Nieuws - 1 november 2007

Talented foreigners often stay on

About half of the foreigners who come to the Netherlands to do a PhD remain in the country to work after receiving their doctorate, according to a recent report. The Utilisation Report 2007 is published by the Technology Foundation STW, a Dutch funding agency for applied university research.

The Technology Foundation STW sponsors doctoral research positions in science and technology at Dutch universities. The three technical universities have the largest share of STW projects, closely followed by Wageningen UR. Each year STW publishes a report, with interim results of projects that started five years earlier, and the final results of projects that started ten years ago. Data was collected for 283 PhD students with an STW grant, 40 percent of whom are from abroad.

The figures show that within a period of 2 to 3 years after obtaining a PhD, over 80 percent of those sponsored by STW continue in research and development, engineering or product design. Of the Dutch PhD graduates, three-quarters are still working in the Netherlands. For the foreigners the figure is over half.

STW concludes that these figures show that the research it funds attracts highly qualified people to the Netherlands. A relatively large number also find work in the Netherlands after completing their PhD, in particular at universities (18 percent) and large companies (7 percent).