The Weight of Expectations: Higher Education in Asian American Families

Asian American youth often feel like the only way to make their families proud and to provide any type of comfort as they grow up is to reach for higher education, even if it means incurring massive amounts of debt with student loans. Though not an expectation exclusive to any single community, this burden manifests itself in a somewhat intense way within Asian American households. In fact, this can be a weight that one carries with them when navigating critical decisions throughout life. One question we can ask ourselves is: What are the broader implications of this ingrained cultural focus on the individual and their communities? 

How Filial Piety and Family Expectations Shape Lives

The expectations of pursuing higher education in Asian American households always feel like something that is a given, an accomplishment that you were prepped to achieve from an early age. Your parents’ retirement plans or notion of a caretaker may ride heavily on your potential income and career, an idea that stems from the concept of filial piety, common in many Asian cultures. This value emphasizes the importance of repaying our parents’ sacrifices with outward-facing success. When you layer this with parents and families who fled war or civil unrest, the pressure to achieve greater-than-average educational excellence can burden an individual with existential weight. 

For children of immigrants, higher education is not merely an option but a stern and unspoken requirement for stability. Immigrant parents may push first-generation children toward a certain career solely because it will make more money, or into higher education, even though these may not be the best options for that individual. These options are portrayed as the only way to find achievement, success, and contentment, with enough financial stability to hopefully provide for their families’ elders. 

The Price of Success

The statistics on student debt are surprising. Though different from social perception, the financial burdens of these high educational expectations are often disproportionately high for Asian American families. One study found that at four-year public universities, when it comes to financial aid, 79% of Asian Americans have unmet financial needs, compared to the national average of 75%. Digging deeper into these statistics, Southeast Asians have higher poverty rates than the national average. So, while Asian Americans appear to earn more than their white counterparts, the poorest Asian Americans are actually poorer than their counterparts, as well, exposing the economic disparities within the broadly defined Asian American community. The upper percentile is often explored and upheld while forgetting and shooing away the lowest percentile of a population. 

The pressure to pursue higher education isn’t completely a burden. For many, it can inspire a sense of purpose and direction toward being able to provide for their families. However, when the weight of these expectations overwhelms someone’s mental health and leads to potential financial instability to achieve this goal, it is important to sit down and look at the costs to the individual, their family, and society. 

Growing up in a lower-income, single-parent Southeast Asian household, I knew that one day I would have to provide for my mother. But at the same time, the “what if?” questions were extremely debilitating and crushing. 

Is the path to higher education the only way to achieve financial stability and personal and familial fulfillment? What happens when the emotional and financial tolls of meeting these expectations grow and grow with no outlet? What if I couldn’t get into college? What if I didn’t make enough money to take care of my family, who fled a war to give me a better life? 

Put in tandem with a culture that refused to talk about finances, wealth, or income, I felt as though I was left to fend for myself with scholarships, financial aid, and loans. That fear meant I entered college, not caring how much debt I would go into. My thought process was: If I don’t go and I don’t finish, I will be a failure and won’t be able to live up to what has been expected of me since birth. It was better to be in debt with a degree than not because, with the older traditional mindset, that was what it took to make a living and pay back our parents. 

But what is the price of success? Is it worth our mental health to meet familial expectations? Are these expectations and insurmountable pressures worth the associated potential extreme mental illness? What about the moral obligation to honor one’s parents and ancestors and their sacrifices, felt by many in the Asian American community? We need to ask ourselves if ruining one’s well-being or potential financial stability is an ethical way to meet these expectations. 

Looking at these issues, we can see a domino effect in the grand scheme of our families and macro community. It starts with the formation of mental illness, the potential for financial instability, and generations burdened with expectations that do not align with their own mental capacity or desires. 

Generational Gaps and Rising Costs

Another issue is that older generations may still hold the notion that higher education costs as much as it did 40-50 years ago. However, with inflation and the general cost of higher education rising rapidly, the biggest advantage any college candidate can have is wealth. College then seems easy and inexpensive, although affordability has ballooned out of control for most families, regardless of ethnicity. 

This contradicts the model minority myth that all Asian American students get full rides or their tuition paid in full. The notion of the model minority bluntly clashes with the notions of struggle or the inability to provide fully for one’s education. Growing up with this myth made me feel for a long time that I was a failure for not reaching or aspiring more by becoming a doctor or an engineer. I felt like a failure as I saw others in my surroundings get full rides and acceptance into Ivy League schools. 

Completely disregarding alternative struggles aside from undiagnosed ADHD, I took a long time to heal and realize that failure wasn’t the case. Everyone’s brains are wired differently, want different things, and excel at different places. All the model minority does is pit one community against others, academically and professionally, while leaving the most vulnerable parts of that community unaided and forgotten. It assumes that Asian Americans are a monolith that all come from similar economic and cultural backgrounds. 

How Can We Break the Cycle?

Some ways to address these complex issues are by breaking down barriers between older and younger generations and engaging in open-ended talks about different paths to success and stability. Not only that, educational programs that can aid in financial literacy can help break the cycle of uninformed educational decisions that may lead to hardships in the future, mentally and financially. 

In the end, it is hard to break away from these notions, these fears that you have to live life a certain way, give back a certain way, and succeed in a certain way. The drive toward higher education in Asian American communities is a complex salad of cultural, ethical, and economic implications. Even though the intent behind these expectations may be pure, noble, and rooted in love and a desire for a stable future, we need to consider the impact and weight on individuals. 

We, as a community, can slowly chip away at the monolith that has been created around us to be used against us. There is no shame in needing help, loans, or external guidance for financial literacy. It’s not that you “weren’t smart enough” or “didn’t deserve it.” If you need it, go for it. If it feels right, pursue higher education; just don’t let the fear of failure or the stranglehold of family expectations make you feel like you have only one option. Be true to yourself, and you may find alternate avenues of success and personal fulfillment. 

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