Discouraged by the economic downturn in the United States and buoyed by

Discouraged by the economic downturn in the United States and buoyed by the promise of a continuing dynamic work situation in India, about 74 percent of Indian students surveyed recently across America said they plan to return home. A small percent in this group has already returned. In contrast, 8 percent of respondents said they preferred not to go back, with half of them indicating they would take any job they could to avoid returning. Another 16 percent were looking for the best job, irrespective of location.

In the survey conducted last fall, 53 percent said they would like to work in America for two or three years before returning home.

The study – the first of its kind – conducted by Rutgers University, Pennsylvania State University and India’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences surveyed nearly 1,000 Indians out of about 100,000 who are either pursuing or have completed graduate study in the United States.

It comes out at a time, its authors point out, when India’s parliament is planning to debate several landmark proposals for higher education reforms, including the foreign universities bill.

The most significant reasons cited for wanting to return to India are family and a desire to give back to the country. Corruption, red tape and the academic work environment were the strongest deterrents to returning.

“The students were not so much worried about the political situation or the threat of Naxalites [militant Communist groups operating in different parts of India] in some parts of the country,” said B. Venkatesh Kumar, co-author of the study and a professor at TISS, Mumbai. Kumar, a visiting Penn State professor as a Humphrey Fellow, added India has a plenty of resilience to overcome political dangers and threats. “What weighs most on the minds of the students is if the red tape can be significantly reduced and an excellent work environment are created,” he said.

Another author of the study mirrored his thoughts. “The results are surprising and encouraging for Indian universities,” David Finegold, dean, Rutgers’s School of Management and Labor Relations, was quoted as saying. “The economic growth and the excitement of challenges in India surely have to do a lot with these decisions. We had expected that more students would lean heavily toward remaining in the U.S. But our results suggest many young academics would be interested in pursuing a faculty career in India, if policymakers can address some of the key issues facing the Indian higher education system.”

Students who have been coming to America in the last 10 years are very different from those who came 20 or 30 years ago, he said; they are not running away from India – they come from a new India which has problems and yet is also full of promise.

Kumar said the survey is an ongoing project. “We want to contact the same students a year from now or even a year later, and find out if they have changed their positions,” he said. “We are also working on a survey in India looking at the students who have returned from America and how they are working in the new environment and if some are planning to go back to America.”

Pointing out that the survey would encourage India’s policymakers, Kumar said the country needs to recruit at least a million new faculty members for its colleges and universities if it is to meet the government’s goal of making higher education available to 20 percent of young people by 2020.

“Perhaps the biggest constraint on being able to meet these ambitious growth targets while improving, rather than diminishing, quality is the availability of a sufficient supply of well-qualified faculty members with advanced degrees,” the study noted. “India already has one of the worst faculty-to-student ratios of any nation: At 26:1, it is roughly twice the ratio of China. And the number of faculty has been growing at less than half the rate of student numbers. Faculty shortages at universities and colleges are alarming and growing, as roughly half of faculty positions are going unfilled. If India is simply to maintain its current faculty-student ratio it will need to add over a million net new faculty members to a current base of roughly 600,000. And this does not include replacing those retiring or leaving the higher education system.”

Kumar said the study suggests concrete steps the Indian government “can take to address the large and chronic shortages of qualified faculty in India.” The Web-based survey was posted online November 1, 2010 to January 17.

“We sent e-mail invitations to approximately 2,500 individuals,” the authors of the study, including Anne-Laure Winkler, a doctoral student at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, write, “and alumni organizations at U.S. public and private research universities, using a snowball method that encouraged them to share the survey in their personal networks. Approximately one thousand (998) current or recent Indian students completed the survey.”

Two-thirds of those surveyed were graduate students – 40 percent master’s and 26 percent PhD – with another 8 percent completing a post-doc. Another 17 percent had entered the U.S. work force after completing their degrees, while 3 percent had returned to India. Nearly three-quarters of the sample was male and 85 percent were under the age of 30.

“There is ample evidence that individuals who have the misfortune to enter the job market during deep recessions suffer negative consequences for the rest of their careers,” the authors asserted. “This is magnified today in U.S. HE [higher education], where individuals who have invested five or more years of their lives to complete PhDs and post-docs are finding themselves competing with many graduates from the prior two years who weren’t able to locate jobs. And the supply of openings, while improved this year, is still limited by the budget cuts occurring in public universities across the United States.’

The study also sought to find out what had brought the Indian students to America. Cutting-edge research, better options after graduation, and a desire to emigrate to the United States varied significantly by field of study, the report showed.

“Those pursuing a natural science degree found cutting-edge research most important (62 percent), while business and law students rated better options after graduation (43 percent) and desire to emigrate to the U.S. (12 percent) as more important than students in other fields.”

A key question the survey asked was: What types of jobs in India are most attractive?

“Graduates are most interested in returning to India for jobs in the private sector, either to work for corporations or to start their own companies,” the study said. “Three-quarters or more of respondents are interested in corporate jobs or entrepreneurship opportunities in India, and HE opportunities that offer the chance to do research are also very attractive. In contrast, teaching-only positions, which historically have constituted most of India’s HE sector, are not as attractive to the majority of respondents. More worryingly from the perspective of strengthening the Indian state, far fewer individuals are interested in returning to India to pursue careers in the public sector or politics. The results differ substantially based on the respondent’s level of qualifications. While master’s students are attracted to private-sector jobs in India, the vast majority of PhDs and post docs are most interested in pursuing positions that combine teaching and research in an Indian university (79 percent and 81 percent respectively) or research-only careers (64 percent and 76 percent).”

By Hao Hsieh, World Journal, 16 March 2011. Translated from Chinese by Connie Yik Kong.