The (Dis)Advantages of Foreign Education: The Differential Effects of Place of Education on Earnings by Ethnicity, Gender and Their Interaction

Lulu Chen, University of Michigan

Much sociological attention has been given to the topic of immigrant economic assimilation into the labor market. Because of their economics success, Asian Americans are touted to be “model minorities” who have achieved the American Dream. This rosy perception eclipses the finding that they need to overeducate to reach earnings parity with their white counterparts. Recent scholarship has found that once place of education is considered, nativity and race are no longer consequential. However, the Asian American population is marked by considerable heterogeneity within, suggesting that source of education could matter differentially for different ethnic and gender groups. To uncover the variations across different dimensions of stratification, I use the 2000 Public Use Microdata Sample to examine the effects of foreign education on earnings by ethnicity, gender and the intersection of the two. I employ the differences-in-differences strategy in addition to the conventional human capital approach to make a more confident causal argument.