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The US's Reverse Brain Drain
We may have to rethink the assumption that Silicon Valley is the hotbed of innovation in which all the world's best and brightest want to work and live. TechCrunch has a piece by an invited expert on the reverse brain drain already evident and growing in the US as Indian, Chinese, and European students and workers in the US plan to return home, or already have. From an extensive interview with Chinese and Indian workers who had already left: "We learned that these workers returned in their prime: the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. ... What propelled them to return home? Some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians cited professional opportunities. And while they make less money in absolute terms at home, most said their salaries brought a 'better quality of life' than what they had in the US. ... A return ticket home also put their career on steroids. About 10% of the Indians polled had held senior management jobs in the US. That number rose to 44% after they returned home. Among the Chinese, the number rose from 9% in the US to 36% in China."
Have you ever tried applying for a green card in America? You get stuck in a queue and have to wait years before you might finally get permission to stay here. It's no way to plan a secure future for yourself. It's also worse for migrants from certain countries. I have Indian friends who have basically been told that the process may take so long that they'd be better finding other means to change their status (e.g. marriage).
The US makes it quite difficult for talented people who follows the law to stay in the country. It does not surprise me in the least that Indians are returning home.
Two comments. First, "age of prime" is 30-33? Is IT really that anti-fogey? Second, degrees above bachelor are generally held in higher regard outside of the US. US companies value what they see as "actual productivity" and will usually trade a more productive BS for a lack-luster MS[1]. In most countries, especially Asia, advanced degrees are simply given more esteem compared to the US. More money AND more chicks.
[1] Those with advanced degrees claim their extra knowledge helps in areas that are less visible to management but still very important. But, that's another story.
Table-ized A.I.
Funny how many people forget just how much the government has to do with the hostile treatment that immigrants face upon entering the US. Considering how much red tape and utter nonsense is baked into the system it isn't any surprise that a lot of educated people want the hell out of here.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
That's a pretty bold claim you're making. Let's have a look at some actual numbers, shall we?
This chart indicates that not only are we keeping up with Moore's law, for the past 2-3 years we've actually moved ahead of where we'd expect to be. And the graph doesn't even include AMD's R800 graphics chips, which have even higher transistor densities than RV770/GT200.
In social studies, the "Brain Drain" was something the US was doing to the rest of the world by "taking away their brains." Now, those people are going back to their countries so it is a reversal of the "Brain Drain."
we educate foreign students at the cost of displacing domestic students
I would like to see some evidence to back that claim because that does not match my experience. In my CS department, US citizens are almost automatically accepted into the graduate program, while foreign students have to compete with each other to get in. (My professor is on the admissions committee.) The reason is that there are so few US citizens that apply that they have to take as many as they can get. The only people being turned away are foreigners who got beat out by more qualified foreigners.
The fact is that the US has half of the world's colleges and universities. It is the large number of foreign students that allows us to have so many universities and that gives domestic students a wide range of choices.
completely untrue. At least in canada. Roughly every 6 or 7 foreign students subsidizes a professor (well maybe 10 or 11 depends on how you count the flow of money and if you include grad students etc). They pay about 20k in tuition and the average prof gets probably a bit less than 100k. Lots of courses are taught by people making a lot less than that too. On top of that they bring into this country about 15k/year in living expenses which is spent, unsurprisingly, on local things like rent, food etc. Though one should see the irony of a student from china spending extra money in canada on goods made in china with much lower point of sale costs there.
There is not a limit on the number of students we can teach - there is a limit on how fast we can grow, but not how big we can get. In fact quite the contrary - the more students we have the more we can teach, because the more graduate students we can fund, and thus the processes is a positive feedback system. Engineering, medicine and the like; programs which control enrollment do so artificially to keep the value of their degrees up, if demand gets too high (we cannot attract enough engineers/doctors) politicians either force rule changes or the price goes up and more of the smartest people from other countries stay here, and don't go home.
Don't kid yourself for a moment - we aren't 'passing over' domestic students for foreign ones. We get the best and brightest from those countries; you don't move 10 time zones across and ocean to a place where you don't know anyone and barely speak the language because you're mediocre. They make our 'average' students look bad sure, but we have lots of room for domestic students, for good or bad we can train far more domestic students than want to apply to our programs. And we still, including here on /. bemoan the falling quality of computer science graduates because we're dumbing down the programs. I'll let you in on a secret: we're not dumbing the program down for the guys from india china or the middle east.
Right now I'm in a PhD programme in comp sci. We could probably double our undergraduate enrollment (2nd 3rd and 4th year courses probably have 400 ish students combined now) with all domestic students right now, and not skip a beat.
Imagine I was at a business. Lets call it the computer science corporation of London ontario. (Fake). And we do 70% of our business with india the middle east and china. Our real dollar business with the local market (canada) has basically grown with inflation for 10 years, but we've more than doubled in size by exporting our product to those markets and we see continued expansion in those areas. Is that really bad, shareholders would be thrilled? Car companies have basically reached one car per person in north america, the market is pretty obviously saturated at that point, so to grow your business you go elsewhere. Education has the same problem. Frankly we have more PhD's than the private market really wants, and more people who would rather the ~25% pay cut but academic freedom and the ability to teach rather than work for the man (IBM, MS, Google). Think of foreign students as sales to a foreign country - and lets face it, we're running out of other things the chinese are willing to pay money for that we have.
You want to pick on someone pick on programmes that aren't the aforementioned "management, technology and science". Want to know why we're managing such poor enrollment? Because students have been given the woefully misguided impression that 80K later any degree will be just as good as spending 80k on one in management, technology or science, and that working hard and learning to do math is bad. Admittedly I'm in Canada, and we have oil, and oil makes you as a society stupid because any high profit margin product that can be mass produced reduces demand for education or efficiency gains through education. It's not that I object to psychology, or history or anything else, but if the market wants 100 grads and you
you can have economic freedom and STILL not be free, i am not arguing you that.
but if you don't have economic freedom, you are not free, at all.
do you have trouble with the not all rectangles are squares thing too?
I am a faculty at a US university, advising several such foreign students and postdocs. Many of them choose to leave the US after their PhD or postdoc simply because there are often better opportunities elsewhere, especially for those interested in an academic career. Many countries are ramping up their investment in education and research, while the trend in the US is negative. In the 70's and 80's, US universities were the top. Now, researchers are often offered much better support, infrastructure, ability to grow a research group, and even salary, in other countries. So they leave. Three of the people who worked with me are now professors; none of them is in the US. What this says for the future pre-eminence of US science... wait, which pre-eminence?
Actually that's misleading too. I'm a foreign undergrad student (soon to be graduate, hopefully *fingers crossed*), and the sheer number of NSF-funded summer internships and other opportunities that are closed to me since I'm not a citizen is mind-boggling. Don't get me wrong, I'm not whining or anything - it's only fair for a gov't to take special care of its own citizens, and to expect anything else would be absurd - I'm just pointing out that american citizens still have it a lot better than int'l students.
weinersmith
Absolutely agree with this. As a European I would never work in the US for all of the reasons listed. I don't care what money I could earn. "At will" employment scares me especially since you can be fired without any good reason. Working hours are ludicrous which seems to stem from the "at will" factor - people are too scared not to work those extra hours for fear of being fired. In the EU it is illegal to work more than 48 hours a week without special dispensation. And the final straw is that you don't even get decent vacation time for all those hours, I get 5 weeks here and I know plenty of people who get more.
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Of course, I'm a college prof, so I may be biased.
That being said, I'm a college prof outside of the US, because here they'll actually pay me a decent middle-class salary for my time and degrees, whereas in the US, I literally had a hard time paying rent. As in, my food and utilities budget was what was left after I paid rent; I had no discretionary income, and didn't even have a mobile phone.
HOWEVER, I'm not in the hard sciences, but I still agree that science and technology are the basis of all developed countries' growth. There's no room for linguists and psychometricians in anyone's budgets without physicists and chemists and biologists and engineers making things that make money.
My wife and I came to this country because it is the land of opportunity. The place where the very best in the world go to build the best business. We're thinking of leaving because that don't seem to actually be true... at least, not anymore. Instead you:
I wanted to make this permanent, get my green card and eventually citizenship. But it seeme to me that you guys are trending hard towards compleat paranoid xenophobia. We have kids now and I'm thinking more and more about what living here is going to do to them. I don't want my kids to grow up in what, to me, seems like a poisonous atmosphere of stranger hate, militant and religious zealotry, misplaced sense of entitlement, and a "we're the greatest because we're the greatest" view of the world.
At this point, it's just a matter of time for us. We're making pretty good money and want to pull together a large enough nest egg to allow us to move home, buy a house, and start a business. After that, we'll likely only ever return here to take the kids to Disneyworld
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All Western European schools keep people in school longer than America does. Britain has 190 days. Canada has 190. Japan keeps kids in schools much longer than Americans do. South Koreans, Australians, and other outliers do as well. We are actually behind by only going to school 180 days or so. South Africa is 200. Philippines is 200. Hong Kong goes September to July. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_term