An analysis of the foreign-educated elite academics in the United States

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.02.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We analyze the educational backgrounds of 14310 full professors from the top 48 universities in the United States.

  • One in three professors at prestigious US universities get their undergraduate degree abroad and one in eight professors get their PhD degree abroad.

  • Greece provides more undergraduate degrees to elite academics than the whole continents of South America or Africa.

  • Most foreign-educated professors get their undergraduate education from high income countries.

  • Higher ranked universities hire foreign-educated professors at the same rate as lower ranked universities.

Abstract

This study collects the educational backgrounds of 14310 full professors from top 48 universities in the United States. The aim is to analyze the role of foreign education in academics training in the United States. There are two parts of the analysis. In the first part, we find the countries from where the professors get their education. We note that there are some concentrations in provision of undergraduate studies. For example, Greece provides more undergraduate degrees to professors than the whole continents of South America or Africa. Moreover, we show that most of the foreign-educated professors get their undergraduate education from high-income countries. In the second part, we find the ratio of foreign-educated professors by the type of the university and the academic field in which they currently work. We show that the ratio of foreign-educated academics does not vary with public ownership of the university or the ranking of the university. However, the ratio of foreign-educated professors varies significantly among academic fields.

Introduction

This study collects the educational backgrounds of a large number of academics to understand the role of foreign education in academics training in the United States. We handpick the data from the top 48 universities in the United States. We get the educational backgrounds of all full professors who work in 16 academic fields related to the natural sciences, the social sciences, engineering and humanities. In all, the education backgrounds of 14310 full professors is obtained.

There are two parts in the analysis. In the first part, we analyze the source countries from where the professors get their education. It is examined whether the students who take their education from certain countries are more likely to become elite academics. Moreover, the paper investigates whether the poorer countries are more likely to provide education to elite academics. It also examines the source geographical regions that provide education to elite academics.

In the second part, we analyze the institutions in which the professors currently work. The paper studies whether the foreign-educated professors more likely to work in public universities. The ratio of foreign-educated professors in higher and lower ranked universities is also analyzed. Moreover, we find the academic fields in which foreign-educated academics are more likely to work.

The brain drain is defined as the loss of skilled labor because of the emigration from the country. Bhagwati and Hamada (1974) show that the brain drain is associated with a significant level of output loss if skilled and unskilled labor are not substitutes.

It is observed that most of the prestigious universities are concentrated in few countries that can attract highly skilled academics. Therefore, brain drain is an important issue in the academic world. The brain drain of academics has already been analyzed in previous studies. Ioannidis (2004) and Stephan and Levin (2001) are closely related to the present paper because they also analyze the brain drain of academics in a large scale by spanning many academic fields. Ioannidis (2004) collects the birth origins of 1523 highly-cited researchers from all over the world. The author finds that the ratio of foreign-born academics depends on the host country and the academic field. Stephan and Levin (2001) analyze the birth origins and educational backgrounds of 4500 science and engineering researchers from the United States who are National Academy members or have other qualifications such as being authors of highly cited papers. They find that the ratio of foreign-educated elite academics is increasing through time.

Another closely related paper to our study is Wang, Mao, Wang, Peng, and Hou (2013). They also focus on the academics attracted to the top US universities. However they constrain their study only to academics of Chinese origin. They find that the ratio of Chinese academics is highest in the medical field and the number of Chinese academics is highest at Ohio State University.

Hunter, Oswald, and Charlton (2009) analyze the birth and educational backgrounds of 158 the most-cited physicists. They show that the United States has become a very strong magnet for physicists. Although only 29.7 percent of their sample are born in the United States, 67.1 percent currently works in the United States.

Laudel, 2003, Laudel, 2005 follows 131 biomedical researchers who participate on a regular yearly basis in the prestigious Gordon conferences. Elite academics are highly mobile in every stage of their career. Moreover, academics are found to be attracted to the United States at different stages of their career.

An alternative method to measure the extent of brain drain is to use information from publications. Basu (2013) searches the Indian names in the Web of Science and compares the productivities of Indian researchers who work in India to those Indian researchers who work abroad. The Indians abroad are found to be more productive and the gap is increasing through time. Furukawa, Shirakawa, and Okuwada (2013) find the educational backgrounds of more than 7000 scientists from the biographical notes in the journals from the computer vision, robotics and electron devices fields. They find that highly-ranked graduate schools attract students from all around the world. Woolley, Turpin, Marceau, and Hill (2008) make a survey on East Asian scientists by using the e-mails in the contact information in articles taken from SCI. They find that many of the East Asian researchers get their graduate and post graduate training from Europe and North America

The prevalence of foreign-born academics is not surprising because there is a high stay rate of PhD students in the United States. The studies that use the Survey of Earned Doctorates show the extent of the stay rates. Johnson and Regets (1998) state that more than half of the PhD graduates from Science and Engineering programs intend to stay in the United States. Bound Turner, and Walsh (2009) show that there is a steep upward trend of the number of PhD graduates who have foreign undergraduate degrees. Finn (2010) and Kim, Bankart, and Isdell (2011) show that the stay rate of the foreign-origin PhD students increases with time.

The brain drain studies are not confined to academics. Docquier and Marfouk (2006) use OECD and US Census data to find the number of college graduates who migrate to OECD countries. Docquier, Lohest, and Marfouk (2007) use the same data and find that small, poor and politically unstable countries are more likely to lose their educated labor force to OECD countries.

Mullan (2005) studies the source countries of all foreign-educated medical doctors who have emigrated to Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and the United States. India is found to be one of the top providers of medical doctors to all these countries.

Gibson and McKenzie (2011) analyze the brain drain of a thousand people from Tonga, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand who have been successful in high school by participating in scientific olympiads or being top performers in college admissions exams. They find that those who attain PhDs are less likely return to their country.

The treatment of foreign-educated professors in the United States as a brain-drain indicator is limited for two main reasons. First, pre-tertiary backgrounds of the professors are not collected because of data availability issues. Stephan and Levin (2001) and Hunter et al. (2009) show that the ratio of foreign-born academics is significantly different than the ratio of foreign-educated academics. This is not surprising as Marginson and van der Wende (2007) show that more than ten percent of the tertiary students in Australia, Germany and United Kingdom are foreign born. Some students may go to these countries for education and use their education as a stepping stone to become academics in the United States. Paul (2011) shows that the stepping-stone migration is prevalent and has many routes.

Second, this study is confined to universities in the United States for reasons that we describe in the data section. Therefore, we miss the brain gain of the other countries from the United States. The brain gain is the opposite of the brain drain and is defined as the benefit of a country from skilled labor migration. We do not cover any academics who are educated in the United States but become elite academics in other countries. In other words, our measure is unidirectional and only specifies the loss of the foreign countries.

There can be a comparable amount of brain drain and brain gain for a particular country. Then, the term “brain circulation” is used for these countries. For example, Bekhradnia and Sastry (2005) show that there is a comparable number of academics moving in and out of the United Kingdom.

Canibano and Woolley (2015) examine the rich brain drain and brain gain literature that starts around the 1960′s. There are many paths of brain drain and brain gain. The net brain drain depends on the assumptions of the studies. They classify the literature into the optimistic and pessimistic categories where the former studies find a more equalitarian distribution of benefits of skilled labor mobility.

There are brain gain studies that find that the researchers who return to their source countries gain by their increased productivity partly by sustaining their ties of collaboration in the host countries. Jonkers and Tijssen (2008) and Velema (2012) show this type of brain gain for Chinese-returned and Mexican-returned researchers respectively.

Part of the brain gain is detected in the human capital investment behavior of the agents. Beine, Docquier, and Rapoport (2001) note that there is an additional benefit of going abroad for the countries which send their skilled labor abroad. This additional benefit motivates parents to invest more in their children’s education. Therefore, the source countries may end up having a higher stock of high-skilled workers even after sending a considerable amount of their skilled labor abroad.

Although we do not consider the brain gain directly, we think that the number of foreign-educated professors might lead to the potential for reverse brain drain for some countries. Marginson and van der Wende (2007) show that Turkey, Chile and India are among the countries where the ratio of foreign undergraduate students are below one percent. Therefore, most of the students who are educated in these countries are actually born and raised there. Monteleone and Torrisi (2012) find in their survey that one of the major reasons for reverse brain drain is family considerations. Therefore, many professors have the potential to return to the country where they get their undergraduate degrees if their families also reside in that country. We see that this is happening in Turkey. Many professors from top Turkish private universities were previously at elite US institutions. They are mostly Turkish origin and many of them have their undergraduate degrees from Turkey.

Dill and Soo (2005) show that many of the global rankings of universities include the success of the graduates from these universities as one of their criteria. The number of professors who get their tertiary education in one country but work in elite institutions in the United States would partly demonstrate the success of the tertiary institutions in that country. Consequently, the findings of the present study help to evaluate the success of the tertiary institutions in the world.

The analysis of this paper answers a couple of important questions that are unexplored in the literature. For example, we see whether the ratio of foreign-educated professors change as the ranking of the university increases. In other words, we compute the share of professors with foreign undergraduate degrees and see whether the share increases with the prestige of the university.

Borjas (2004) shows that the foreign students crowd out native students in prestigious US graduate programs. We study whether the students who have foreign undergraduate degrees are as succesful as their domestic counterparts who have attended the same US grad school. In other words, we see whether the students who crowd out natives would benefit the United States by becoming academics at the very best US universities.

Section snippets

Data

We collect data from 48 US universities that are top 100 in the Shanghai Rankings. The only three US universities that are in top 100 excluded are specialized in life and/or medical sciences.

Our interest is confined to the United States because of data-availability issues. Professors in most other countries are not as willing to expose their background as professors in the United States. We also would have language difficulty for the professors in non-English speaking countries because it is

The percentage of foreign-educated professors in the United States

We compute the ratio of foreign-educated professors by dividing the number of foreign-educated professors to the number of all professors. It is found that 34.5 percent of the professors have foreign undergraduate degrees whereas only 12.5 percent of the professors have foreign PhD degrees.

The high ratio of foreign undergraduate degree holders show us the importance of foreign education in academics training in the United States. More than 1 in 3 professors get their undergraduate degrees

Source countries that provide undergraduate education to elite academics

In this section, we analyze the source countries that provide education to elite academics. Since there are many more academics who get their undergraduate degrees from non-US universities than those who get their PhD’s from non-US universities, we have a richer data-set about the source countries at the undergraduate level. Therefore, we confine our analysis to undergraduate education in order to work with a richer data-set about the source countries.

Table 1 lists all of the 45 countries that

The analysis of foreign-educated professors by the type of institutions in which they currently work

In this section, we analyze the ratio of foreign-educated professors by the type of the institution in which they currently work. We investigate whether public ownership, ranking and academic field of the institutions matter for the ratio of foreign-educated professors.

We find that the ratio of foreign-educated professors in private universities is slighlty less than the ratio in public universities. 33.7 percent of the professors have foreign undergraduate degrees in private universities but

Conclusion

The role of foreign education is important for training academics in the prestigious universities in the United States. We find that one in three professors get their undergraduate degrees abroad and one in eight professors get their PhD degrees abroad in such universities.

The analysis exploits the richer set of source countries by focusing on foreign undergraduate education. There are 45 countries which provide undergraduate education to at least 10 professors in our data. It is not surprising

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Shourjo Chakravorty for his valuable comments. I also thank the many professors who replied kindly to my e-mails that inquired their educational backgrounds.

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