Refugees Do Well in School, Study Finds : Researcher Praises Public, Private Programs for ‘Boat People’

Children of “boat people” from Southeast Asia are very bright students who are generally high achievers in their Orange County schools, a University of Michigan researcher has found.

Nathan Caplan, a professor of psychology at the university, made a three-year study of Southeast Asian refugees who have arrived in the United States since 1978, three years after the fall of Saigon. The study was designed in part to determine the adequacy of support services to poorer Southeast Asians, many of whom escaped Communist Vietnam in flimsy fishing boats.

Caplan’s federally financed study was focused on “boat people” communities in Houston, Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Orange County. Of the five areas, Orange County has by far the largest number of refugees.

Two major findings are that adult refugees are rapidly becoming self-supporting and that their children, despite initial language difficulties, are outstanding students.

In a telephone interview from Ann Arbor, Mich., Friday, Caplan said Orange County was an interesting site to study because of its large number of refugees. But he said that his findings about adult refugees and their children are very similar for all of the places he studied.

Services Praised

Caplan said he spent a considerable part of the three-year study in Orange County. Despite the county’s reputation for being very conservative, Caplan said he found that Orange County “has excellent support services,” both government-funded and private, for the refugees. Moreover, Caplan said, he found that Orange County is providing “a very effective ensemble of programs” for the refugees.

“I think the (refugee support) programs in Orange County are damn good,” he declared.

Caplan could not offer a statistical breakdown separating Orange County figures from the rest of the study. But he said that the education figures are similar for all five areas.

Overall, the study found that of 355 refugee children studied, more than a fourth got all A’s last school year, despite language problems. Forty-four percent had 4.0 averages, or all A’s, in mathematics.

Ed Dundon, superintendent of Garden Grove Unified, Orange County’s largest school district, said Friday that evidence in his district supports Caplan’s findings that refugee students are high achievers.

Many Among Valedictorians

“About 80% of our (high school) valedictorians this year were Southeast Asians,” Dundon said.

“There’s just no question but these young people are good students. They pay attention, want to do homework and they apply themselves. They’re aspiring to be upwardly mobile.”

Dundon pointed out that his district has a large concentration of Southeast Asians.

Another indicator of refugees’ academic ability came in late 1984 when UC Irvine announced that an unusually large percentage of its next freshman class would be Southeast Asians. UCI Chancellor Jack Peltason said the Irvine campus gave no preference to admitting Southeast Asia students; they had simply been among the top achievers in their high school classes and had high scores on entrance tests.

Caplan said Orange County and the other communities that have large numbers of the refugees will benefit as these bright students advance into high-tech jobs and careers.

“I don’t have any doubt but that this (aid to refugees) is a great investment in human resources that will have a tremendous payoff,” Caplan said.