India supplied the highest percentage of foreign students at U of Chicago when I went there. I never found a middle ground in the Indian students I knew. Fifty fifty. Half of them were so good the earth trembled under their feet. I sat in on a class in Astrophysics from Chandrasakar. They don’t get any better. But the other half were not of the average caliber of our students and you learned to sprint around desks when alone in the classroom with them. We all knew who to avoid and we knew the quality students that were worth the time and effort to know and to date. My assumption has always been that the lower quality students got in with money.
Chinese students are a different situation. That’s why the liberals are trying to keep them out of the best colleges. Because they’ll trample everyone else into the academic dirt. The children are trained up from an early age to study night and day. They go to extra academies. They focus on English. And they don’t take the summer off to enjoy a rest. Every year gets more and more intensive until their college entry exams and the burden on those young shoulders is intense. They get into colleges because they know how to do what our own students don’t anymore - study!
I’ve noticed that nursery/kindergartens in our area are beginning to put up advertising that they speak Mandarin. The students who migrated to the US and have begun raising families here are going to be as strict with the academic upbringing of their kids here, even though the environment in the US won’t be as supportive for the students as back home.
There are good facts in your post. I was hired by a manufacturing outfit in 1963. My boss liked my work so from then on, my boss expected every Indian to be like me, and then any Indian who walked in through the door was immediately hired. Pretty soon we had 6 Indians working in my department, responsible for design and stress analysis of metal working machines. That 50-50 rule you mentioned was pretty damn close. We also had 2 Chinese, 1 Russian and 1 Japanese American in our group. The Japanese American was brilliant mathematician. The Chinese guys had good work ethic but not very good at creative thinking.
Oh good grief with this earth trembling and chinese trampling everyone dramatic talk. I’m fully acquainted with what Indians and Chinese are like in these universities. Chinese are not that great. Raised with more math. Advisors like them because they slave and know the value of cross-stealing work. And there’s millions of them, can locate a platinum streak in the fools gold pools of fish. And many of them assign their school work to others to other chinese in china cheap. They resort to what they have to to compete, and their patrons doctor test scores to push the “whites for business, asians for math” and guess who to lead them all at the very top.
If the average IQ of all Indians was 10 points (S&B) lower than the average American (and I'm not implying that it is, I'm just hypothesizing to make a point), if you plot that on a Bell curve, with their 1.4 billion people, that means they still have more geniuses (140 S&B or >) than America does.
But by the same token, it also means they have more idiots.
Talking to an Indian sound engineer (educated in India), I happened to mention Amar Bose, American-born, ethnic Indian, one of the most famous sound engineers ever. He'd never heard of him. Or Rudyard Kipling. He told me their engineering schools only teach science and mathematics. No history, no literature, no PE. Nothing but engineering.