Exploring the success of Indians at the Spelling Bee?

Yet again an Indian wins the spelling bee. Give it up to Sukanya Roy from Wilkes-Barre, PA. 7out the 13 finalists in 2011 contest were of Indian origin. It has become astereotype of sorts for a kid of Indian ancestry to win the US National Spelling Bee championship. About a year ago, in an article titled Indian Buzz at the Spelling Bee, I pondered on the success of Indians at this competition. In this post, I will explore the possible causes of the success.This post however is not an attempt to explore the why of the success, rather the how of it, may be? Before we begin analyzing the success, I want to take a small detour into the history of the Spelling Bee winners who are of Indian Ancestry.

The first Indian kid to win the championship was Balu Natarajan in the year 1985. He did it by spelling the word milieu. He went on to become a Physician in Internal and Sports Medicine with a fellowship in Sports medicine. He practices in Chicago. This breakthrough was followed shortly in 1988 by Rageshree Ramachandran. She earned a joint MD-PhD at UPenn and is currently pursuing a gastrointestinal fellowship at UCSF in 2008. This succession of wins was followed by a drought of 11 year until 1999 when Nupur Lala won the championship. It was the year the documentary Spellbound was made that followed 8 spelling bee contestants. This documentary film was nominated for Academy Award in the Best Documentary category in 2003. Nupur become a celebrity of sorts since the documentary was released. She graduated from Univ. Michigan Ann Arbor majoring Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She is currently pursuing research in neuroimaging at MIT. George Tampy, who was mentioned several times but was not one of the contestants that were followed regulary in the documentary, went on to win the bee the next year (2000). After graduating from Harvard in 2010, George is a Finance Analyst in Chicago.

The list of all Indian Spelling Bee Winners is below
1985 Balu Natarajan
1988 Rageshree Ramachandran
1999 Nupur Lala
2000 George Abraham Thampy
2002 Pratyush Buddiga
2003 Sai R. Gunturi
2005 Anurag Kashyap
2008 Sameer Mishra
2009 Kavya Shivashankar
2010 Anamika Veeramani
2011 Sukanya Roy

For a full list visit http://www.spellingbee.com/champions-and-their-winning-words.

Time, effort and hardwork each of the winner put into the preparation for the contest has to be the primary cause of their success. Proper encouragement and supportive environment at home and in school plays a part. Assuming every winner had these conditions, a candidate preparing for such an intensive high
competitive event needs a training and practicing ground. To the Indian Kids this came in the form of North South Foundation(NSF). NSF has over 60+ chapters in USA and was started in 1989. The educational contests including the spelling bee contests at the chapter level was started in 1993. These contests have kind of become a minor-league training ground for the major league level Scripps National Spelling Bee.

So far, we know that the Indian kids have been successful post 1999 thanks at some level to the intensive training grounds provided by NSF since 1993. What about the period prior to 1999? There were only two winners in the 80s and none prior to that. To that I would like to take one more detour and explore
the history of Immigration (legal) to US from India.
The immigration policy of US has been fairly restrictive prior to 1965. A policy change in 1965 could be termed a land mark for Immigrants from Non-Western countries to US. You can find details of the history of Indian immigration here. An excerpt from it that is relevant to the current topic is below. Italics are
mine.

The Immigration Act of 1965 liberalized immigration, increasing per country quota to 20,000 people irrespective of race, color or creed. The new legislation while ending the period of selective discriminatory immigration to the US, encouraged a new wave of Indian immigrants who were educated and skilled and have profited from their knowledge.

A further boost to the immigration from India came in the form of temporary work visa or H1B(cap of 65k per year). The Amendment that allowed this to happen came into effect in 1992. Here you can find more details of the change to immigration rules, an excerpt of which is below. Italics are mine.

After 1992, it was the relatively less noticeable route of temporary migration that started to become predominant. The 1990 Amendments, brought into effect in 1992, explicitly favored the building up of the human capital capabilities of America by fulfilling its current and future requirements of highly skilled knowledge workers, finally bringing to relevance the immigration of Indians to the American labour market needs.

The immigrant Indian population in US can be seen in the list and chart below. More details here.
Year     Indian born Immigrants
1960    12,296

1970    51,000

1980    206,087

1990    450,406

2000    1,022,552

2008    1,622,522

So the immigration rules mattered. It limited the number of Indians coming to USA prior to 1965 and 1992, thereby limiting the number of participants in the contests. With the issuance of temporary work permit visas, the number of immigrants from India to US has increased manifold since 1992. This led to the formation of Indian communities and they began to participate in the local events that symbolize something to them. Part of that is success in academic and knowledge pursuits. This has to be cultural as well as demand of the times. The 1980s and after were a period of knowledge driven societies. Service industries have grown that need well educated, high skilled work force. The lack of local workforce led to the immigrant work force from India filling the gaps. This work force came to US on the factor of skill set – good education, learning in science and technology. The immigrants from India who came to US did not have the luxury as the other western immigrant in the 17^th and 18^th century - vast frontier lands and hard work to till the land and make their dream come true. Instead all they had was their academic over achievement that led to their success in their home country and immigration to US. They impart the same spirit to their kids who went on to pursue academic success. This I believe is the reason for the kids’ success. The notion that Indian Parents are pushy and subject their kids to these contests by force and pressure is a farce.

In a follow-up to my first post on Spelling Bee, I attempted to find if there were a set of conditions that all communities, who attained success in certain specialized fields, have. The communities that succeeded, I observed, had
•Barrier Breaker
•Willing Takers/Followers
•Continuing Success
•Network for Practicing and Competing Opportunities
Apart from the above I had also wondered if the size of the community matters.

From what I can see so far, the success of Indian kids at the Spelling Bee meet all the above mentioned observations. The question to ask next is, with the change of times in India and USA, will Indian kids continue their success at the Spelling Bee and in the large context at the academic, professional levels. Also the success is largely achieved by the progeny of first generation immigrants from India. What happened to the kids from second and third generation? Why is their participation and success so limited at the spelling bee? The second generation is fairly successful. We are beginning to see a lot of the second Indians in the movies and TV, politics, leading corporations etc. The time has not elapsed enough and there is very limited data on the third generation. That’s a topic for another day.