[LINK] "Iran's Brain Drain Is the West's Gain"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Golnar Motevalli writes about the huge scale of Iran's brain drain. Having the quoted proportions of trained professionals leave the country will kneecap the country's economic future rather thoroughly.

Drawing on a cigarette in his flat in central Tehran, Araz Alipour can count on one hand the number of friends who stayed in Iran after college. “Easily 90 percent of them have gone overseas,” the 29-year-old software developer says, reflecting on the flight of many of the nation’s science and engineering students. “Of my 45 university classmates, maybe five remain.”

Tens of thousands of Iranians have left the country of 77 million in recent years, largely for Europe and North America, in search of jobs and higher salaries. During the past two years, at least 40 percent of top-performing students with undergraduate degrees in science and engineering left the country to pursue advanced degrees, according to Iran’s National Elites Foundation, a government-run organization that supports academically gifted and high-achieving students. “Mostly they want to go to Canada, Australia, Germany, or Sweden,” says Bahram Yousefi, 26, a translator who works with college students on their graduate school applications. “There’s no job security, no life security here,” he says.

Nine months after taking office, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is under pressure to follow through on campaign promises to slow the brain drain that contributes to the country’s economic woes. From 2009-13, net emigration from Iran was 300,000, according to the World Bank. The number of Iranians studying in the U.S. increased 25 percent, to more than 8,700, in the 2012-13 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education. Many won’t return. According to a 2012 survey by the Arlington, Va.-based National Science Foundation, 89 percent of Iranian doctoral students remain in the U.S. after graduation—equal to the Chinese and the highest percentage of nationalities surveyed.

Unemployment among Iran’s 15- to 29-year-olds is about 26 percent, twice the national average, though Rouhani has pledged to increase jobs and raise salaries. While there’s no official data, graduates who recently started work in Iran say they earn no more than $500 a month. “No matter how good you are, you’re never going to earn $3,000 a month, a starting salary for Iranians in Canada or the U.S.,” says Mohammad, a postdoctoral student of communications in Ireland (he asked that his surname and the name of his college not be published).