A well-dressed student slides his fork into a tender steak and cautiously moves a piece towards his mouth. Other members of the table laugh heartily at the table head’s quips, offering commentary of their own to impress the distinguished table companions.
This is no final club affair. The setting? A typical recruiting luncheon for Harvard undergrads, given by leading financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers.
Harvard students are well-known for flocking to investment banking and consulting firms following graduation, and it’s hard to turn down companies that throw such lavish events for students. Originally hailing from all 50 states and dozens of foreign countries, graduates often leave Harvard to concentrate in the financial centers of New York City and London rather than returning to their places of origin. The phenomenon is called “brain drain”; disadvantaged regions send their brightest students away to schools like Harvard to be educated, hoping that they will return with the solutions to the problems facing their homelands. But many choose instead to apply for work visas in the United States and reap the benefits of the lucrative careers that their Harvard degrees make accessible.
But despite the spotlight that seems constantly trained on financial careers and the issue of brain drain, Harvard graduates are not all aspiring to be i-bankers for i-banking’s sake. A corresponding “brain gain” trend is gaining popularity. For some students, this means completing the cycle in the most direct fashion—leaving Cambridge to apply their education in their respective cities, states, or countries. But many other students, both American and not, are exploring other ways to plug the drain.
GOING HOME WITH A MISSION
Mariam O. Fofana ’06, a Quincy House tutor and researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, is a member of the brain gain movement in its most classic sense. Originally from the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, she attended high school in Minnesota and concentrated in Biology at Harvard. Côte d’Ivoire’s Ministry of Technical Education and Professional Training provides scholarships to top Ivorian students like Fofana studying abroad, lightening the burden of the expensive
tuition at elite universities in hopes that those students will later return —or at least contribute—to their native country.
“It wasn’t necessarily an incentive in and of itself, because I already knew I was planning on participating in the development of Côte d’Ivoire,” says Fofana. “Still, the scholarship reminds you of your gratitude for Côte d’Ivoire in a concrete form.”
In the future, Fofana plans to attend medical school and graduate school and then work in public health research, focusing on infectious diseases.
“Even though I doubt my research will be based in Côte d’Ivoire, I feel that the research itself will benefit the country just as much as my presence would,” says Fofana.
Karolis Balciunas ’08, the former president of the Woodbridge Society of International Students at Harvard, agrees that physical proximity isn’t necessarily a requirement for giving back to one’s country.
“Brain gain does not mean that you have to go back to your country,” says Balciunas. “You can achieve the brain gain by being involved in your culture from abroad as well.”
Born in Lithuania, Balciunas went to school in London before coming to Harvard. During his summers off from Cambridge, he has returned to Lithuania for several political internships. But despite his political and familial ties to Lithuania, which he considers “home,” he is not sure whether he will return in the immediate future.
“The company I’m starting right now is an online media company with a bunch of people from back home in Lithuania. I don’t think I need to be back in Lithuania to get this done as long as I’m involved in Lithuanian culture,” says Balciunas, though he isn’t ruling out a return to Europe. “I definitely see the Lithuanian market as a huge business opportunity, especially public service opportunities. I want to contribute to Lithuanian development. One day I’m going to go back and do something there.”
CHOOSING TO SERVE
Many students and graduates are using public service as an avenue to effect brain gain in America. David L. Tannenwald ’08, of Newton, Mass., has interned in the public sector and is currently exploring career fields for post-graduation life.
“I’d be shocked if whatever I do doesn’t involve public service,” he says. His work on John F. Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign drew his attention to inequities of resources in poorer regions of the US that are no different from those abroad. “That was a very powerful experience for me. It reinforced my opinion that public service is of the utmost importance,” says Tannenwald. “I had a lot of opportunities to talk to people from all over the country, to see how concrete some of the problems we face are.”
Teach for America (TFA) is another popular route to brain gain for many Harvard graduates. Those accepted as corps members in the program teach in low-income schools for two years in an attempt to close the achievement gap of American education. This year, Harvard applications to TFA have increased 100 percent, more than twice the national increase.
To encourage participation in TFA, prestigious firms like JP Morgan and McKinsey and Company now allow graduates to defer job offers for two years in order to teach with TFA. But few follow through with their business aspirations. “It’s a very small portion of our actual alumni who are in business, around four percent,” says Joshua Z. Biber, TFA’s Boston director for new site development.
Biber reports that before joining TFA, ten percent of corps members considered teaching after college. But two-thirds of corps members continue teaching following their two years in TFA, with one-third of alumni working in low-income communities.
Still, Biber recognizes the importance of all career fields to the common goal of improving the country’s public school system and, in turn, the country as a whole.
“We believe that in order to really fix social justice, we need leaders in education reform but we also need people in law and in policy and in business and in medicine who have done something like this first. They really understand what the problems look like in the schools and they understand what the solutions look like.”
WHERE LIES THE MOST GAIN?
Brain gain is a postive force for the regions and peoples of the world that benefit from the work of graduates. The question that now remains is how to ensure that this movement continues. Increasing on-campus recruiting by public service organizations is one solution. However, financially successful graduates undoubtedly provide Harvard needed monetary support. The role of the university might not be to encourage graduates to enter the public service sector.
“To some extent, the university and public service organizations in general have an incentive for many people to do i-banking and other lucrative careers. If anything, the university should make sure the door is open to public service careers, but should be career-neutral,” says Tannenwald.
Despite the prosperity and privileges that Wall Street promises, the prospect of transforming the globe, starting with their own hometowns, might influence future graduates to cultivate brain gain. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Balciunas is not alone is seeing promise elsewhere: “I think it’s exciting to maybe go back and start things back home.”
