Reverse Brain Drain happening

crobato

Colonel
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Some news on this lately. Will have a fundamental impact on the economic competitiveness of the US, China and India.

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More of world's talented workers opt to leave USA

More skilled immigrants are giving up their American dreams to pursue careers back home, raising concerns that the U.S. may lose its competitive edge in science, technology and other fields.

ECONOMY: Driving emigration

"What was a trickle has become a flood," says Duke University's Vivek Wadhwa, who studies reverse immigration.

Wadhwa projects that in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and 100,000 to China, countries that have had rapid economic growth.

"For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced," he says.

Suren Dutia, CEO of TiE Global, a worldwide network of professionals who promote entrepreneurship, says the U.S. economy will suffer without these skilled workers. "If the country is going to maintain the kind of economic well-being that we've enjoyed for many years, that requires having these incredibly gifted individuals who have been educated and trained by us," he says."

Read more on the link.


Also more articles about this. Companies like Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Oracle & Microsoft are very concerned about this.


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Skilled Immigrants are leaving the U.S. Why?

"The Business Week quoting a study by Duke University professor and Harvard researcher Vivek Wadhwa found that among Chinese nationals who emigrated to the U.S. and later returned home, 72% said they thought professional opportunities were better in China. Among Indians who returned home, 56% said the same of their country. Wadhwa estimates that as many as 200,000 skilled workers from India and China will go home over the next five years, compared with roughly 100,000 over the past 20 years.

"We're in a recession, and there is enough good talent now [in the U.S.], but long term, it will hurt like you won't believe," says Wadhwa, in an interview to Business Week.

"Losing critical talent means arming the U.S.'s competition. The next Google, Microsoft, or Apple could be launched in Shanghai or Bangalore."


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Why Skilled Immigrants Are Leaving the U.S.
New research shows that highly skilled workers are returning home for brighter career prospects and a better quality of life

"Our new paper, "America's Loss Is the World's Gain," finds that the vast majority of these returnees were relatively young. The average age was 30 for Indian returnees, and 33 for Chinese. They were highly educated, with degrees in management, technology, or science. Fifty-one percent of the Chinese held master's degrees and 41% had PhDs. Sixty-six percent of the Indians held a master's and 12.1% had PhDs. They were at very top of the educational distribution for these highly educated immigrant groups—precisely the kind of people who make the greatest contribution to the U.S. economy and to business and job growth. "
 

bladerunner

Banned Idiot
Quite sometime ago I read an article which I think from memory stated that 40% of the top research positions in the USA were occupied by Asians. (sounds alot)

But that in turn is a very broad statement as many nationalities make up Asians?
 

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
A major example is Kai Fu Lee. He worked with SGI, Apple, Microsoft then Google. One of the top guys in IT today, an idol among many young Chinese geeks.

When Google hired him from Microsoft, Steve Ballmer was said to throw a fit, smashing chairs, and swearing "I will crush Google!". Kai Fu Lee eventually became head of Google China. His resignation from Google to create a new venture capital start up in China for Chinese innovators created much waves in the IT press.
 

ba12

New Member
As always very old dictum s should not be forgotten...
"Money Talks, Bullshit Walks." The wealthy, gifted, privileged few embrace this simple universal concept very well! And also I may add, to very good advantage.
 

vesicles

Colonel
Quite sometime ago I read an article which I think from memory stated that 40% of the top research positions in the USA were occupied by Asians. (sounds alot)

But that in turn is a very broad statement as many nationalities make up Asians?

Depending on the field. In the States: natural science: much more Chinese than anyone else (the tougher the field, like math and physics, the more Chinese you see. Perhaps having something to do with not many Americans want to go into these fields). Medical: Chinese, Japanese and Indians. Engineering: Chinese and Indians. IT: Chinese and Indians. Physicians: Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Indians.

If you go to any science conference in the world, at least half the attendants will be Asians... again, you'll see a lot of Chinese and Indians at natural science meetings and a lot of Japanese at medical meetings.
 

Mcsweeney

Junior Member
Andrew Chi-Chih Yao's trajectory suggests a genius's quick ascent to success. Born in Shanghai, he studied hard, earned two Ph.D.'s from American universities, and at age 35 was a professor of computer science at Stanford University. By 2000, when he received the A.M. Turing Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in his field, younger computer scientists were memorizing a principle bearing his name.

But when Tsinghua University invited him to return to China to lead a new, generously financed institute in 2004, he jumped at the opportunity. "I was very excited," he recalls.

In creating the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Mr. Yao says, he had free rein from Tsinghua's administrators to determine everything from research topics to personnel.

Once in Beijing, he threw himself into the project, emerging with an institute that is today one of the university's jewels and is increasingly known outside China.

The way Mr. Yao's institute was created illustrates a central element of China's higher-education strategy. When the government decides it wants to do something, it does it, and fast.

Theoretical computer science—the abstract, intensely mathematical subfield that is Mr. Yao's specialty—is poorly financed in the United States. It wasn't originally a target area for China, either. But China has an approach different from that found in the United States: a desire to build outstanding institutions by attracting the leaders in a field—any field.

Mr. Yao was first approached about joining Tsinghua's faculty in 2003 by Chen Ning Yang, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who had himself recently begun lecturing at the university.

Through that and later discussions, Mr. Yao came to understand that the university's officials were more interested in hiring world-class talent than they were in building up specific areas.

"They want to catch up in a global way, and therefore it doesn't matter where they get started," Mr. Yao explains.

That hunger translates into money for leading Western-trained scientists willing to relocate. "China is a very exciting place for science and engineering for people who have vision," he says.

'Yao's Class'

But while the chance to build a world-class institute from scratch required little consideration, how exactly to do it in a country with a developing higher-education system was a difficult question to answer.

Mr. Yao recruited his first class of graduate students, only to discover that many of them lacked basic skills. If he wanted quality applicants, he realized, he would have to train them himself. So he established an undergraduate program within the institute, selecting about 100 students each year and then identifying the most talented ones—a group now known as Yao's Class—for intensive instruction.

The fact that he had the freedom to do so reflects another element of China's higher-education strategy, in which a select number of elite universities are allowed to flourish ...

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tphuang

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well, it's bound to happen, since American life style is clearly on the decline whereas the developing world is going up rapidly. And for most people, if they can enjoy similar compensations at home and in America, they'd much rather go back just because they are more comfortable back in their home culture.

The way the world is going, I might go back sometimes in the future too. But there are a lot of things still to be resolved. I find pollution in China to be unbearable, so I have a hard time staying there for a pro-longed period of time. But I also have a lot of friends going to Shanghai and really enjoying it there. It definitely makes sense for a lot of people to go back.

Actually, even Peter Schiff has been mentioning this on his weekly radio shows. As situations in America deteriorates, young Americans should go to Asia or Other English speaking countries (maybe Canada, Australia) to earn a living.
 

vesicles

Colonel
Unfortunately can't get the rest of the article, it requires a subscription

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About the part that Yao found out that most of his graduate students lacked basic skills, I think that's misleading. They can say that these students didn't have the background that HE needed since he's establishing a new field, but the article sounds like that most Chinese college graduates lack fundamental knowledge. That's actually the total opposite as most of the American graduate programs recruit Chinese college graduates fresh out of college all the time. And most of them are very sound in terms of BASIC skills and knowledge of the field.
 

bladerunner

Banned Idiot
Depending on the field. In the States: natural science: much more Chinese than anyone else

The Article I read was in the Scientific American, It wasnt the sort of magazine I pick up while browsing in a bookshop, but the article heading caught my attention.. I also believe that natural science wasnt so strong as applied science in countries like China and India, that field was a area, more developed countries indulged in. True/False?

To me it ssems like they are cherry picking and hoping at some stage it all falls into place.
 

vesicles

Colonel
The Article I read was in the Scientific American, It wasnt the sort of magazine I pick up while browsing in a bookshop, but the article heading caught my attention.. I also believe that natural science wasnt so strong as applied science in countries like China and India, that field was a area, more developed countries indulged in. True/False?

To me it ssems like they are cherry picking and hoping at some stage it all falls into place.

I think it's quite the opposite. The natural science in China is very strong. We don't hear it because it's less sexy.

The developed nations are more into the fancy transition stuff. The more basic/fundamental research is usually labor-intensive and less flashy and attracts significantly less money. Thus, it's hard to get basic research off the ground in the wealthy nations. I know this for a fact because I'm experiencing it as we speak. To get a grant in biology/medicine, we have to "cure diseases" and do the flashy stuff like cancer and use animal models. Any basic stuff like simply learning how a cell works and "to satisfy the curiosity" will NOT get you anything. About two weeks ago, this year's Nobel prize winner in Medicine specifically pointed out the importance of funding basic researches that LOOK like it won't go any where. that just tells you how frustrated he is with the current funding trend in the States.

The common view is "we've learned enough basic stuff and it's time to apply it"!! While we need to translate what we learn to what we can use. That' for sure, but we certainly have NOT learned enough. At least in terms of biology/medicine, we are still in the stage of "data gathering". To compare the field of biology as an ocean, we've only got a bucket of that knowledge. Sadly, many people think we've learned most of what we can. And even more sadly, these people are the ones who decide the funding in congress and NIH...
 
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