We study migration in the right tail of the talent distribution using a novel dataset of Indian high school students taking the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), a college entrance exam used for admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT).
We find a high incidence of migration after students complete college: among the top 1,000 scorers on the exam, 36% have migrated abroad, rising to 62% for the top 100 scorers. We next document that students who attended the original “Top 5” Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) were 5 percentage points more likely to migrate for graduate school compared to equally talented students
who studied in other institutions. We explore two mechanisms for these patterns: signaling, for which we study migration after one university suddenly gained the IIT designation; and alumni networks, using information on the location of IIT alumni in U.S. computer science departments.
In the first study of its kind, we looked at the outcomes of the top 250 rankers from the IIT class of 2013-2020.
HALF of the top ranking IITians 30-32 years old are in the USA, but only 20% of the 25 year olds are!
🧵
1/4 pic.twitter.com/TVSRyMEI2l
— Deedy (@debarghya_das) June 2, 2023
Out of the 1,000 top scorers on the entrance exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology, 36% have migrated eight years later (primarily to the US).
Out of the top 100, 62%.
Out of the top 10, 90%.https://t.co/bEEe4kWz2k
— Stefan Schubert (@StefanFSchubert) June 7, 2023