Kerre Woodham: The brain drain - who cares?

Yet again, there have been alarmist stories in the media warning that New Zealand is facing a "brain drain".

These sorts of stories are much loved by the media and used to pop up once a year until that unseemly business with the young man who masqueraded as a concerned citizen calling for the government to do something about the horrifying number of his peers who were heading off-shore. When he was outed as an enthusiastic card-carrying member of the Act Party, on a mission to embarrass the government, his campaign was tarnished and brain drain stories went into the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet for a while.

Until the survey last week that breathlessly proclaimed one in three students were heading off overseas after they'd completed their studies.

A couple of things here. One: the report failed to mention that there are international students studying here. Of course they're going to head off overseas once they complete their degrees. That's where they live. Take the international students out, and the numbers fall to 20 per cent of students. That leads me to point number two.

Surely we want our young people to travel. Surely it's better for people to gain life and work experience around the world and then come home, all the richer, in both a spiritual and a material sense, for their time away. It's in our blood. Our forebears travelled to this country and exploration and derring-do is part of our heritage.

I don't know why these "brain drain" stories command so much attention. I suppose it's because they are engineered by those with barrows to push. Graduates from the school of Rogernomics see the brain drain as the result of New Zealand being hostile to business, which means our 'brightest and best' leave for greener pastures. This, say the Rogernomes, will ensure that New Zealand continues its inevitable spiral downwards towards banana republicanism and by implication the country will be run and peopled by the Antipodean equivalent of Appalachian mountain men and women.

Others, primarily the various spokespeople for the students' unions, argue that the brain drain is the result of excessive student fees. To pay back the cost of their education, young people are being forced to seek employment offshore, where the wages are higher, the climate more balmy, the beer colder and the streets paved with gold.

While there are some absurdities with the student allowance scheme - for example, treating young adults up to the age of 25 as dependents of their parents - I don't in general have a problem with students funding at least part of the cost of their education. The taxpayers - the truck drivers, the cleaners, the retailers - already pay the lion's share of the cost of every student's degree. Surely the students themselves can chip in a quarter.

Maybe the government can pick up on Winston Peters' idea of reintroducing bonding - a scheme from the 50s that saw teachers contracted to work for a couple of years in payment for the cost of their training. Or maybe we just accept that we're living in a global village and that while we may lose some bright young things, we gain others, equally luminous and lovely.

That doesn't mean I accept the premise that we are indeed losing our best and brightest. This is a mantra that's become a "fact" through repetition. Who says the students who head off overseas are the top of the class? Where's the evidence to show that these kids were in the top five per cent of their graduating year? The ones heading off overseas may have been the ones who weren't picked for the plum jobs in this country.

Besides, there's all sorts of smart. There's academic brilliance and that's to be admired and appreciated, but there are people with real entrepreneurial flair who left school without a single qualification. Some of them have hugely successful businesses that sees them employ hundreds of New Zealanders and pay eye-popping amounts in taxes. Pragmatic, phlegmatic intelligence - otherwise known as common-sense - is also absolutely essential within a community and thus the list goes on.

We need the intelligence to understand that young people have always travelled and always will. We should be grateful that they do. It would be dumb to think this country would be better off if they stayed at home.