In a characteristically smart post, Noted video-game hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang (who spells his nickname with a small 'b') recounts a conversation with University of California, San Diego, engineering professor Jim Buckwalter about UCSD's grad-school applications. "Of the thousands of applicants, only 80 were from the US," bunnie recounts. "To put this in perspective, he had more applicants with the surname 'Lee' alone than he had domestic applicants."
Huang (an American child of Chinese immigrants) concludes that, with numbers like this, the only sound strategy is to try to get as many foreign-born tech workers as possible to stay. (It's worth noting that, as we reported in a recent blog post, only a third of the Chinese people who went abroad for their educations eventually returned home.) "We need to compete to retain foreign talent, but instead, we hassle them away," he writes.
- Jim Austin
