Archive for January, 2010

U.S. Keeps Foreign Ph.D.s

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Despite Fears of a Post-9/11 Drop, Most Science, Engineering Post-Grads Have Stayed

By DAVID WESSEL : The Wall Street Journal

Most foreigners who came to the U.S. to earn doctorate degrees in science and engineering stayed on after graduation—at least until the recession began—refuting predictions that post-9/11 restrictions on immigrants or expanding opportunities in China and India would send more of them home.

Newly released data revealed that 62% of foreigners holding temporary visas who earned Ph.D.s in science and engineering at U.S. universities in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available. Of those who graduated in 1997, 60% were still in the U.S. in 2007, according to the data compiled by the U.S. Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education for the National Science Foundation.

Foreigners account for about 40% of all science and engineering Ph.D. holders working in the U.S., and a larger fraction in engineering, math and computer fields. “Our ability to continue to attract and keep foreign scientists and engineers is critical to…increase investment in science and technology,” Oak Ridge analyst Michael Finn said.

“Data for all available cohorts indicate that ’stay rates’ of foreign science and engineering doctorate recipients in 2007 are slightly higher than they have been in recent years,” Mr. Finn said. His findings, which use tax data to track graduates over time, cover the years before the U.S. plunged into a recession that damped job prospects in many U.S. industries and universities.

Other analysts see signs that recent foreign grads are increasingly likely to return home, particularly in today’s weak job market. “I have no doubt that the 2009 data will show a dramatic shift,” said Vivek Wadwha, executive in residence at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering, who has been warning loudly about the threat that trend would pose to innovation in the U.S. In October 2008, Mr. Wadwha and others used Facebook to question 1,224 foreigners studying at U.S. institutions at all levels. More than half the Indians and 40% of the Chinese said they hoped to return home within five years.  (more…)

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Is China stuck in ‘cultural isolation’?

Friday, January 1st, 2010

by Yu Qiuyu / GT

Why Chinese culture is not as alluring as it ought to be

I once heard an American musician who was friendly toward China say, “Every westerner who comes to China for the first time will be shocked at how many misconceptions they had before they came. Perhaps your propaganda methods have created a kind of cultural isolation.”

To call it “cultural isolation” is obviously going too far, since there are few people in the world who deny the grand history of Chinese culture, and few people reject Chinese material or food culture. At present, a “China fever” is gradually rising. However, it cannot be denied that in the case of the Chinese cultural mainstream being understood abroad, despite a certain improvement over the past few years in rejecting habits like “leftist” extremes and arrogant, one-way indoctrination, there nonetheless still exist serious problems. Internationally, our cultural dialogue overall is still stuck in a situation that is hard to accept.

Is this because of political bias? It actually is not – take the two World Expos that China has attended for example: at Hanover, Germany, in 2001, in a public opinion survey taken before the opening ceremony, China’s exhibit ranked second on the list of “exhibits you most want to visit.” So where then is the problem?

I visited the China exhibit at the Hanover Expo. What struck me most were the photographs of the Great Wall and Peking Opera masks, as well as some backlit photos of famous Chinese vistas. After that it was a smallish model of the Three Gorges, a conceptual model of a Chinese person on the moon, and finally a model of the human body labeled with acupuncture points next to some Chinese medicine. Out of all of the foreign audience who lined up to come in, few lingered at any one spot; most of them walked quickly through in a few minutes and then left.

The China exhibit at the 2005 World Expo in Aichi, Japan, obviously took a lot of work, but conceptually there was little change. At that time, there was a computer screen at the main entrance that displayed how long you would have to wait at particular moment to enter any country’s exhibit. That screen essentially became a competition board for the attractiveness of each country’s culture; for example, France was three hours, Korea three-and-a-half hours, Japan four hours. But at the entrance to China’s exhibit you hardly had to wait at all.  (more…)

Posted in China, Communication, Cross-Cultural | No Comments »