International students should be enticed to stay after graduation

President Barack Obama’s new, generous NASA budget recently drew praise from none other than “Avatar” director James Cameron, who worried that national budget woes would see space exploration “fall off the priority list.”

Beneath this triumph for NASA, though, lies the tragedy it sought to rectify: Science and engineering have been falling off the national priority list for decades. At present, the annual growth in research and developement expenditures of some Asian countries is up to four times that of the U.S.

Signs of our national priorities can be found in most south campus classrooms, home to UCLA’s highest concentration of international students.

Signs of our national priorities can be found at UCLA in, say, the graduate division of electrical engineering, where international students constitute 51 percent of the class. Compare this to the graduate division of English, where a mere 1 percent of students are foreigners.

It would seem logical that if U.S. universities are going to train these students, there should be a proportionate effort to ensure that they’re employed here and welcomed into domestic engineering and science, if possible, permanently.

In the past, foreign students were enticed to study in the U.S. by the prestige of the nation’s universities, and convinced to stay because of living conditions and the job market. The perception of U.S. higher education as superior remains intact, but the recession has hit the U.S. harder than, for instance, China, so for international students we’re becoming little more than Hotel Academia. America is still a good place to study before returning home to greener job pastures.

A recent Duke University study found that a majority of Chinese students believe their home country offers better employment opportunities than the U.S. The same students expressed worries about the difficulty of obtaining a work visa here. That means we’re essentially placing red tape around jobs that weren’t all that attractive to these students in the first place.

Even when the jobs are particularly enticing, certain industries are engaged primarily in classified government work, significantly draining an international graduate’s pool of careers.

“Many companies, aerospace companies for instance, do not hire people who are not citizens,” said Vijay Dhir, dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. “So they get shut out from the aerospace companies.”

When foreign scientists are turned away, though, some of these security barriers need to be removed. A work visa and eventual citizenship might be difficult to obtain, but the offer of a high-paying position at Boeing or Lockheed Martin would no doubt make the hurdles worth jumping.

To bring these jobs within the grasp of international students, the federal government should loosen its hand in granting work visas to those in the process of obtaining advanced degrees. Foreigners have no qualms with living in the U.S. for the four or more years of their university education. This time is paramount in making long-term employment and residence seem palatable.

Legal barriers and the economy aside, commitments to family and friends are what ultimately send international students home after they’ve graduated, said Tina Nguyen, a coordinator at the Dashew Center for International Students and Scholars.

While UCLA can’t eliminate the opportunities awaiting its international students in their home countries, it does have the power to produce the kind of friendships and community involvement that might decide whether a degree holder stays here or goes overseas.

One problem is that most international students are either transfers or graduate students, and neither of these groups are normally subject to the school spirit indoctrination of the freshman dorms. While dorm cliques might not convince a person to move permanently to the U.S., they would at least offer an alternative to insulation within one’s own group of countrymen and countrywomen.

To tempt international students into the dorms, the university might consider lowering housing fees. Apartments make isolation all too easy.

An emphasis on socializing with domestic students is especially important for engineering majors. Although the engineer as an antisocial nerd is a stereotype, it’s nudged somewhat closer to validity by the long hours of study endemic to the field. This deficit of communication is compounded for international students because the fields of engineering and science are not as conducive as the humanities, for instance, to a mastery of the English language.

The university does hold mixer-type events to bring international and domestic students together, but a true promotion of integration should be one that convinces foreigners of the worth of a personal investment in UCLA and the country as a whole. To come to another nation, learn its language and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars there to study and then leave is an opportunity squandered.

E-mail Dosaj at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].