Retaining foreign graduates key to talent edge: Research

Whether international students can build careers after graduation, rather than whether they can enter US universities, is becoming an important test of the United States' ability to compete for global talent, experts said, as new research highlights the long-term economic value of graduates who remain in their countries of study.

A new report, "Talent Beyond Borders: The Global Impact of International Graduates", released on Thursday, and developed by Studyportals and Cambridge IELTS, estimates that international students who graduated in 2024 will generate about $1.7 trillion for host economies over their working lives. The United States is expected to receive the largest contribution among individual countries, at about $358.6 billion from the 2024 graduating cohort. The report draws on data tracking more than 545,000 international graduates.

"A key message in our report is that the long-term value of international education lies not in the time spent during the studies, but in what happens after graduation," Robert Lintzen, a senior advanced analytics consultant at Studyportals and one of the report's coauthors, told China Daily.

"International graduates help drive economic growth and are a key source of workforce capacity. As a result, countries worldwide increasingly compete to attract and retain them," he said. "For the United States, the challenge is no longer simply attracting international students but creating pathways that encourage graduates to build careers in the US and fill critical workforce gaps."

The question has become more pressing as the international student pipeline into US higher education shows signs of weakening. A Conference Board assessment published in August found that new international enrollment fell 17 percent and graduate enrollment declined 12 percent in the 2025-26 academic year.

Denis Simon, a senior research fellow in the East Asia program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told China Daily: "I believe the United States faces a genuine risk of undermining one of its most important, and historically durable, competitive advantages: its ability to attract, educate and retain talented people from around the world."

"The issue is not simply whether the United States continues to admit international students. It is whether it remains a country in which the world's most talented students believe they can build a future," Simon said.

A September report by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence found that international students earn more than half of US STEM master's degrees and more than one-third of STEM research doctorates.

Simon said that uncertainty over what comes after graduation can itself become a disadvantage for the US.

"One does not have to prohibit international students from coming to the United States to discourage them. It may be sufficient to make their professional prospects sufficiently uncertain that they decide to study somewhere else."

That uncertainty has drawn fresh attention after the Department of Homeland Security published a proposed rule on Oct 8 that would require schools certified under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program to pay $70,000 for a student's initial optional practical training recommendation and $30,000 for a subsequent Optional Practical Training recommendation. The proposal has not taken effect.

"The United States risks losing some students not because its universities are inferior, but because competing countries may offer a more predictable pathway from education to employment," Simon said.

Both experts pointed to the importance of Chinese students in the US talent pipeline.

"Chinese students have historically been a major part of the international student population, accounting for more than one in five international students in the United States," Lintzen said.

"While our research does not allow us to precisely quantify their stay rates, the sheer size of this population suggests their contribution to the US economy and labor market is likely significant. Even if Chinese graduates were retained at a lower rate than the average international graduate in the US, their overall contribution would still be substantial simply because of the scale of the Chinese student population," he said.