Investing in our universities is investing in our future.The development of more Tier One universities in Texas will give our brightest high school graduates more top-level choices for college educations in their home state, easing a brain drain of Texas young people to prestigious schools elsewhere.
Last night, the economic think tank the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) held a forum in Sydney called ''Flight of the Kiwi to Australia'' to discuss ways of reversing the trans-Tasman brain drain. The former Fairfax chief executive and All Black captain David Kirk, CIS policy analyst Luke Malpass, business broadcaster Andrew Patterson, and Dr Don Turkington from the New Zealand Government's regulatory responsibility taskforce, canvassed issues such as wage disparity, tax structures, streamlining Anzac business, career prospects and social and cultural changes.
Monika Johnson is 20 and the Midwest Coordinator for the Roosevelt Institute. It's a student-run policy organization that put together a two-day event called Midwest Version 2.0. ...... "Detroit has so many great opportunities and potential for change," Johnson said. "In fifty years, this could be a great city. It could rival Chicago. I would consider staying in Michigan if I had an opportunity to participate in Detroit's revitalization."
Maybe New Zealand suffers from the supposed generation Y complex—we want it all, we want it now, and we want it at no cost.
To form our list, we ranked the 100 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas--geographic entities that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines and uses in collecting statistics--in five categories: unemployment rate, GMP (a measure of the size of a city's economy), foreclosures, home prices and sales rates.We ranked September unemployment rates (the most recent available by metro) using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; the percentage of a metro's homes in foreclosure with September data provided by RealtyTrac; and the change in GMP between the first and second quarter of 2009 from the Brookings Institution's MetroMonitor. We also included the second-quarter 2009 year-over-year change in Freddie Mac's ( FRE - news - people ) Conventional Mortgage Home Price Index--a measure of housing price inflation--and the average days on the market for properties currently on sale (to measure sales rates), using data from Zillow.com. We then averaged the scores for each measure to arrive at an overall ranking.While there is no foolproof method for resisting recession, a common thread in thriving cities is an economy fed by multiple industries. Former Northeastern industrial hubs like Pittsburgh, and Rochester, N.Y., while they may not seem the likeliest models of economic health, have been able to supplement industrial sector decline with a boost from public-sector jobs that have pumped up the economy even as the private sector declined. They land in the fourth and seventh spot on our list, respectively.
I know that, all across the Midwest, good people are worrying about the same issues. They need help in thinking about these issues and where they fit into the Midwestern reality. If Midwesterners who are paid to think don't do this thinking, then it won't get done.
USAToday reports that more Americans are seeking work abroad than in the past. Although “the trend reverses a longtime pattern of far more foreign workers seeking jobs in the U.S.” sounds like an overstatement, there are signs that Americans are more willing to consider working abroad. The country’s largest staffing company, Manpower, says it has 500 clients seeking overseas work, compared a few dozen six months ago. And a recent survey of executives in the U.S. revealed that 54 percent would be likely to take a job in another country, compared to 37 percent in 2005. The top prospects? India, China, Brazil, Dubai, and Singapore.
ColumbusChamber CEO Ty Marsh, a participant in Wednesday’s discussions, said the importance of boosting the region’s talent pool stems from a growing desire among companies to set up shop in areas that can continue to produce viable job prospects.“One of Columbus’ great assets has been the quality of its work force, but one of the opportunities and challenges of the new century is, ‘How do you attract them and how do you keep them?’ ” Marsh said.Columbus would begin the effort, Marsh said, on strong footing with an internship pipeline with the state’s colleges and a better-than-average share of residents with four-year degrees.
Recent reports published by various entities including the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston show an alarming trend: The Greater Boston area is losing recent college graduates at a startling rate. The ability of an economic region to grow and thrive is largely due to these knowledge workers. The recent reports shed light on three distinct questions: Why are students engaged in Greater Boston higher education fleeing the state after graduation, where are they going, and what can be done to increase the retention rate within the region. This report seeks to provide answers to these questions.
A separate analysis by William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer, found that Dallas and Houston were attracting less-educated migrants and identified large brain drains from Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland and, to a lesser extent, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and Boston.Meanwhile, Atlanta; Seattle; Austin, Tex.; San Francisco; and Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., were magnets for better-educated people who were relocating.
Still, contrary to the usual reasons offered to explain why individuals leave the Bay State, recent college graduates appear to be moving primarily to seek the best job opportunities. That suggests that states can take tangible steps to retain more recent college graduates.One potential solution is to build stronger ties between colleges and local employers, to help graduates, particularly non-natives, learn about local job opportunities and form networks in the region. For example, the Colleges of Worcester Consortium in Massachusetts has expanded internship opportunities through an online regional database that students can tap into from any of the consortium’s 15 member institutions. Internships create a win-win-win situation, because they allow students to try out a job or firm, lower recruiting costs for employers, and enhance the reputation of a college or university.
But Darga insists the problem is exaggerated. He says every state thinks it has a brain drain, but ignores the fact that migration rates for young people tend to be much higher than any other age group. Besides, he argues, the number of recent college graduates leaving has leveled out, and it’s a tiny percent of the total state population.
More than ever, diasporas — the "scattered seeds" most governments previously ignored and in some cases even maligned — are increasingly seen as agents of development.Aware of this potential, some developing countries have established institutions to more systematically facilitate ties with their diasporas, defined here as emigrants and their descendants who have maintained strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin.
Rick Desrochers is leaving. And he's not coming back.He and his wife are moving in with her parents in Michigan after the couple lost their jobs, their Hunter's Creek home to foreclosure, and everything else to bankruptcy. The trauma of going broke in the Sunshine State has convinced them that when the good times return to Orlando, they won't."I've talked to a lot of people who say they aren't coming back," said Desrochers, 39, who moved to Orlando nine years ago from Hilton Head, S.C.Later this month, Rick and Connie Desrochers will join a migration out of Florida that began before the housing market collapsed and the recession kicked in. In 2009, more than 500,000 people like them will leave. And for the first time since World War II, Florida's population will actually shrink -- by about 60,000 residents, state demographers estimate.
For nearly 15 years, china has been trying to engineer a "brain gain" by luring top scientific and technical talent home from the United States, and it's working. One major success story is the National Institute for Biological Sciences, created in 2003 with several advantages. Freed from the fundraising pressures of the U.S.—and from the often mindless red tape of traditional state-run Chinese institutions—researchers there say their lab environment, financed by the Chinese government, trumps what they could expect in America. They know from experience, since all 23 were educated in the U.S. In 2005 Dr. Feng Shao, 37, left Harvard Medical School to return to China after receiving a more generous deal from NIBS, where he now studies bacterial pathogens in a top-class lab, with a $300,000 annual budget. He says that in the U.S., "I might have a lab with just a few students and technicians. Here I have 16 or 17." The bottom line, says Shao, is that while his team has published six scientific papers since 2005, "elsewhere I might have done just two."
America’s best friend and oldest trading partner—that’s Canada. Happy member of the world’s largest free trading zone? Sure. But when it comes to the global competition for talent, well, friendship only goes so far. When immigration managers at Canada’s consulate in Los Angeles were asked last year to provide a snapshot of the immigration situation in their region, their tone sounded downright predatory. “Significant numbers of high quality economic class immigrants are being gleaned from this territory,” they wrote in a report obtained by Maclean’s. Most of the workers have been educated at U.S. universities, the document went on, obtaining degrees in valued fields like biomedical research or software engineering. With such talent in short supply in Canada, the pencil pushers in L.A. boasted, “this office regularly engages in promotion and recruitment efforts to exploit this talent.”
