Job satisfaction of foreign-born faculty in science and engineering by citizenship status

A growing number of reports from National Science Foundation and National Academy of Sciences express concerns over the United States maintaining its lead in the realm of Science and Engineering (S&E). A report issued by the National Academy of Sciences indicated that U.S. is losing its bright talent to countries in Europe and Asia which are increasing their investments in S&E research and development. To sustain the rise in employment, universities and policy makers have to find ways to attract and retain a growing population of foreign-born faculty at universities. Losing them to other nations might not only impact the edge this country holds over other nations in the fields of science and technology but will also affect the economic growth of the United States. The latest figures published by the Science and Engineering Indicators report reveals that in 2003, 23% of faculty in science and engineering departments were foreign-born, a number that has more than doubled in thirty years. However, foreign-born faculty comprise an important group that has been understudied. The purpose of this study is to examine the job satisfaction patterns of foreign-born faculty employed in four year institutions in S&E disciplines.;To study the factors that affect faculty job satisfaction a very large and comprehensive National Science Foundation (NSF) dataset, the Survey of Doctoral Recipients (SDR), is employed. The study uses a framework developed by Linda Hagedorn, which contends that faculty satisfaction is impacted by a set of mediator and trigger factors that have a significant relationship with faculty work satisfaction. Certain modifications were made to Hagedorn's framework to study the differences in satisfaction of faculty based on their visa status. Several descriptive and inferential statistics are employed to study the differences in job satisfaction based on country of birth and citizenship of S&E faculty. Differences in satisfaction of faculty employed in S&E based on citizenship status is tested using an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression for the entire data. The results of this study cause concern given that it was found that foreign-born scientists and engineers are less satisfied at all levels of citizenship despite higher productivity rates when compared with native-born faculty.