Responsibilities

Over the last couple of decades the number of young men and women who leave their home countries to pursue further education elsewhere has risen by leaps and bounds. The increase has been particularly high when one considers the flow of students from the developing world to the developed world. The reason for such an increase is easily explained when one considers the relative standards of education that exist in the developed and developing world, along with rapid economic growth for many nations of the developing world, much of which has allowed a certain segment of their respective societies to be able to afford a daughter or son studying at a school in the developed world.
While this indicates the movement towards a world that is much more “global” in a nature, the creation of a generation that is made up of individuals who can empathise with those who might be as different from them as chalk is from cheese; while it shows that the developing world is catching up, that the economic inequality facing the world is slowly being reduced, one can’t ignore the deeper-reaching implications of this wave of students moving to the developed world, or the questions it raises about their links to their home countries.
Often, there are arguments about the “brain-drain” that arises for an economy that is seeing a larger amount of human capital flowing out of the country and how it affects the nation’s economic future. To view human actions in purely economic terms makes it easy for us to understand the economic effect of such actions but we ultimately lose the microscopic implications of moving away to a world that provides one with a significantly higher level of opportunity, comfort, and freedom.
The question then, is: What responsibilities do students from developing nations have once they leave their own country, one that is still struggling with problems that the developed world dealt with quite a while ago? Is it irresponsible to forget about that and move along keeping in mind that the opportunity one has is the first step towards personal success in a field chosen from a host of available options?
To say that one should forego everything one has worked hard for and often faced myriad difficulties to achieve would not only be hypocritical but also foolish; but to completely ignore the opportunity of giving something back to one’s home country after learning so much about the world would be tantamount to something quite similar.
There is no easy way to understand what one can do to help alleviate some of the problems that one has seen before moving away from home. But there is always a way to begin seeking ways of using one’s education to improve conditions that outsiders won’t ever be able to completely understand. It is important for students leaving their countries to consider going back to use their education and make a change: to take a stand is important, and to use that as the basis for moving ahead is critical to any change that we want to see in the world.