The Effect of Talent Recruitment Programs on the Reverse Brain Drain Trend

Abstract

As the coronavirus outbreak is growing, international students studying in the U.S. are facing huge obstacles, and more than ever before of they come back to their home countries after they graduate in May 2020 (Josh Moody, 2020). Such returning home trend is accompanied by the recent years’ emerging reverse brain drain trend all over the world and is promoted by governments’ talent recruitment programs. Thus, this paper studies the relationship between talent recruitment incentives and international graduate students’ choice of leaving the U.S. after they graduate. Plus, whether students’ awareness of such programs affects their choices.Additionally, China is used as a case study. Two main findings of this paper are: 1) only for F-1 students, there is a statistically significant relationship between talent recruitment incentives and students’ decision to stay in America after they graduate, and 2) for F-1 students, there is no proved statistically significant relationship between the awareness of home countries’ incentives and their decisions of staying in the U.S. after graduation; while for J-1 students, there is a weak statistically significant relationship between awareness of the programs and their staying decisions. Moreover, for Chinese students only, awareness of home countries’ policy incentives doesn’t have a significant effect on their stay.