Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Evidence suggests that US education plays an important role in both attracting and retaining high-quality foreign-born students. This is particularly true in the case of doctorates trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), a workforce that is disproportionately foreign born and likely to contribute to long-term economic growth. This paper studies the impact of the research environment within STEM doctoral programs on labor market outcomes for foreign-born students.

We introduce a rich new dataset from the UMETRICS project, which provides information on research funding structures—funding duration, timing, and source. These data are, in turn, linked to rich Census data on person characteristics, household structure, labor market outcomes, and employer characteristics. These data allow us to identify which graduate students work together in academic research laboratories as well as the characteristics of other individuals in those labs (e.g. faculty, post-docs, undergraduates, and staff). We use this information to construct measures of team size, demographic composition, and mentor characteristics.

We utilize year-to-year variation in these lab characteristics to analyze how the research environment affects the probability of obtaining a (post-graduation) job in the U.S. for foreign-born students. Looking at changes within a particular research lab, we find that the fraction of one’s peers who are foreign-born is an important determinant of staying in the U.S. for foreign-born doctoral students. Furthermore, we find that, conditional on working in the U.S. for at least 4 years after graduation, foreign-born students earn higher wages than their native-born counterparts. Preliminary results show no evidence that other lab characteristics, such as team size, have a significant effect on labor market outcomes for these students.