Brain Drain in Philippine Society
...uates choose to work over seas and according to the statistics, the biggest source among the countries of brain drain to America is the Philippines. The question is: why? In order to understand the situation, one should know the three main reasons why people choose to migrate. First, they feel safer in a secured environment with a far more stable economy. Second, they want better jobs, meaning higher wages and lower taxes. Third, they feel the need to broaden their experiences. Personally, I have had a close encounter with this phenomenon. My brother is a graduate of the University of the Asia and Pacific. He worked in a top-notched computer consultant company and was sent twice to Finland to work on a collaboration project with Nokia. Despite the fact that things were going very well for him, he still chose to migrate to Australia because he had better opportunities there and because he will get paid more. So more often than not, it is the immigrants themselves who choose to move out of the country, regardless whether their situation is already good. In fact, some people even earn more performing “blue collar” jobs in foreign countries compared to very dignified jobs in our country. Such is the case with the women of our country working abroad as domestic helpers. This gives us the evidence that when people choose to migrate, we cannot always presume that it’s to have better job experience. This “brain drain” serves as a sort of “escape” from the economic instability of our country because most Filipinos already have the mentality that they will not achieve success if they remain here in the Philippines. Putting that aside, it is not solely the fault of the people because sometimes, the other countries deliberately recruit them. This is true for countries such as America and the UK that recruit fresh graduates from the Philippines. It has become problematic for our country, especially since it has become so widespread. Attaining a high education and certification here become merely a “ticket” to another country with a more stable economy. They invest in their education for the sole purpose of qualifying to go abroad. This brought about our specific case when so much of our students are taking up nursing for college, but at the same time our country has a shortage of nurses. The nursing schools have partial faults in this case. Some private nursing schools advertise to their students that they are guaranteeing them a job in the United States once they graduate. In short, there will be scarcity of highly educated workers here, where most of these professionals are educated. The “brain drain” phenomena reached its height very recently and now our country suffers from a lack of doctors, nurses, scientists and even teachers. It is predicted that the situation will continue to worsen for the next five years. Yes, brain drain is an economic issue. It has been common knowledge and it has become part of the economic theory that the education level of the population of any certain country plays an im...