They Constitute 40% of Young Science Professors : Many Foreign Students Staying in U.S. to Teach

From their campus atop a cliff in Hoboken, N. J., the 593 foreign students at Stevens Institute of Technology have a grandstand view of the New York City skyline, particularly the skyscrapers of the financial district.

To some of them it is a vision of the Promised Land--and many are tempted to stay in this country to start their careers.

Currently, 356,200 students from other countries are enrolled at more than 2,000 colleges and universities across America, and perhaps 20% of them will, in fact, stay on.

“Our best estimate is that in recent years, only 80% to 85% of foreign students in the United States returned home,” Jack Reichard, vice president of the Washington-based National Assn. for Foreign Student Affairs, said.

Moreover, 50% to 60% of foreign science and engineering students--whose expertise would be vital to their countries as well as the United States--decide to stay, a National Science Foundation study found.

Foreign Professors

About 40% of foreign Ph.D.s in science and engineering seek jobs in the United States and about 40% of American university science and engineering faculty members under age 35 are now foreign nationals, according to the National Academy of Sciences.

Whether these young intellectuals of the world should stay on to make their careers in America or return home is a question in growing contention. Their decisions to stay or to go could have considerable impact on world affairs.

Leon Febres Cordero, who earned a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Stevens in 1953, completed a four-year term as president of Ecuador last August.

Niklos Nemeth, an economist who took postgraduate training at Harvard University, in November was chosen to be prime minister of Hungary.

Benazir Bhutto, who has a BA from Radcliffe College, became prime minister of Pakistan. Elected in December, she is the first woman to head a Muslim government.

In dozens of other nations of every political persuasion, graduates of American universities have occupied positions of influence and power in politics, industry and other fields.

Some Success Stories

Foreign students who decided to stay on in the United States have been no less successful, however.

Shanghai-born An Wang, sent to study physics at Harvard by President Chiang Kai-shek, stayed on in the United States to found Wang Laboratories, a major scientific company, and to make a fortune that Forbes magazine estimated at $365 million.

The average foreign university student attends courses for about 3 1/2 years, Reichard said in a telephone interview, so it may be estimated, with about 350,000 foreign students in the country, that approximately 100,000 university-level students enter the country each year.

According to U. S immigration figures, about 20,000 of these young people, who are among the brightest of the world’s youth, trade in their student visas for immigration cards.

The students come from 186 countries and territories. Two-thirds of them are from developing nations where, in many cases, a depressing paradox awaits their return home: There is a desperate need for their knowledge, but jobs are scarce and poorly paid even at the advanced levels they have achieved.

So the temptation to remain in the United States is strong.

Shortage of Scientists

They also have the encouragement of some American business and academic leaders who are acutely aware of a shortage of American-born science students, in particular.

According to the Council on Competitiveness, the United States could face a shortfall of 500,000 American-born scientists and engineers by the year 2010, due to retirements and the decline in the number of Americans choosing those fields.

The council, composed of 151 chief executives of industry, labor and higher education, also noted in a report last July that already, 1,300 to 1,800 engineering positions are vacant at American universities.

“How can we replenish these faculty positions?” asked Stevens President Harold J. Raveche. “It takes 10,000 high school students expressing an interest in a science or engineering major to assure us of 20 doctorates.”

“We should talk about our education deficit rather than about our budget deficit,” said Kenneth Wilson, 1982 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics. “We need math and science teachers,” he said during a forum on U.S. competitiveness at Stevens.

The academic gap increasingly is being filled by professors from other countries, particularly India, Japan and other Asian nations.

About 60% of foreign students are in engineering, mathematics, computer sciences, physical and life sciences or management-related fields, according to the New York-based Institute of International Education, which administers international scholarship programs and places thousands of foreign students in U. S. schools.

“An important policy need is to encourage developing-country nationals to return home. Their U. S. education should represent a brain gain, not a drain,” said the institute’s chairman, Charles H. Percy, the former U.S. senator from Illinois.

Peter Sprague, chairman of the board of National Semiconductor Corp. disagreed. He said that “the American university system is unmatched in the world, and the United States is a mecca for foreign students.

“About half our science and engineering graduate students are foreigners. We should give them green cards,” to admit them as immigrants, Sprague said at the Stevens forum.