Driven to Learn: The Second Generation
Compared to their parents, the education achievements of the next generation have been remarkable. Analysis by the Pew Research Center shows that U.S.-born Vietnamese Americans demonstrate high academic achievement and college attendance relative to their families’ initial socioeconomic status. They are far more likely to pursue higher education than their foreign-born counterparts. Among adults aged 25 and older, only 19 percent of U.S.-born Vietnamese have a high school education or less, compared to 51 percent of the foreign-born. More than half of U.S.-born Vietnamese adults have attended college, and 55 percent hold at least a bachelor’s degree.
The academic success of second-generation Vietnamese Americans cannot be understood solely through statistics. Examining the broader systems and conditions that shaped their trajectories reveals several patterns.
One of the most prominent is a high level of education aspiration. Studies of Vietnamese American communities consistently find that education is viewed as the primary pathway to economic security and upward mobility. In fact, compared to Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian Americans, “Vietnamese Americans stand out as having extraordinarily high average values” on education, wages, and managerial or professional employment. Achievement is a cultural value; in other words, many Vietnamese American students grow up with strong expectations to complete college and pursue professional careers.
The research is supported anecdotally. Minh recalls his family’s intergenerational emphasis on education. “College was basically assumed,” he says, even though his parents did not fully understand the U.S. education system. Sophie agrees, noting how her parents’ limited formal education shaped her own academic drive. “I think that’s why I put a lot of expectations and pressure on myself, especially in middle and high school, to get involved with clubs and do well in school,” she says. Their reflections illustrate how statistical patterns of mobility are often experienced as lived responsibility within families.
But sometimes responsibility veers into pressure.
“My parents were pretty harsh on me when it came to education,” Minh remembers. “They wanted pretty decent grades. They just wanted to try out everything. Moving to 7th and 8th grade, when they found out about the SAT, they made me do, like, five hours a day after school.” Whether experienced as obligation or pressure, intergenerational expectations among Vietnamese Americans serve as a powerful motivating force in education achievement.
Equally important are the dense social networks shaping students’ educational environments. Within Vietnamese enclaves, families are connected through churches, temples, businesses, and neighborhood organizations. As described in Growing Up American, an influential book by Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston about the postwar Vietnamese American experience, these networks create a system of support and social accountability. Students receive encouragement and resources from peers and community members, while academic success is publicly celebrated and failure carries social stigma. This environment serves as informal social control, reinforcing norms that prioritize academic effort and achievement.
The education patterns produced by these dynamics translate into striking intergenerational mobility. Research shows that Vietnamese Americans experience some of the largest gains in education attainment between immigrant parents and their U.S.-born children. Sociologists Van C. Tran, Jennifer Lee, and Tiffany J. Huang find that, among major Asian immigrant groups, “second-generation Vietnamese report the most intergenerational mobility; they are more than twice as likely to have graduated from college than the first generation (62.4 versus 26.0 percent).”
