Walking on the Wilde side...

On the Brain Drain Scourge...

The Global Race for Graduate Jobs is Abating 

brain drain

noun [S]    

› the situation in which large numbers of educated and very skilled people leave their own country to live and work in another one where pay and conditions are better:

(Definition of brain drain noun from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

Brain drain could come back to haunt some European economies. 

A 2013 survey of MBA (master of business administration) and other graduate business students by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) found that 23% of Europeans planned to seek jobs outside the continent, up from 15% in 2010. Even more undergraduates in several European countries hoped to work abroad: 42% of those surveyed in France; 40% in Italy; 37% in Spain; 30% in the UK; and 30% in Switzerland, according to Universum, a research and consulting firm.

European business schools are going all out to connect their globetrotting students with recruiters from other regions. Spain’s IESE Business School recently partnered with several other major European schools for career fairs in New York, London and Barcelona to attract recruiters from the US, Asia and Latin America.

“Career services departments have historically competed, but we recognised that if several top schools collaborated, we could give recruiters a critical mass of students,” said Fiona Sandford, executive director for careers and global business at London Business School, which hosted the Asian recruiting event last month.

She said that in the past, about two-thirds of the school’s MBA graduates would normally take jobs in the UK, but for the first time in 2012, more than half started their careers in other countries. Similarly, only 20% of IESE’s full-time MBA graduates landed jobs in Spain in 2013, down from more than one-third of the class before the 2008 financial crisis.

Brain drain

That brain drain could come back to haunt some European economies when fortunes improve and they need seasoned talent. “The real risk is that the best talent is leaving,” said Melissa Bailey, president for the Americas at Universum.

As fast-growing developing nations create more jobs, Universum found that undergraduates from China, Russia, India, Mexico and Brazil are now less likely than European students to look beyond their homeland for jobs. GMAC’s 2013 study showed a similar trend for graduate business students: 79% from the Asia/Pacific Islands region planned to work there, up from 73% in 2010.

While more young Americans say they want some international work experience, they are still far less inclined than most other nationalities to venture abroad on a more permanent basis. In Universum’s study of undergraduates, only 16% indicated they would like to begin their careers overseas, while GMAC sees little change in its study, with 97% of US graduate business students seeking jobs at home.

“Many students will say they have an interest in working abroad, but whether they go after it is another story,” said Wendy Tsung, associate dean for MBA career services at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in Atlanta. “Some people get caught up in family life, and some students fall in love with Atlanta.”

But Tsung does see some signs of change: For the first time, a few of Goizueta’s American students will be joining their international classmates on the school’s third annual recruiting trip to Asia this month.

 Some officials at universities in the US said that despite their awareness of global issues, many American students still aren’t confident about fitting into another culture. Others believe more Americans would explore job possibilities abroad, but cannot afford to accept lower salaries offered in some foreign countries because they’re saddled with so much student debt. Last year’s US college graduates had average student debt of $29,400, according to a new report from the Project on Student Debt at the nonprofit Institute for College Access & Success.

Many US students also must struggle to compete with European and Asian counterparts who bring a stronger international sensibility and better language skills to the workplace.

But there are exceptions. Tyler Babcock, a 26-year-old MBA student at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business in Washington, DC, boasts both educational and work experience in China. He also was involved in establishing a non-profit organisation to encourage volunteering in China.

“When I was abroad, I felt like I was having a greater impact than I could in the US, while also learning a lot of new things,” said Babcock, who is among the 17% of US students in Georgetown’s MBA class of 2015 who list a non-U.S. location as their first or second employment choice. That’s up from 6% for the class of 2010.

Last month, Babcock, who aims to return to China, networked with recruiters at an annual global careers conference at Georgetown that was co-sponsored with Spain’s ESADE Business School. “I feel there are a lot more opportunities abroad, and you really have to consider a global career because business has gone global,” he said. “I try not to base my career decision on monetary concerns because I feel that as Asia develops, I can still make a good wage.”

On some of the reasons why the economic crisis is commodifying creative writing

Hemingway on Not Writing for Free and How to Run a First-Rate Publication

by Maria Popova

Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.

Recent discussions of why writing for free commodifies creative work reminded me of an old letter Ernest Hemingway sent to his friends Ernest Walsh and Ethel Moorhead when they were about to launch This Quarter — the influential experimental Paris-based literary journal that would go on to publish work by such greats as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Kay Boyle, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, Rainer Maria Rilke, Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Hemingway himself over the course of its run between 1925 and 1932.

Dated January 7, 1925 and found in The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2, 1923–1925(public library) — the impressive sequel to the first volume, which also gave us young Papa’s thoughts on how New York can drive you to insanity — the letter rings with remarkable prescience in today’s publishing microcosm where major publications expect writers to work for free in exchange for “exposure.” The result, unsurprisingly, is mediocre writing at best — not because good writing is motivated by money, but because nothing demotivates a writer more than feeling like her writing is vacant filler for pages meant not to delight or enrich the reader but to sell advertising.

Hemingway counsels Walsh and Moorhead:

One of the most important things I believe is to get the very best work that people are doing so you do not make the mistake the Double Dealer and such magazine made of printing 2nd rate stuff by 1st rate writers.

I see by your prospectus that you are paying for [manuscripts] on acceptance and think that is the absolute secret of getting the first rate stuff. It is not a question of competing with the big money advertizing magazines but of giving the artist a definite return for his work. For his best work can never get into the purely commercially run magazines anyway but he will always hold on to it hoping to get something for it and will only give away stuff that has no value to any magazine or review.

Before closing the letter, he adds a timeless admonition that, despite his own meta-violation, stands all the timelier in today’s age of rapid-fire publishing:

And watch proof reading and typography — there is nothing can spoil a persons appreciation of good stuff like typographical errors.

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway is full of such evergreen wisdom from one of the most celebrated writers in modern history. Complement it with Hemingway on how to become a good writer and his pithy Nobel Prize acceptance speech, then revisit the collected advice of great writers.