Asian Parenting: Most Overrated School Districts in The San Francisco Bay Area

There are some parents who don't understand the concept of moving to a completely different city for schools and there's nothing wrong with that. Being near social support or being in a community they love may be something that is priceless for some and who's to say that it's not the most important thing. The perfect "city" is subjective.

But, I know there are plenty of Asian parents who are willing to relocate, thinking they are moving into a great school district. I'm writing this because I know for a fact a lot of Asian parents are choosing certain cities because of how great they believe the school system is. Unfortunately, it may have been true at one point in time, but the most current data shows that some very popular high schools, such as those in Fremont, San Ramon, Danville, and Walnut Creek are actually not as great as one would hope, especially considering the price tag of living in those cities.

First, let me explain why I believe the schools below are extremely overrated. My methodology is actually pretty straight forward, but fairly logical. I looked at 2022 admissions data for UC Berkeley for all public high schools in California. Even though UCLA is now the most sought out campus, UC Berkeley is truly where the UC system wants to place California's best and brightest.

I filtered this list to only include high schools with higher than average Asian applicants, which is 41.52. Finally, I simply looked at the average acceptance rate for Asian students at those schools, which is 11.80%, and looked at all the high schools below that average.

I'm sure many will be surprised that all of Fremont's public schools are below the average with even Mission San Jose, considered one of the elite high schools in the United States, performed worse percentage wise versus Irvington and Washington High. You'll see that's true with California High in San Ramon, CA, Cupertino High School, and plenty of other school districts popular with Asian families.

Even Dougherty Valley High School, which is known for getting the most students into UC Berkeley, is only slightly above average at 13% acceptance rate into UC Berkeley for Asian applicants.

As you can guess, I also have a list of those high schools that are both above average in terms of Asian applicants and acceptance rate. As you can see, ignoring Van Nuys High School, which really seems like a kind of an outlier, the upper limit really seems to be around 35% acceptance for Asian students. Schools like Gretchen Whitney High School in Cerritos, CA and San Marino High, which both have very high number of Asian students, really seem to live up to their reputation more so than high schools in Fremont, San Ramon, Danville, and parts of San Jose.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, there is no true "underrated" high school where there is a majority Asian population in the SF Bay Area and located in a 'relatively' affordable and safe city; just schools that are at or slightly above the average. The ones well above the average are mostly in Southern California and in cities where you'll pay the premium for that school's performance.

I have another study here looking at this data from a slightly different perspective. It includes the total Asian student body size and their chances of getting into UC Berkeley and seeing how machine learning can predict the acceptance rate for that high school. It also supports how Fremont, San Ramon, and certain schools are actually very over-rated for Asian families in terms of believing these schools are giving them an edge into UC Berkeley admissions.