Some kid named Sameer Mishra won the national Spelling Bee a couple of days ago. He is Indian. It occurred to me that there was definitely another Indian who won the Spelling Bee not long ago, so I looked it up. Turns out there were 4 in just the last 7 years, so Indians have pretty much taken over the contest. This article tries to guess why — I’ll defer my own explanation till later.

Then I decided to look at the other teenage academic contest, Mathcounts. A Darryl Wu won this year’s national contest. Obviously he is Chinese, but there has also been 9 Chinese winners in the last 12 years.

So there you have it, Indians and Chinese basically split the major academic contests at the secondary school level between themselves. What’s the explanation? Demographically, there has been a major explosion of educational immigration from both China and India since the late 1980s, and especially in the 1990s. This has resulted in a veritable brain drain in the home countries, but the side effect is that the second-generation Indians and Chinese growing up in the US are beginning to show what might be called the “disproportionality effect”: levels of achievement not matched by population numbers.

Of course, it’s the so-called “elites” that come to the US, but those countries have large enough base populations and enough reserve “elites” that what these kids achieve as they move through the US school system might just be a harbinger of what an undistorted, competitive world will look like in 20-50 years.

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