Losing the world's best and brightest: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part V
Survey results indicate foreign national students in the United States plan to return to their native countries upon graduation in greater numbers.
Foreign national students have come to the United States to study in increasing numbers and participated in some of the most advanced academic research efforts to date, lending enormous brainpower to the development of technological and scientific innovations that benefitted America. The students were drawn to the United States in many cases by the country’s academic research institutions and enormous budgets for basic and applied research.
As the economies of the developing world have grown rapidly, anecdotal evidence has begun to suggest that fewer foreign national students wish to stay in the U.S. after graduation. Reports in the popular press and elsewhere have suggested that many of these students now believe that greater opportunities exist elsewhere in the world. To date, there has been very little empirical research, aside from the NSF surveys into the post-graduate intentions of foreign nationals and the key factors driving their decisions to seek to stay in the U.S. or to move abroad. This paper attempts to fill some of this void.