The Tiger Mom and her husband have been catching all sorts of flack for their recent book, “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America.” Sociologists claim that Yale professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld’s research is “cherry-picking,” while liberal commentators call their conclusions racist. But those conclusions mostly seem fairly obvious to anyone who has spent time around successful immigrants, especially their theory that a little insecurity goes a long way.
“Insecurity,” the two write, is “a key to success — not exactly the lesson taught by America’s self-esteem-centered culture or its ‘just learn to love’ popular psychology. But for an individual to be driven, something has to be driving him: some painful spur, some goading lack.”
That insecurity is precisely what’s missing on today’s campuses. The fact that American college students spend on average just 25 hours a week on academics, according to a 2011 study, suggests that they are, on the whole, pretty secure. They know that with minimal effort they’ll get decent grades, so they see the college years as a time to have fun before they go off into the “real world.”
In other words, the goad is lacking.
Which is why we need immigrants on our campuses.
In the debates over whether to extend benefits like in-state tuition to immigrants brought here illegally as children (as Chris Christie did last month in New Jersey and Rick Scott is now considering in Florida, and as Cardinal Timothy Dolan and others are pushing in New York), what we’re missing is a sense of what these young people have to offer American higher education. Many immigrants bring to campus the understanding that there is a purpose to college, and that you have to work hard to achieve it.
Peter Berkowitz taught government at Harvard in the 1990s; he recalls of a number of first-generation Asian American students, “They were polite; soft-spoken in class, even diffident; and possessed razor-sharp and highly creative minds.” Good professors are thrilled to find such people in their classrooms.
This drive is even visible in the majors that immigrants choose. According to a Census report from 2011, foreign-born people make up 16.5 percent of the US population 25 and older, and a similar share of the population with college or graduate degrees. But among students with engineering degrees, a full third are foreign-born — and it’s more than a quarter of those with degrees in computers, math and statistics.
The thing about those subjects is that they’re hard, requiring many hours of study. And there’s not much in the way of grade inflation. So plenty of students just decide it’s not worth it. Some studies show that as many as 40 percent of students planning to major in engineering or science decide to switch to the humanities or social sciences before they finish school.
Tamar Jacoby, the president of ImmigrationWorks (a group that lobbies for immigration reform), says she was speaking recently with a Kuwaiti young man studying engineering at a Midwestern university. He loved it, he told her, but, “What’s shocking to me is that my American peers are out partying every night. They don’t have a sense of purpose. I’m there to learn.”
Immigrants, particularly those who’ve experienced some kind of disadvantage, realize that “it’s a privilege to have opportunities,” Jacoby says. (This may also be why immigrants are twice as likely as native-born citizens to start a business in the United States.)
They also haven’t been raised in the cult of self-esteem.
In her new book “Confidence,” psychologist Tomas Chamorrow-Premuzic writes that “lower confidence is key to gaining competence.” In other words, if you think you’re doing great, you won’t do as much to improve yourself.
America is a very wealthy country and those of us with the resources to do so will probably keep coddling our kids more than we should. Even Amy Chua has acknowledged that for all her Tiger Mothering, her own children won’t have the kind of insecurity that she did. We can hope, though, that in college our children will be inspired by peers raised with more insecurity.