Hindu Americans have surpassed Jewish Americans in education and rival them in household incomes. How did immigrants from India, one of the ...
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Hindu Americans have surpassed Jewish Americans in education and rival them in household incomes. How did immigrants from India, one of the world's poorest countries, join the ranks of the richest people in the United States? How did such a small minority of just 1% become so disproportionately represented in the highest income occupations ranging from top corporate executives and technology entrepreneurs to doctors, lawyers and investment bankers? Indian-American Professor Devesh Kapur, co-author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America, explains it in terms of educational achievement. He says that an Indian-American is at least 9 times more educated than an individual in India. He attributes it to what he calls a process of "triple selection".
Hindu American Household Income:
A 2016 Pew study reported that more than a third of Hindus (36%) and four-in-ten Jews (44%) live in households with incomes of at least $100,000. More recently, the US Census data shows that the median household income of Indian-Americans, vast majority of whom are Hindus, has reached $127,000, the highest among all ethnic groups in America.
Median income of
Pakistani-American households is $87.51K, below $97.3K for Asian-Americans but significantly higher than $65.71K for overall population. Median income for Indian-American households $126.7K, the highest in the nation.
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Hindu Americans Education:
Indian-Americans, vast majority of whom are Hindu, have the highest
educational achievement among the religions in America. More than three-quarters (76%) of them have at least a bachelors's degree.
By comparison, sixty percent of Pakistani-Americans have at least a bachelor's degree, the second highest percentage among. The average for Asian-Americans with at least a bachelor's degree is 56%.
American Hindus are the most highly educated with 96% of them having college degrees, according to
Pew Research. 75% of Jews and 54% of
American Muslims have college degrees versus the US national average of 39% for all Americans. American Christians trail all other groups with just 36% of them having college degrees. 96% of Hindus and 80% of Muslims in the U.S. are either immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Jews are the second-best educated in America with 59% of them having college degrees. Then come Buddhists (47%), Muslims (39%) and Christians (25%).
Triple Selection:
Devesh Kapur, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America (Oxford University Press, 2017), explains the phenomenon of high-achieving Indian-Americans as follows: “What we learned in researching this book is that Indians in America did not resemble any other population anywhere; not the Indian population in India, nor the native population in the United States, nor any other immigrant group from any other nation.”
Devesh talks about what he calls “
a triple selection” process that gave Indian-Americans a boost over typically poor and uneducated immigrants who come to the United States from other countries. The first two selections took place in India. As explained in the book: “The social system created a small pool of persons to receive higher education, who were urban, educated, and from high/dominant castes.” India’s examination system then selected individuals for specialized training in technical fields that also happened to be in demand in the United States. Kapur estimated that the India-American population is nine times more educated than individuals in the home country.
Summary:
Hindu Americans rival Jewish Americans in educational achievement and household incomes. Hindus in America have joined the ranks of the richest people in the United States. They account for just 1% of the US population but they are disproportionately represented in the highest income occupations ranging from top corporate executives and technology entrepreneurs to doctors, lawyers and investment bankers. Indian-American Professor Devesh Kapur, co-author of The Other One Percent: Indians in America, explains it in terms of their educational achievement. He says that an Indian-American is at least 9 times more educated than an individual in India. He attributes it to what he calls a process of "triple selection".
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South Asia Investor Review
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Hindu Americans have surpassed Jewish Americans in education and rival them in household incomes. How did immigrants from India, one of the ...
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Indian Americans: The New Model Minority
The 2008 election barely ended before the GOP began touting the presidential prospects of Louisiana Gov. Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants. Tuesday, Jindal becomes the new face of his party when he delivers the official Republican response to President Obama's speech to Congress. Whether or not he actually runs for president in 2012, Jindal symbolizes a remarkable but rarely discussed phenomenon--the amazing success of Indian Americans in general, and what that success says about our immigration policy.
Most Americans know only one thing about Indians--they are really good at spelling bees. When Sameer Mishra correctly spelled
guerdon last May to win the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee, he became the sixth Indian-American winner in the past 10 years. Finishing second was Sidharth Chand. Kavya Shivashankar took fourth place, and Janhnavi Iyer grabbed the eighth spot. And this was not even the banner year for Indian Americans--in 2005, the top four finishers were all of Indian descent.
It's tempting to dismiss Indian-American dominance of the spelling bee as just a cultural idiosyncrasy. But Indian success in more important fields is just as eye-catching. Despite constituting less than 1% of the U.S. population, Indian-Americans are 3% of the nation's engineers, 7% of its IT workers and 8% of its physicians and surgeons. The overrepresentation of Indians in these fields is striking--in practical terms, your doctor is nine times more likely to be an Indian-American than is a random passerby on the street.
Indian Americans are in fact a new "model minority." This term dates back to the 1960s, when East Asians--Americans of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent--were noted for their advanced educations and high earnings.
East Asians continue to excel in the U.S, but among minority groups, Indians are clearly the latest and greatest "model." In 2007, the median income of households headed by an Indian American was approximately $83,000, compared with $61,000 for East Asians and $55,000 for whites.
About 69% of Indian Americans age 25 and over have four-year college degrees, which dwarfs the rates of 51% and 30% achieved by East Asians and whites, respectively. Indian Americans are also less likely to be poor or in prison, compared with whites.
So why do Indian Americans perform so well? A natural answer is self-selection. Someone willing to pull up roots and move halfway around the world will tend to be more ambitious and hardworking than the average person. But people want to come to the U.S. for many reasons, some of which--being reunited with other family members, for example--have little to do with industriousness. Ultimately, immigration policy decides which kinds of qualities our immigrants possess.
Under our current immigration policy, a majority of legal immigrants to the U.S. obtain green cards (permanent residency) because they have family ties to U.S. citizens, but a small number (15% in 2007) are selected specifically for their labor market value. The proportion of Indian immigrants given an employment-related green card is one of the highest of any nationality. Consequently, it is mainly India's educated elite and their families who come to the U.S.
The success of Indian Americans is also often ascribed to the culture they bring with them, which places strong--some would even say obsessive--emphasis on academic achievement. Exhibit A is the
spelling bee, which requires long hours studying etymology and memorizing word lists, all for little expected benefit other than the thrill of intellectual competition.
But education and culture can take people only so far. To be a great speller--or, more importantly, a great doctor or IT manager--you have to be smart. Just how smart are Indian Americans? We don't know with much certainty. Most data sets with information on ethnic groups do not include IQ scores, and the few that do rarely include enough cases to provide interpretable results for such a small portion of the population.
The only direct evidence we have comes from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey, in which a basic cognitive test called "digit span" was administered to a sample of newly arrived immigrant children. It is an excellent test for comparing people with disparate language and educational backgrounds, since the test taker need only repeat lengthening sequences of digits read by the examiner. Repeating the digits forward is simply a test of short-term memory, but repeating them backward is much more mentally taxing, hence a rough measure of intelligence.
When statistical adjustments are used to convert the backward digit span results to full-scale IQ scores, Indian Americans place at about 112 on a bell-shaped IQ distribution, with white Americans at 100. 112 is the 79th percentile of the white distribution. For more context, consider that Ashkenazi Jews are a famously intelligent ethnic group, and their mean IQ is somewhere around 110.
Given the small sample size, the rough IQ measure and the lack of corroborating data sets, this finding of lofty Indian-American intelligence must be taken cautiously. Nevertheless, it is entirely consistent with their observed achievement.
The superior educational attainment, academic culture and likely high IQ of Indian Americans has already made them an economic force in the U.S., and that strength can only grow. Does this continuing success imply they will become a political force? Here, Gov. Jindal is actually a rarity. Indians are still underrepresented in politics, and they do not specialize in the kinds of fields (law and finance) most conducive to political careers. Time will tell if they are able to convert economic power into serious political influence, as a Jindal presidency could.
A much clearer implication of Indian-American success is that immigrants need not be unskilled, nor must their economic integration take generations to achieve. In sharp contrast to Indian Americans, most U.S. immigrants, especially Mexican, are much less wealthy and educated than U.S. natives, even after many years in the country.
A new immigration policy that prioritizes skills over family reunification could bring more successful immigrants to the U.S. By emphasizing education, work experience and IQ in our immigration policy, immigrant groups from other national backgrounds could join the list of model minorities.
There is nothing inevitable about immigration. Who immigrates each year is a policy decision, free to be modified at any time by Congress. Constructing new legislation is always difficult, but I propose
a simple starting point for immigration selection: Anyone who can spell guerdon is in!
Jason Richwine is a National Research Initiative fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
Indian Americans: The New Model Minority (forbes.com)
Indian Americans: The New Model Minority (forbes.com)
Pew: Religion and Education Around the World
Large gaps in education levels persist, but all faiths are making gains – particularly among women
Hindus in India, who make up a large majority of the country’s population (and more than 90% of the world’s Hindus), have relatively low levels of educational attainment – a nationwide average of 5.5 years of schooling. While they are more highly educated than Muslims in India (14% of the country’s population), they lag behind Christians (2.5% of India’s population). By contrast, fully 87% of Hindus living in North America hold post-secondary degrees – a higher share than any other major religious group in the region.
Jews are more highly educated than any other major religious group around the world, while Muslims and Hindus tend to have the fewest years of formal schooling. But all religious groups are making gains, particularly among women.
www.pewforum.org
Why Indians are the highest earning ethnic group in US? Harsh Goenka explains
According to the latest US Census data, the Indians now have an average household earning of $123,700, i.e a little over ₹1 crore, PTI reported. The median earnings of the Indians there is nearly double the nationwide average of $63,922.
Industrialist Harsh Goenka has taken to Twitter to explain why Indians are earning the highest in the United States. In a tweet. he shared an infographic on median household income in the United States by ethnic group.
According to Goenka, Indians value good education and are the most educated ethnic group. He added that Indians work very hard along with being frugal in their habits. “We are smart. We are in IT, engineering and medicine- the highest paying jobs”. he tweeted.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmbjuuHaUAIQcn5?format=jpg&name=small
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmbjuuHaUAIQcn5?format=jpg&name=small
The infographic has the US Census Bureau data of 2013-15 American Community Survey. It shows that the median household income of Indian-Americans stands at $100,000, which translates to ₹81.28 lakh as per the current exchange rate. The Chinese-Americans and Pakistani-Americans are lower on the list with median incomes of $69,100 and $66,200 respectively.
“Definitely proud of these Indians, many of whom are no longer Indian citizens but really sad about the fact that India has not been able to retain the likes of them - shouldn't we talk about this as well?” a Twitter user replied to Goenka's tweets.
Another user wrote, "Indians Mostly due to tech and doctors. Filipinos as well, doctors. So our international household in top two. Our kids 3 country trifecta. maybe even 4 or 5 since Spanish Filipino heritage and possibly British India"
According to the latest US Census data, the Indians now have an average household earning of $123,700, i.e a little over ₹1 crore, PTI reported.
The median earnings of the Indians there is nearly double the nationwide average of $63,922.
Why Indians are the highest earning ethnic group in US? Harsh Goenka explains - Hindustan Times
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