The Hesitant Hai Gui: Return-Migration Preferences of U.S.-Educated Chinese Scientists and Engineers

Abstract

Managers, research administrators, and policy makers need a greater understanding of the factors that drive employment preferences of foreign science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral graduates of U.S. universities. To address this need, the authors report the results of a large multischool conjoint survey of return-migration preferences among U.S. STEM doctoral students from China. The survey presents the respondents with potential job offers and yields individual-level estimates of each respondent's indirect utility of a job as a function of location, job status, and salary. The authors use a delayed follow-up choice task to demonstrate stability of the preference estimates both over time and across response modalities. The estimated preferences imply that Chinese doctoral graduates tend to remain in the United States because of a large salary disparity between the two countries rather than because of an inherent preference for locating in the United States. Given these estimated preferences, the authors conduct several policy-relevant, counterfactual simulations of return-migration choice and outline effective targeting and positioning strategy for attracting Chinese STEM talent.

Has China’s Young Thousand Talents program been successful in recruiting and nurturing top-caliber scientists?

“…This study has important implications for global academic mobility, because Chinese citizens not only account for a large share of the US and EU STEM PhD graduates but also are among the most productive graduates ( 5 ). As China continues to invest in higher education and academic talent, we can expect more Western-trained Chinese students to return to China, although findings were mixed; whereas a National Science Foundation survey showed that 87% of Chinese STEM PhDs wanted to stay in the US ( 15 ), another study revealed that 70% of them would prefer to return to China if offered salaries comparable to what they could expect to receive in the US ( 17 ). We can also expect Chinese universities to become more attractive locations for Chinese (and international) students intending to pursue scientific research careers—students who would otherwise study in the US or EU.…”

Occupational choice, satisfaction and success of PhD graduates in East Asia and the West: A systematic review

“…As observed globally, the academic labour market appeared to be closely related to public funding for Higher Education (HE) sectors. In the 2000s, major countries in both West (Passaretta et al, 2019;Zeithammer & Kellogg, 2013) and East Asia (Shin et al, 2018;Yoshioka-Kobayashi & Shibayama, 2021) experienced dramatic decreases in academic professions (hereafter APs and NAPs for non-academic professions) availability. This decline was accompanied by an increase in fixed-term contracts as a result of the radical HE reforms catalysed by the 2008 economic recession and the concurrent expansion of doctoral education.…”

“…These geographic disparities in NAP provision could result in frequent occupational mobility among doctorates, who tended to migrate towards locales with more R&D investments and greater employment availability (Passaretta et al, 2019). Thus, it came as no surprise that regions with intensified R&D investment-like Northwestern European countries (Reale et al, 2019) and the US (Sinche et al, 2017;Zeithammer & Kellogg, 2013)seemed to experience a net gain in global brain circulation. However, the presence of children and older age when obtaining doctoral degrees (Reale et al, 2019), as well as visa policy (Jackson & Michelson, 2015;Roach & Skrentny, 2019;Zeithammer & Kellogg, 2013) occasionally hindered such mobility.…”

International student mobility: A systematic review and research agenda

“…As China's middle class grows, more and more people can afford and choose to self-fund their studies abroad (Machin & Murphy, 2017). These previous works have investigated more about Asian students' acculturation processes (Brisset et al, 2010;Yu et al, 2019;, employment preferences (Zeithammer & Kellogg, 2013), and effects on scientific productivity at their destinations (Borjas et al, 2018;Gaulé & Piacentini, 2013). A few articles have examined students from Africa, the US, and European countries, but they appear to be underrepresented.…”