A popular perception about Korean Americans is that they value education, and they wish for themselves or their children to attend well-known high-ranking schools as a pathway to securing a successful economic future.
Available data confirms some of this narrative. But while Korean Americans do obtain more education than the population at large, their economic success in the workplace often do not measure up to their level of education.
To fully understand the relationship between the educational goals sought by Korean Americans and their relationship to income potentials, it is important to acknowledge the role of misleading societal stereotypes about Korean Americans.
The “model minority myth” is a short hand that originated in the civil rights era of the 1960s to describe a perception that some minorities are better than others. It is generally applied as a broad stereotype to assert that all Asian Americans are smart, highly educated, hard-working, wealthy, and successful.
This myth is misleading and divisive because the underlying premise is that Asian Americans are doing fine on their own, and thus, do not need government assistance, unlike other minorities who do not measure up to this “model” standard.
The perception is also inaccurate because the gross generalization covers up the wide range of socioeconomic diversity within the Asian American communities and spread out among the geographic and demographic disparities throughout the nation.
During the civil rights era, Japanese and Chinese Americans were viewed as prime examples of successful minorities. But as immigration from Korea expanded following the 1965 reforms that allowed for more educated middle-class professionals to arrive, Korean Americans also became poster children for this myth.
Whether due to cultural or historical reasons, it appears to be true that most Korean immigrants do place a high value on education, and many Korean American parents push their children to prioritize academic achievement over extracurricular activities.
As a result, data confirms that Korean Americans graduate high school, college, and graduate school at a higher rate than the national average. A 2022 Census Survey revealed that 60.7% of Korean Americans obtained a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to 35.7% for the U.S. population, and even higher than the 57.4% rate for Asian Americans as a whole.
Yet, if the goal of many Korean American parents is to leverage successful admission to high-ranking colleges as a gateway to their children’s American Dreams, the resulting data does not seem to match the ambitions.
The level of educational excellence does not necessarily translate to proportional level of income gained by Korean American workers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the rate of Korean Americans who hold a college degree or more in 2018 was 80% higher than the national rate, but their median household income was only 16% higher than the national median.
More disturbingly, the 2018 Census survey found that, whether a Korean American held a high school certificate or a graduate degree, that Korean American’s mean personal income was significantly lower than the mean for that same educational level of a typical worker in the U.S. population at large.
In other words, across the board, Korean Americans on the average earned 80 cents to every dollar that a typical American worker with the same level of education earned.
It is no wonder, then, that a 2023 Pew survey of Asian American adults found that 42% said referring to Asians as a “model minority” was negative, compared to 17% who said it was positive. Among Korean Americans, even a larger proportion, 47%, said they believed it was negative to be typecast as a model minority.
There are many stereotypes of Asians as a model minority, such as being quiet, submissive, deferential to authority, good at following orders but lacking in leadership or management skills, and skilled in math and sciences but not competent in creative or innovative work.
For example, 63% of adult Asian Americans disclosed that in their day-to-day encounters with strangers, they have had at least one experience in which someone assumed they are good at math and science or that they are not a creative thinker. Among Adult Korean Americans, 67% reported the same, which is higher than the average Asian American response.
Broken down by each stereotype, 58% of all Asian Americans have been assumed by a stranger to be good at math and science, while 64% of Korean Americans reported the same. Similarly, 22% of all Asian Americans have been assumed by a stranger to be lacking in creativity, while 24% of Korean Americans reported the same experience.
Many participants in this survey and related focus groups shared how they have been harmed by stereotypes and have had to deal with the social pressures associated with others’ perception of them as a monolithic group.
The perpetuation of such negative stereotypes can also result in Korean Americans missing out on opportunities for obtaining jobs outside of roles they are expected to be good at or missing out on promotions at workplaces.
The National Asian American Survey conducted in 2016 asked Korean Americans to share their experiences with discrimination and microaggressions and how often they faced challenges in their daily life.
Overall, 30% of Korean Americans reported experiencing at least one major discrimination event. They were most likely to experience poor treatment from neighbors and not being hired for a job, followed closely by being passed over for a promotion. In 75% of cases, they reported that the basis for their experience was due to their race/ethnicity, language, or accent.
Deeper analysis revealed that younger Korean Americans, aged 18 to 35 years, were much more likely than the average Korean American to report being unfairly passed over for a job and Korean American men were notably more likely to say they were passed over for a job than Korean American women.
On the other end of the economic spectrum, many Korean Americans are doing well in terms of income, occupational status, and employment rates. The positive economic statistics, however, must be viewed in the context of time and by understanding the changes in the immigration patterns.
The upward mobility of Korean Americans follows the growing economic power of the Republic of Korea and the class of immigrants who chose to move to America in recent decades. Furthermore, as children of earlier waves of immigrants were born or raised in the United States from an early age, they faced far less obstacles of language, assimilation, education, and cultural barriers that their parents did, which limited the older generation’s economic opportunities.
This demographic trend partially explains how, in 2018, 55.4% of Korean Americans worked in the management, business, science, or arts professions, a rate much higher than the national average of 38.6%. This is an increase from 2010 when 46.8% of Korean Americans worked in such high-status occupations.
The median household income for Korean Americans in 2018 was $72,000, which exceeds the national average of $62,000. Only a decade ago, it was nearly identical.
Likewise, the unemployment rates and poverty rates for Korean Americans are lower than national averages. In 2018, Korean American unemployment was 4% while the national rate was 4.9%, and poverty rate was 7.8% when the national rate was 9.3%.
As a further sign of their economic stability, 54.2% of Korean Americans own their own home and 89.6% own at least one car. Korean Americans are also connected and technology-savvy, with 98% of their households owning a computer, and 94% having broadband internet access.
But to emphasize the need for more granular data and further research on the complexities within this community, it should be noted that poverty and economic distress remain on the other end of the curve. For example, among those 65 years and older in the same year of 2018, Korean Americans have a poverty rate of 18.6% which is more than double the national rate of 9%.