Where to train: Shifts in the doctoral destination advice given to Asian bioscience students

Abstract

Prospective Asian doctoral students in bioscience have significantly more local and regional training options today than in the past, and the destination advice their professors give them reflects this shift. Drawing from interviews with eighty-two Asian-born, Western-trained bioscientists in academia, now working in either Singapore, India, China, or Taiwan, we analyzed the doctoral training advice they give to promising science students in their current country to assess if these scientists encourage their students to look westward for their doctoral training. We found significant variation in the doctoral destination advice that interviewees give, with the modal category of destination advice being neutral rather than emphatically West-directed. We attribute this to a growing view among interviewees that the research environment in top Asian universities has improved to the point that, from a technical standpoint, it is increasingly on par with what is available in all but the top Western universities. These changes set the stage for greater variety in the migration streams of Asian scientists-in-training in the future.