Why do American Indians strive for academic excellence?

A note on terms: "American Indians" in this article means Indian-Americans — immigrants from India and their children in the United States.

Indian-Americans are among the most prosperous immigrant groups in the United States, and much has been written about Indian parents pushing their kids to excel in academics. They are the tiger parents Amy Chua described — a comparison her 2014 book The Triple Package made a national conversation.

In 2015, Pooja Chandrashekar was accepted by all eight Ivy League schools — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, and Penn — plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and five others. She chose Harvard. Her story raised questions many Indian families ask: Indian-American kids get no advantage in elite admissions. Their competition pool is fierce and large precisely because most of them apply with high ACT/SAT scores and high GPAs. While colleges say there is no discrimination of any kind, they openly seek a diverse profile of students for each class — which means top-scoring Indian-American applicants are competing against each other for a limited number of seats.

So why do we emphasize academic excellence so much?

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the large group of Indians who migrated to the US did not come through family ties — they came through academic excellence, which let them enter the country as skilled workers. That was not the case in the 19th century, when most immigrants were unskilled workers and farmers. The new Indian immigrant group comes as professionals, and the key element in their path to success has been education.

They hail from families back home where academic excellence was the main emphasis. They were told over and over that high performance in school was a necessity — and they in turn teach their kids to do the same.

There is a deeper logic to it. When someone is willing to pull out his entire roots to settle in a country thousands of miles away, physically and culturally, he is bound to be ambitious and more hardworking than the average person. Indians are among the largest groups to get employment-based green cards: it is India's educated who get employment-based lawful permanent resident status in the US. This group rose only through academic excellence, so they teach its importance to the next generation.

In our local high school, the joke among the kids is "did you pass, or did you pass by Asian standards?" Passing by Asian standards means A and above in every subject. Yes, sometimes the pressure inside the home is a lot — an A- may not be enough, and grade B is not even a topic of discussion — but we know of no other way. It is not that we are trying to beat the system or raise the bar; it is just that we know of no other way to survive.

And because the Indian community is so competitive, you would think they would help each other and share experiences to make the group better. The opposite is often true. Most of them suffer from crab mentality — if I can't have it, neither can you. (Of course, there are exceptions.) The new immigrant family or first-generation family tries to understand the system alone, with no help from the community. So again, the one thing the family knows from generations of experience is that excellence in education always helps.