Laughing and Crying
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007Thomas Friedman was the commencement speaker at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last weekend. In his May 23, 2007 New York Times column Laughing and Crying (subscription required), he laments the forced exodus of foreign Ph.D.s who cannot stay in the U.S. to work. Instead they will be innovating overseas, competing with the few U.S. born kids who choose engineering as a job. (It’s a job, not a career).
I think Friedman overstates the problem. How bad could it really be for highly educated, motivated scientists and engineers to go back to their countries of origin. When I was a graduate student in Nuclear Engineering at RPI, my fellow students were from Brazil, Iran, Pakistan and South Korea. It didn’t turn out so bad, did it? After all, Brazil gave up its atomic weapons program for sugar cane, Pakistan is our ally in the war on terror and Iran doesn’t have the bomb yet. I bet the White House wishes that S. Korea had the bomb, so we could redeploy our soldiers to Iraq.
