ABSTRACTMIGRATION AND MOTIVATION: AN ANALYSIS OF MOTIVATION FOR RETURN TO COUNTRY OF ORIGIN AMONG FOREIGN-TRAINED CHINESE PHDSByJohn William Medendorp Brain drain has been a much studied phenomenon. Its fundamental dynamic is the departure of highly talented individuals from developing economies for more developed economies. The assumption is that the primary motivation for brain drain is the pursuit of higher earnings. The effects of brain drain are more contested. Some contend that the effects are entirely negative, depriving developing countries of human capital and realized as well as unrealized income. Others argue that the effects are mixed, with substitutionary effects in educational systems in developing countries caused by the departure of the highly talented and the prospect of earnings-enhancing emigration. This position, called brain gain, claims that the departure of the highly talented actually incentivizes education and therefore more than makes up for the loss of the highly talented. Others point to the beneficial effects of diaspora communities, such as remittances and foreign direct investment in country of origin due to the presence of expatriates in the diaspora. Empirical evidence is mixed, showing strong negative effects for small countries but some positive and some negative effects for larger countries. This study is focused on the effects of brain drain on higher education systems by examining the motivation for return among foreign trained PhDs. Brain drain affects the higher education sector disproportionately because it consists in its majority of the highly skilled. The effects of brain drain on higher education systems can be devastating. For that reason, the retention of the highly skilled in higher education systems becomes an important imperative for higher education systems, especially in developing countries. There has been a significant body of research devoted to the question of why the highly talented leave their countries of origin – economic research, psychological research, and sociological research. There is relatively little research, however, on the reasons why the highly skilled return to their countries of origin. There is even less research on why scholars return to academic systems in their country of origin. This study seeks to fill that gap. This is a qualitative study that uses some quantitative methods in order to model the results. The qualitative portion is based on 36 in-depth, coded interviews with returned scholars working within the higher education system in the People’s Republic of China. These 36 coded interviews rendered key insights into the reasons for return among these 36 returned scholars. I found that professional factors were the primary motivation, but nuanced by different values placed on personal factors, institutional factors, and sociological factors. I triangulated the results of this coding process by doing word count analysis, word tree analysis, and word cloud analysis. In the quantitative modeling of the data, I regressed several demographic variables against the four factors described above – professional, personal, institutional, and sociocultural – using a one-way ANOVA, to find whether there was significant variance in the influence of these four factors among different demographic groups. I found that there were several significant differences among the groups. The results of these two analyses – the qualitative and the quantitative – shows that the return decision is the result of an individualized value matrix that is used to evaluate the conditions in country of origin before making the decision to return. Depending on the weight assigned to each value, the decision to return, or not to return, is made. Using the results of the qualitative and quantitative portions of the dissertation, I model the findings in a microeconomic function describing the way in which the decision for return is made.
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