10-15 years ago my foreign grad students all wanted to stay. Only question was how.
There was always a big crowd who found the process of staying in the US painful, random, humiliating, and sometimes even downright abusive, so they went home.
What has really changed is China. That's what this paper shows too. Many of the Chinese students want go back home.
10-15 years ago when I would talk to grad students from China most wanted freedom and democracy. Now most tell me about how the Western system has failed and how a centralized government is more efficient.
Between making it harder to stay, China changing the narrative on dictatorships, and the West doing a horrific job in the last decade on pretty much every front, yeah, we're going to see a lot of folks move back.
Even 10 years they wanted to stay. I was at Microsoft China at the time, and management would complain about Google or Facebook in CA still getting the best prospects from Qinghua/PKU. It wasn't about freedom or democracy at all, they just wanted big paychecks without the 996.
Today it is an easier case to stay, although 996 is still a thing. Still, if you can make your FU money by age 35 (and it still has to be by age 35 according to a relative), you have it set.
There was no "change of narrative", the West just stopped delivering, similar to what happened to the Soviet system starting with the 1970s (and which ended the way it did by the early 1990s).
10-15 years ago my foreign grad students all wanted to stay. Only question was how.
There was always a big crowd who found the process of staying in the US painful, random, humiliating, and sometimes even downright abusive, so they went home.
What has really changed is China. That's what this paper shows too. Many of the Chinese students want go back home.
10-15 years ago when I would talk to grad students from China most wanted freedom and democracy. Now most tell me about how the Western system has failed and how a centralized government is more efficient.
Between making it harder to stay, China changing the narrative on dictatorships, and the West doing a horrific job in the last decade on pretty much every front, yeah, we're going to see a lot of folks move back.
Note: This is at a top-tier US university.