Asian Parenting Is Easing Up. The Degree Still Pays.
Full-time workers with a bachelor's degree earned $1,578 a week in 2025, against $966 for high school graduates. That gap stopped climbing around 2000 and is still about $32,000 a year. Households earning over $125,000 are the ones doing the extra spending.
Someone at the table says the house can be lighter now. No more Saturday drill. Sleepovers are fine.
The college list is still on the fridge.
In 2025, full-time workers in the United States with a bachelor's degree, and nothing past it, earned a median $1,578 a week. High school graduates with no college earned $966. That is about $82,000 a year, against about $50,000.
The lighter house is already underway in a lot of Asian families. The pay gap is still about $32,000 a year, and the households spending more are the ones earning over $125,000. Keep the application. Let the Saturday drill go.
The gap stopped climbing
That gap used to climb. Economists at the San Francisco Fed followed it through 2023 and found the climb mostly stopped around 2000. For about 20 years it sat there.
In 2023 it was a little under the 2000 level. It was still wide enough to matter.
Canada looks the same. In 2024, Statistics Canada found employees 25 and older with a bachelor's degree or more earned $44.67 an hour on average, 55% more than people with a high school diploma or less.
You can cancel the drill. Those two paychecks stay that far apart.
Who you meet there
The stub is the part you can see. The other part is who your child ends up knowing.
Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard, looked at friendships for about 70 million American adults on Facebook, ages 25 to 44. People with higher incomes made a much larger share of their friends in college. People with the lowest incomes made about four times as large a share of their friends on the block.
Friendships between richer and poorer families predict what a child earns later. If children from lower-income homes grew up where those families actually knew each other, the way they do in higher-income counties, Chetty's group estimated adult incomes about 20% higher.
A campus puts them in the same place. Students from lower-income homes still befriended higher-income classmates less often than those classmates befriended each other.
The split people are calling a K
People have started calling this split a K, one line rising and one staying flatter. Since 2023, the New York Fed has been watching who is actually spending. Households earning more than $125,000 have driven the growth in retail spending.
They were the only group whose spending kept rising, after inflation, the whole way through.
Wealth moved the same way. From early 2023, wealth for the richest 1% of households by income grew more than 25%, once prices are taken out. The middle 40% grew less than 10%.
A degree is the common route into that upper group. In 2025, the College Board found 84% of adults ages 25 to 64 with at least a bachelor's degree had a job, against 70% of high school graduates. Unemployment for people 25 and older was 2.6% with a bachelor's or more, and 4.3% with a high school diploma.
The Richmond Fed looked back 30 years and found pay rose on the bottom too, about 13%. High-income households rose about 63%. Lately you see the split first in who is shopping, and in who is holding the wealth.
What you can put down
Nearly half of Asian parents are already trying the lighter house. In a Pew survey published in 2023, 47% said they are raising their children differently than they were raised. Seven in ten still said a college degree was extremely or very important.
The enrollment numbers match that second answer. In 2022, 81% of Asian students who had just finished high school started college within a year. Among White students, it was 64%.
The average also hides the major. Mid-career pay in the College Board report ran from about $55,000 in elementary education to about $120,000 in computer science and mechanical engineering.
At the table, try one line. "We can retire the Saturday practice. We are not retiring the diploma."
Then ask which rule was there to keep a child in line, and which one still changes the job and the people they meet at 22.