain in November, its strongest monthly performance since January.
Japan's Nikkei (.N225) eased 0.20% but is up 8% this month, on course for its strongest monthly performance in three years.
"The outlook for central bank policy has been a big factor driving the improvement in risk appetite in November," said Rodrigo Catril, senior FX strategist at National Australia Bank.
The evidence of an easing inflationary pressures has supported the view that many central banks are done with their tightening cycles and rate cut expectations for next year have been brought forward, Catril said.
Markets are pricing in a 96.8% likelihood that the U.S. central bank will leave interest rates unchanged next month, with the possibility of a rate cut starting to gain ground in mid-2024, according to CME's FedWatch tool.
Investors will focus this week on the Fed's preferred measure of inflation on Thursday and euro zone consumer inflation figures for further clarity on the where inflation is headed.
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on Monday the central bank's fight to contain price growth is not yet done, citing a still strong wage growth and an uncertain outlook even as inflation pressures in euro zone ease.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell is also due to speak on Friday his words will be scrutinized by traders to gauge where rates may head.
China's blue-chip CSI 300 Index (.CSI300) was 0.23% lower while Hong Kong's Hang Seng index (.HSI) fell 0.70%, a day after data showed profit at China's industrial firms grew at a slower pace in October.
U.S. data on Monday showed sales of new single-family homes fell more than expected in October, as higher mortgage rates reduced affordability, but the housing segment remains supported by a persistent shortage of existing properties on the market.
The weaker-than-expected data weighed on Treasury yields, with the yield on benchmark 10-year notes slipping 9.6 basis points on Monday. In Asian hours, they were up 1.6 basis points at 4.404%.
The dollar index , a measure of the greenback against a basket of currencies, fell to 103.11, its lowest since Aug. 31. The Japanese yen strengthened 0.28% to 148.25 per dollar.
Oil prices inched higher on Tuesday after a steep fall the previous day as investors awaited this week's OPEC+ meeting and expected curbs on supplies into next year.
U.S. crude was 0.31% higher at $75.09 per barrel and Brent was back above $80.
Spot gold added 0.1% to $2,015.00 an ounce, just shy of the three month high it touched on Monday.
Reporting by Ankur Banerjee. Editing by Sam Holmes
The admissions consultant described what it takes to get into an elite college: Take 10 to 20 Advanced Placement courses. Create a “showstopper project.”
Asian American students need to be extremely strategic in how they present themselves, “to avoid anti-Asian discrimination,” the consultant, Sasha Chada of Ivy Scholars, said at the October webinar to an audience of mostly Asian parents and students.
Edward Yen, who doesn’t consider himself a “tiger parent,” wondered what extreme accomplishments his 11-year-old daughter will need to get into USC — considered a relative shoo-in back in the 1990s, when he attended.
Parents and students at an annual college and career fair at Temple City High School.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
“I appreciated the honesty,” Yen said of Chada’s presentation, which was co-hosted by the Los Angeles County Asian American Employees Assn. and the nonprofit Faith and Community Empowerment.
In the first college application season since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, Asian American students are more stressed out than ever. Race-conscious admissions were widely seen to have disadvantaged them, as borne out by disparities in the test scores of admitted students — but many feel that race will still be a hidden factor and that standards are even more opaque than before.
At seminars like Chada’s around Southern California this fall, some held in Korean or Mandarin for immigrant parents, consultants reinforced the message — even students with superhuman qualifications are regularly rejected from Harvard and UC Berkeley.
Parents who didn’t grow up in the American system, and who may have moved to the U.S. in large part for their children’s education, feel desperate and in the dark. Some shell out tens of thousands of dollars for consultants as early as junior high, fearing that anything less than a name-brand school could doom their children to an uncertain future. Sometimes, anxious students are the ones who ask their parents to hire a consultant.
Some consultants say they try to push schools that fit the student best, not necessarily the top-ranked ones — even as skeptics wonder whether they are scare-mongering in an attempt to drum up business. But especially for parents from countries like South Korea, China and India, where a single exam determines a student’s college choices, the lack of objective standards can be overwhelming.
“The worst part of stress comes out when kids feel helpless, not when someone sets a high bar for them,” said Chada, whose Indian father grew up in Northern Ireland.
Julie Lin, left, and her 14-year-old daughter Jasmine Liao visit an annual college and career fair at Temple City High School.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
“A lot of our Asian parents are thinking it’s a golden ticket if you’re able to get into Harvard or Yale,” said Yen, president of the Los Angeles County Asian American Employees Assn., who lives in San Marino and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan. “I just want my daughter to be healthy, safe, and I want her to be successful in life.”
Srikanth Nagarajan, a 52-year-old manager at DirecTV and an immigrant from India, has been nudging his daughter to shoot for top schools like Harvard.
Sam Srikanth, a senior at El Segundo High, has a 4.41 GPA and has taken seven AP courses, which she said was the maximum number offered at her school. She is captain of the varsity swim team and is working on a research project about the role of race in college basketball recruiting.
After asking teachers and school counselors to read her admissions essays, Srikanth decided to hire a private counselor. But she ended up not using the counselor’s suggestions because they didn’t feel like her voice.
Srikanth said her “hopes got a little bit higher” after the Supreme Court’s decision.
But with her last name, she said, “you actually fill out the application and realize there’s no way colleges won’t figure out what race you are.”
Her older sister, who applied to colleges five years ago with a similar resume, got rejected from 18 of 20 or so schools and ended up at Boston College.
“I can’t be let down if my expectations are already so low,” Srikanth said.
When Sunny Lee came to the U.S. from South Korea in 2006 for postdoctoral work at USC, she thought that people could succeed in America even if they didn’t go to college.
But after moving to San Marino about a decade ago to raise her three sons — the oldest is now in 7th grade — she saw neighbors hiring athletic coaches and academic consultants for kids who were still in elementary school.
The moms she knows fret about students who seem like slam dunks being denied by top schools.
“A student known as a genius at San Marino High ended up going to Pasadena City College,” said Lee, 48, a researcher at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Moms were having a mental breakdown.”
A friend told Lee that she regretted spending only $3,000 for a consultant to go over her child’s admissions essays. For her next child, the friend would spend at least $10,000.
With both her and her husband working full-time, Lee feels an admission consultant is necessary just to keep up, especially with opaqueness and unpredictability of college admissions.
“It’s a fight over information,” she said.
She said she doesn’t think her oldest son needs a consultant yet. But she would like her middle son, a fifth-grader, to start working with one.
On the outskirts of Koreatown in July, dozens of Korean American students and parents attended a five-hour seminar hosted by Radio Seoul.
Several admissions consultants said in Korean and English that the end of affirmative action could improve Asian American students’ chances of getting into elite colleges.
One urged parents to give up their hobbies — no more golfing every weekend — so they can hover over their children.
Won Jong Kim, director of the college consulting firm Boston Education, described several students who got into elite schools.
Anna, who got into Harvard, took AP Calculus AB in 7th grade. Ben, who got into Stanford, took 15 AP classes.
Esther’s academics weren’t “stellar,” Kim said — only a 4.3 GPA, 1520 SAT and nine AP courses. But in her personal statement, she wrote about her mother’s fight with breast cancer. And she was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania.
“That was her trump card. It was a unique situation that she overcame,” Kim said. “To be frank, she got really lucky.”
In an interview, Kim said he wanted to show the “common characteristics” of those who get into Ivy League schools.
“Every year, the bar goes up for students looking to get into top colleges,” he said.
Chung Lee, the chief consultant at Ivy Dream, said he tries to share information in free seminars hosted by various community organizations.
Ethan Chen, 17, left, and Audrey Balthazar, 16, both Arcadia High students, browse through material at a college and career fair at Temple City High School.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
“The colleges’ lack of transparency has created this sense of fear,” he said.
In Temple City, Shun Zhang said she doesn’t want to put pressure on her son, Connor Sam.
Zhang, a 48-year-old realtor, wants to give him the support structure she didn’t have growing up as an immigrant from China.
Her only requirement is that he play a sport, to stay active and healthy. Still, Sam, a senior at Temple City High who is on the varsity soccer team and interns for Assemblymember Mike Fong, feels the need to push himself. He wants to double major in sociology and some kind of science at UCLA.
Hoping to be “more organized and put together,” he asked his parents for a personal admissions counselor to help him reflect on his accomplishments and brainstorm essay topics. He has been working with the counselor for two years and finds it helpful.
Sam, whose father is a refugee from Vietnam and works as a project manager, said he thinks about how well his parents have provided for him and wants to be as successful.
Going to a good college would go a long way in securing a good job and “maintain where I am,” he said.
But for all his hard work and preparation, he views college admissions as a crapshoot.
“I don’t really know what they are looking for,” he said.
(Bloomberg) -- Asian stocks swung to a loss and US equity futures fell as slowing Chinese industrial profit growth sapped optimism after last week’s equity rally. The yen strengthened against all its Group-of-10 peers.
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China shares led declines with the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index dropping as much as 1.4%, while benchmarks also fell in Australia and Japan. Rising Treasury yields siphoned some funds away from stocks.
Equities trimmed some of last week’s gains amid uncertainty before the next installment of key global economic data this week including euro-zone inflation data, China PMIs and US personal consumption numbers on Thursday, and US, European and Chinese PMIs on Friday. Asian markets had little direction from the US following the holiday shortened post-Thanksgiving session Friday.
“We’ve seen US bond yields gap higher at the open, and that has weighed on equity market sentiment to send US futures down alongside Chinese markets that are already under pressure from weak industrial profits,” said Matt Simpson, a senior market strategist at City Index Inc.
US stock futures dropped in Asia after the S&P 500 capped a fourth week of gains Friday, when the VIX — Wall Street’s “fear gauge” and a measure of equity volatility — fell to its lowest level since January 2020.
This week, investors will be looking especially closely at Chinese activity data to gauge the health of the world’s second largest economy. Traders will be assessing shadow banking stocks after Chinese authorities said they recently opened criminal investigations into the money management business of Zhongzhi Enterprise Group Co.
Profits at China’s industrial companies climbed at a slower pace in October than the prior month as deflationary pressures persisted, suggesting the economic recovery remains uncertain.
“The profit numbers shows that current recovery momentum is still fairly fragile,” Dong Chen, head of Asia macroeconomic research at Pictet Wealth Management, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We still have a long way to go to get out of the woods.”
The Hong Kong dollar one-month interbank rate jumped to the highest since 2007 as the supply of cash tightened toward year-end.
‘Remain Heavy’
Treasury 10-year yields climbed as much as five basis points to 4.51%, the highest in more than a week.
The dollar was mixed in Asian trade after Bloomberg’s index of the greenback slipped 0.5% last week.
The US currency may “remain heavy” for most of the week as fund managers adjust hedges and cash heads into developing economies, Commonwealth Bank of Australia strategists including Joseph Capurso wrote in a note to clients. “The backdrop of low volatility and expectations for a soft landing in the US economy supports portfolio capital flows into emerging markets,” they said.
In earnings due this week, Crowdstrike Holdings Inc. will underscore how businesses are prioritizing cybersecurity after recent high-profile corporate hacks, while Salesforce Inc. and Dell Technologies Inc. are expected to post slower sales growth as overall corporate expenditure tightens.
Traders will also be keeping an eye on gold and oil after Israel and Hamas signaled that a temporary cease-fire in Gaza could be extended beyond Monday to allow for the release of more hostages and prisoners. Meantime, OPEC+ looks close to resolving a dispute over output quotas that forced the group to postpone a pivotal meeting at the weekend. Oil steadied after notching a three-day drop.
Key events this week:
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde appears in parliamentary committee, Monday
Australia retail sales, Tuesday
NATO foreign ministers meet, Tuesday
US Conf. Board consumer confidence, Tuesday
Fed Governor Chris Waller, Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee speak at different events, Tuesday
Australia CPI, Wednesday
Reserve Bank of New Zealand policy decision, Wednesday
New York will establish a new commission to tackle the needs of the state’s rapidly growing population of Asian American and Pacific Islander residents under a new law signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul last week.
Queens Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar, the bill’s sponsor and the first South Asian-American woman elected to the state Legislature, says the commission will address the “unique needs” of AAPI New Yorkers.
Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the city, state, and country. More than 2 million residents of Asian descent live in New York — the majority in New York City. Asian Americans now comprise more than 10% of the state’s population and 7% of the country's.
“The commission is like a think tank within our state government that will constantly work on the ways that government can better serve the Asian population,” Rajkumar said, adding that the group would be a “bridge” between government and Asian communities.
The group will be made up of 15 members chosen by the governor and state legislative leaders, but it won't launch until at least next year. It’s tasked with boosting awareness of state and local resources available to Asian American and Pacific Islander individuals and communities, developing programs to honor those communities, and educating the public about Asian American issues and culture.
The group also aims to raise awareness of anti-Asian hate crimes. The commission may also help more Asian Americans run for office and provide more granular ethnic data on the state’s diverse Asian American population, Rajkumar said.
Hochul signed the bill establishing the commission after a group of 40 state lawmakers and nearly 50 Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations added their names to a letter from Rajkumar calling for the governor’s approval.
Hochul vetoed a version of the bill last year, citing funding concerns. But this year, the state budget includes $1 million for the commission, Rajkumar said.
“The time has come for our state government to take this step to be more responsive to our community,” she wrote in her letter to Hochul, pointing to the uptick in anti-Asian violence in recent years and the growing numbers of Asian New Yorkers.
The number of Asian New Yorkers has more than doubled since 2000 and quadrupled since 1990. From 2012 to 2022, the Asian population in New York state grew by nearly 370,000 people, or 23%, according to Census data.
Investing.com-- Most Asian stocks fell on Friday following weak economic signals from Japan and the euro zone, while steep losses in index heavyweight Chow Tai Fook Jewellery dragged Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index lower.
Trading volumes were muted, while markets also saw little overnight cues on account of a U.S. market holiday. Most regional bourses were also set to end the week unchanged as markets grew uncertain over the path of U.S. interest rates in the coming year.
The was the worst performer among its peers on Friday, down 1.5% on a 11% slump in shares of luxury goods retailer Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group Ltd (HK:). The retailer, which is part of the Chow Tai Fook Group conglomerate, clocked strong earnings growth for the six months to Sept 30.
But uncertainty over succession plans for the group, coupled with concerns of slowing demand for luxury goods in China and Hong Kong largely offset the stronger earnings. Real estate firm New World Development Co Ltd (HK:), which is also part of the conglomerate, fell 0.6% in Hong Kong trade.
Broader Chinese stocks also fell as shares of major property developers saw some profit taking after a strong week. Expectations of more policy support for the sector had spurred strong gains in property stocks, as Beijing prepared a whitelist of developers to provide them with easy access to funding.
China’s index fell 0.5%, while the fell 0.4%.
Focus was now squarely on data from China, due next week, for more cues on business activity. Still, Goldman Sachs recently said it was positive on the outlook for Chinese stocks through 2024, as an economic recovery picks up steam.
Weak business activity readings from and the provided negative cues to markets, especially as both regions also clocked negative GDPs in the third quarter. U.S. for November were due later in the day.
But Japan’s index rose 0.6% in catch-up trade after a holiday on Thursday. Weaker-than-expected data for October also fed into expectations that the Bank of Japan will have more headroom to remain ultra-dovish for longer, even as underlying Japanese inflation still remained sticky.
Other Asian indexes were mostly negative. Australia’s rose 0.3%, while South Korea’s fell 0.3%.
Futures for India’s index pointed to a slightly negative open. But the Nifty remained in sight of a record high, while a Reuters poll also showed that markets were largely bullish on Indian stocks over the next six months, with resilience in the Indian economy set to drive the Nifty to new record highs.
SYDNEY, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Asian shares were dragged lower by China on Friday amid little guidance from Wall Street which was closed for a holiday, while the dollar remained on the back foot as investors bet U.S. rates have peaked.
The yen was little changed after data showed that Japan's core consumer inflation picked up again in October, although by less than expected, and factory activity shrank for a sixth straight month.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan (.MIAPJ0000PUS) eased 0.4% but are headed for a weekly gain of 0.9%. It is up a whopping 7.1% so far in November as investors grew increasingly confident that the U.S. rates have peaked, with discussions shifting to the timing and speed of future rate cuts.
Japan's markets (.N225) returned from a holiday, with Nikkei (.225) climbing 1.0% to charge towards a 33-year high hit on Monday.
Chinese bluechips (.CSI300) fell 0.3% while Hong Kong's Hang Seng index (.HSI) tumbled 1.3%, reversing the previous day's hefty gains. Chinese developers listed in Hong Kong (.HSMPI) lost 0.7%, after jumping 6.4% on Thursday on more support measures from Beijing to prop up the beleaguered industry.
"Since share markets rebounded so quickly, they became technically overbought, so it's quite possible we go through a period of consolidation in markets," said Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP.
"You get the talk of the so-called Santa rally, but often times Santa rally doesn't really occur in the last two weeks of December. So we could have a couple of weeks with the markets sort of just meandering around and lacking direction."
Overnight, U.S. markets were closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. In Europe, slightly better than expected euro zone PMIs nudged the euro and shares higher and Sweden's crown dropped as its central bank left rates on hold.
Minutes of the European Central Bank October policy meeting showed euro zone inflation falling as expected, or even a bit faster, but suggested policymakers needed to keep the possibility of an interest rate hike on the table.
Cash Treasuries fell a little as they resumed trading in Asia, with two-year Treasury yields up 2 basis points to 4.9338% and benchmark ten-year yields up 4 bps to 4.4568%.
In the currency markets, the dollar < =USD> was on the back foot against its peers at 103.71, nearing a three month low of 103.17.
The sterling perched near a 2-1/2 month top at $1.2575, as strong results from a business survey led markets to push back bets on when the first rate cut from the Bank of England might come.
Oil prices were mixed after tumbling more than 1% on concerns over the delayed OPEC+ meeting. Brent crude futures were up 0.3% at $81.69 a barrel while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude fell 0.6% to $76.65 a barrel.
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