The Great White Flight!!
I had a rather lazy Sunday afternoon today and by chance I happen to come across this article in the Wall Street Journal about how the white population of kids is decreasing in the predominantely Asian schools of Cupertino and they are choosing to move to other school destricts with lesser asian population.

Cupertino, a small city in the southbay where 45% of the population is Asian (Chinese or south asian) descent. To put this number in perspective, the entire asian population in the United States is barely 4%.

Ten years ago before the great technology boom took place, Cupertino was a small towm predominantely white neighbourhoods, a sleepy town indeed with orchid trees. Slowly the demographics of the region changed with more asians moving into upper and middle-class white nieghbourhoods. As a result the schools also saw a change in the student ratio of whites to asians. Ten years ago, more than 52% students were whites, with other blacks, hispanics and asians. Today about 25% of students are whites.

Why is this trend being seen?
Firstly as a result of asian communities growing in the area, the number of asian students has increased in the classrooms. Asians students tend to focus more on science and math rather than liberal sciences or sports.
Secondly Asian parents especially first generation parents pressure their kids to do well in these subjects rather than have their kids choose something of their own liking.
This has much to do with the psychology of the parents who faced competitions in their native lands to get admission to good colleges. Therefore this emphasis on good grades is causing asian kids to study even more harder. They are enrolled into special tutoring classes, summer schools etc just so that they an edge over other kids in the school. Therefore a student with a 3.0 GPA feels he is an underacheiver when s(he) might be a stellar performer in a predominantely white school where competition is lower and students are encouraged to pursue other subjects besides science and math.

In fact the same complaint of competition is echoed by other second generation asians as well.

Inspite of this academic competition, there are no racial tensions between communities and some white students infact feel that they perform better with great competition around.

I can totally relate to this situation with my own schooling background. My parents especially my father cared more about how I performed in math and sciences as compared to my scores in english and history which I enjoyed more. The pressure on every Indian kid is to either become a doctor or an engineer. They were never really encouraged to become a writer or a stage actor or pursue a career in sports. The competition and pressure on the kids is tremendous starting from summer schools to tutoring classes for practically every subject and performing well in the two critical years of the indian schooling system - 10th grade ( to enter into higher secondary school) and 12 grade( to enter into under-graduate program) because these two years are a make-or-break years for your career. I could see the comparisions being made between me and my father's co-workers kids or my neighbors kids or how my cousin was performing. Everybody was caught in that system. This is definetly not limited to India.

I had a chinese co-worker in my previous job and she used to tell me that her 14 year old was learning C++ and Java besides doing his regular schooling. She was a first generation immigrant too, which just validates what I had stated before.

Personally I think competition is good, but the problem is with parents deciding what their kids should do rather than kids deciding what they want which is also where the problem exists. Because kids at that age really dont know what career they want to pursue.

Well this cycle of competition will continue...Today chinese and indians are working hard to become successful... 15 years from now, the chinese and indians will be complaining about people of african descent being competitive.
As new generation enjoys the fruits of labor of their older generation and relaxes, a new group is waiting to pick your slack.