Recession

The best of the academic institutes each year leaves the country.

The second best are picked up by companies providing very high compensation - a final year student in his farewel party arranged by the E&ECE Dept., IIT Kharagpur told the Head of the Dept. that he would be earning more than double the Head was earning at less than half the age by not being a part of Govt. research lab. in India like the Head. The student was talking to a person who toiled himself and led a team who trained the student.

The third best plays it safe by joining Pvt. or Govt. sector providing decent salary and perks.

Most of the students joining Govt. research lab.s or filling up project positions or looking for M.S. or Ph.D opportunities are the ones who got rejected everywhere. It is the greatness of the IIT system and untiring effort of the IIT faculty to bring the best out of these students, to get decent output from their research lab.s while being at a much, much, more disadvantageous position compared to his competitor at the other side of the globe.

Manpower is the key element of a research lab. It can be a good thought experiment to swap the students we get in our research lab. with the ones available in US research lab.s and then compare the output of these lab.s.

Thus the recession and the following research report in rediff.com bring some cheer to me, not in a saddistic sense - but from the consideration that the research lab.s of our country may now get what it desearves, some of the better students the country produces.

Hope, the present student generation considers these before they exercise their choices.

------------

From Rediff.com, March 09, 2009

Research report -- titled America's Loss is the Worlds Gain: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs - Part 4 -- was just released by the Kauffman Foundation. It is based on interviews with 1,203 Indian and Chinese professionals who had worked or studied in the US but returned home.

We found that the vast majority of the returnees were in their 30's and 90% held masters or PhDs in management, technology or science. They were at the very top of the educational distribution for these highly educated immigrant groups -- precisely the kind of people that make the greatest contribution to the US economy and job growth.

We asked them why they returned and how they have fared since returning. Returnees said they had much better economic and professional opportunities in their home countries and they had advanced significantly in their careers. Respondents saw much better entrepreneurial opportunities back home, and over half of our sample planned to start their own business, if they had not already done so.

But it wasn't only about the money or career opportunities. Most were making less money, but believed they had a better quality of life. They found emotional growth and family values to be much better in their home countries. They also confirmed that family considerations were the strongest factors drawing them home.

It wasn't just H1-B's and students who were returning. Thirty percent were US permanent residents or citizens. About a third complained about the pollution and bureaucracy back home. Regardless, only a quarter of our sample said they intended return to the US.

An analysis of the 2000 census by William R Kerr of Harvard Business School showed that immigrants made up 24% of the US science and engineering workforce holding bachelor's degrees and 47% of science and engineering workers that have PhDs. Yet, immigrants account for only 12% of the US working population.

What's more, immigrants made up 67% of all additions to US science and engineering workforce between 1995 to 2006. Kerr found evidence that the presence of more foreign knowledge workers actually had a positive impact on patent filings by US born workers in the same region.

Similarly, Jennifer Hunt of McGill University and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle of Princeton University analysed long-term changes in the US population in a paper published in January 2009 titled 'How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?'

They calculated that, for every percentage point rise in the share of immigrant college graduates in the US population, the total per capita number of patents for the entire population should increase by 6 percent.

Make no mistake. This is a zero-sum game. Immigrants who leave America will launch their companies in other countries, file patents in other countries and fill the intellectual coffers of other countries. Those companies and those patents will benefit countries like India, China and Canada not the United States. America's loss is the world's gain.