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Comment by quickben | Hacker News Reader

My old country gave to whoever returns home with a foreign degree up to 95% salary match from what they would have made if they stayed.

You can rack $100k USD, in a country where average yearly salary is $2k and living expenses are nil.

When you talk about 'standard of living', imagine what standard of living you'd have in USA at 50x average salary. If I'm not mistaken that would be around 1-2 million a year. Add to that free unlimited healthcare, free prescriptions glasses. No land ownership fees, no condo fees, some money to buy your way anywhere, etc.

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Certainly not true for India (second largest contributor of international students, behind China [1]). By my (extremely unscientific) estimate, less than 5% of Indian students arriving in the US for higher education go back to work in India.

[1] https://www.iie.org/Why-IIE/Announcements/2017-11-13-Open-Do...

Your country sounds highly unusual. Are these government jobs? Talking about naivety, this certainly doesn't seem like it's true generally.

Also note that I said US offers a lot of economic opportunities not that other countries didn't. And I was talking from the perspective of a person from a developing country looking to travel to a developed country. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

I've met enough international students to know different countries have different strategies to bring the knowledge home. Some have 2x time retainer for whatever length one studied on their expense. Others have guaranteed government jobs. Mine had any general engineering/it jobs in the private sector. Where are you drawing the conclusion from that this is the exception?

I fully get that a STEM graduate has an easy life in USA, we have that anywhere. But you have to look at regular people, with average jobs. What you refer to as "developing country" most of the time offers better free healthcare that the top notch USA option that's simply out of financial reach.

Not to derail the discussion but just to illustrate. Canada just brought a law for maternity leave to be up to 18 months, paid.

I wouldn't move back home even with a 100% salary match.

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