What Happens to All the Asian-American Overachievers When the Test-Taking Ends? -- New York Magazine - Nymag

We spent considerable time in those days comparing ourselves unfavorably to one another. We’d all been top students in our high schools and colleges, able to learn all the material in any course. Now even the most hardworking among us could barely keep up. Except that each of us felt especially inadequate.

I was becoming a hoop-jumper just like Deresiewicz’s students at Yale, internalizing the idea that education is “doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test.” I had not developed a sense that “something larger is at stake” as Deresiewicz says, and only was playing the game of student, not using my mind.

We were lucky, I thought, dissociating, to even be able to indulge these awful priorities, to have the economic capital to be able to accrue more social capital via our looks. And then our looks, in some way, would help us guard and acquire economic capital—this was the

Asian kids, as a matter of fact, are roughly as likely to come from low-income households as are black or Hispanic kids.