Pawan Agarwal Speaks About His Research on Student Flows and Circulation of the Highly Skilled Workforce
Monday, October 02, 2006
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Pawan Agarwal
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WDI’s popular Brown Bag Seminar was kicked off for 2006-07 school year with a visit from Pawan Agarwal, a Fulbright New Century Scholar on higher education from India. Pawan presented his research on 'Student flows and circulation of the highly skilled workforce: Its future and implications'.
In his presentation, Pawan analyzed a host of issues - including changing nature of work, demand and supply of skilled workforce, different and changing higher education enrollment across geographies and mobility of students across borders. He laid out the following propositions:
- Globalization of skilled workforce is inevitable
- It is the main driver of a new division of labor on a global scale
- This would require adjustments on a long-term basis for the advanced countries, but they face no immediate threats
- The best any government can do in these uncertain times is provide more and better education to its people
Armed with rich data and thoughtful analysis, Pawan arrived at following conclusions:
- Changing nature and organization of work will result in more work flowing across nations. This would ensure a large population in the developing countries becoming part of global production system and would fuel global economic growth benefiting developing and developed countries alike.
- Highly skilled work will go to countries that attract the best talent from across the globe. Increasingly in the advanced countries such people will come as students and stay back creating an ecosystem that helps such people to flourish. US had a huge attraction. That is being threatened by competition from other advanced countries.
- At the same time, demographic and enrolment trends in higher education suggest that developing countries like India will corner a large pie of the routine kind of work that does not require high level of problem solving skills. Though on a long term basis some of it would also eventually come to developing countries like India.
- The above developments would require people in developed countries to make adjustments. Such adjustments, would be required over a long period and there are no immediate threats
- In such uncertain times, the best the governments both in the developed and developing countries could do is to provide more and better education.
This presentation was made on the basis of the detailed review of India high education and global student flows done by Pawan. To read his review of Indian higher education, please refer to: www.icrier.org/publication/working_papers_180.html. His study on global student flows is yet to be released.
