The Edge: Colleges Take On 'Brain Waste’

How colleges can help immigrants put their education to work.

Most of us are familiar with the risks of “brain drain,” but have you given much thought to “brain waste”? The phrase was new to me, but the concept certainly wasn’t. Still, I hadn’t realized the extent of the challenge. More than two million college-educated immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers living in the United States are either unemployed or working in jobs that require no more than a high-school education, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Many of them are doctors, nurses, engineers, and architects.

Reducing “brain waste” has been on my mind since a Chronicle session at SXSW EDU last month, during which the chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, Juan Salgado, talked about the new Chicago Welcome Back Center at Richard J. Daley College. Created last summer in partnership with the Chicago Bilingual Nurse Consortium, the center is helping foreign-trained professionals get licenses to resume their careers in the United States or find other options that make use of their education (think a doctor turned medical educator). The collaboration seemed like such a natural fit, I wondered why I hadn’t heard of more such centers at colleges around the country.

Read more at https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/the-edge/2023-04-12