My son’s current experience in college seems to bear this out.

But this remark made me think hard about my own experience as a high school senior in the early 1970′s. I knew pretty much all of the top students in my very large, very competitive university town high school and they were pretty much all Caucasian.

My son graduated from the same school about 40 years after I did, and the difference was striking. My son was also friends with most of the best science and math students in his high school as I was. But most of his friends are Asians.

I appreciate your comments about your son’s experiences in college. My son also seems to understand that innate ability and eagerness to work very hard in the most challenging math and science classes will bring him the degrees and success he needs, not further test conditioning.

Let me tell a little anecdote. At the High School where my son graduated the Valedictorian was a Chinese immigrant girl who had essentially straight As since the first grade. My son was in her class from kindergarten through 12th and our whole family knew her as she worked at her own family’s Chinese restaurant since she was quite young running the cash register. We still eat at the restaurant. Their soups are extraordinary.

Both Eva (her name) and my son got into the same out of state university. She had SAT prep unlike my son who refused my offers to send him to a prep tutor. He also refused to take any AP courses given at the local college. Never-the-less both were accepted at that university. She started in pre-med and by the end of the year was in Business. My son who graduated with no honors or notice tested out of freshman English and standard Calculus and went instead into math major Calculus and upper level English. She graduated with a Business major and now is married. My son has a BS, a MS and a Ph.D. in Mech. Engineering and is actually a rocket scientist currently. All of the finagling came to naught as performance alone made the difference between success and failure. BTW, in the Ph.D. level my son was the only American (white or Asian) in a cohort group of seven. There were five from red China and one from Taiwan. He was the first to finish of the seven and the only one to not fail any part of the comprehensives.

I asked him recently about test prep for the SATs and the GREs. He said that as far as he was concerned it is better to not prep because when one is in college and graduate school in engineering the courses are so hard that if you don’t have the ability you will fail anyway. Many who started with him in the Masters program were dropped. About 50%+ were lost as he started with 25 and 11 got their MS degree. All seven of his cohort for the Ph.D. eventually got their Doctorates but all of the Asians were mature men in their 30s when they started who had demonstrated their mettle before being sent to the USA.

I think you may have missed the point, commenters. The father is obsessive and driven by his son’s accomplishment, yes. But he was also open to the fact that being good at reading and expressing thoughts was also useful.

This kid is quite bright, and not in the slog way. He asked me to help because he wanted to take more advanced verbal courses, and didn’t want to spend more time prepping on the SAT.

The rare white IQ 130+ in the mix will do just fine against the coddled Asian American.