By Lim Mun Fah
June 04, 2011 | The Malaysian Insider
JUNE 4 — The world is fighting for talents. We can hardly find another country having a messy overseas scholarship system and yet blames the media for causing chaos, like Malaysia.
I have a book entitled “The Talent War” on my bookshelf. It wrote: “Talent outflow in European countries has made the United States the first country to successfully detonate atomic and hydrogen bombs, as well as send satellites into space and astronauts to land on the moon. Meanwhile, talent outflow in China and India has created Silicon Valley, a home to many of the world’s largest technology corporations, in the US. Talents are more important to a country compared to oil, financial streets and nuclear weapons.”
I agree with the argument. In fact, strategies of how to cultivate and attract talents have become one of the most important policies in many countries.
However, it is frustrating that many developing countries, including Malaysia, have been sending a large number of students to study abroad but still facing the problem of brain drain.
According to “The Talent War”, it said that in today’s world, more than half of highly-educated immigrants have been absorbed by the US. A quarter of them were post-graduate students and half of them chose to stay in the US after completing their doctoral degrees, making the US a unique superpower.
However, the US is not the country attracting most Malaysian talents. According to the Malaysia Economic Monitor report released by the World Bank, Singapore has attracted most Malaysian talents (54 per cent), followed by Australia (15 per cent) and the US (10 per cent).
It is not a surprising phenomenon. In fact, it is entirely consistent with the world trend of talent flow, namely talents from developed countries flow to the most developed country while talents from developing countries flow to developed countries and talents from backward countries flow to developing countries. Of course, there are also some exceptional cases.
To effectively cultivate talents, it is essential to develop a fairer scholarship system and not to give up making changes for fear of triggering some minor issues.
I do not agree with the saying of making potential talents studying in local universities means retaining talents. Instead, I agree with “The Talent War” that talent outflow is not equivalent to brain drain. Studying, working and developing careers abroad are regarded as talent outflow and they might return and contribute to their motherland one day. As for brain drain, it is referring to those who have given up their original nationality, become citizens of the countries they are staying and would never come back.
Obviously, the transnational flow of talents is an unstoppable trend. The most important thing is whether we can stop domestic talents from becoming drained talents and prevent talent outflow from turning into brain drain? — mysinchew.com