A study commissioned by the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation, a private, nonprofit foundation, concluded that few foreign nationals studying at universities in the United States plan to remain permanently in this country to pursue careers after graduation. The study surveyed 1,224 students from India, China and Western Europe via the Facebook social networking site. The students' fields of study primarily included engineering, business and economics, computer science and biological sciences.
In previous surveys of doctoral recipients in science and engineering by the National Science Foundation, 92 percent of students from China and 85 percent of students from India said they intended to stay in the United States to work or conduct research for at least five years after graduating. In contrast, the new survey shows that only 54 percent of the students from China and 58 percent of the students from India want to stay in the United States for a few years after graduation, and only 10 percent of students from China and 6 percent of students from India said they wanted to remain permanently.
The researchers conducting the survey concluded that the results reflected the students’ assessment that there are better economic opportunities in their home countries than in the U.S. Approximately 74 percent of the students from China and 86 percent of the students from India said they believed their home countries' economies will grow faster in the future than they have in the past decade. Almost the same percent of these students said they thought it would be difficult to find a job in their field in the United States. One of the authors stated, “The challenge for the U.S. is to preserve the economic dynamism and openness that has long made us a magnet for talented immigrants."
More information about the study is available online at the Kaufman Foundation Web site at: http://www.kauffman.org/Newsroom.aspx.
The economic recession has resulted in a growing number of U.S. jobseekers, particularly those at the executive level, seeking (and securing) employment abroad, according to USA Today. Although the number of candidates remains relatively small, the trend reverses a longtime pattern of greater numbers of foreign workers seeking jobs in the U.S. than the reverse.