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“Like the United States, and thanks to the United States, MIT gains tremendous strength by being a magnet for talent from around the world. Faculty, students, post-docs and staff from 134 other nations join us here because they love our mission, our values and our community.” -L.Rafael Reif, MIT President
The MIT Senseable City Lab recently analyzed nearly 20 years of ethnographic student data in order to visualize the origins of its international faculty, students, and researchers from 1999 to the present.
The above chart may be a bit small (larger version here), but it shows all students (undergraduate, graduate, and visiting/others) by country. The top 5 countries are China, India, Canada, South Korea, and France.
To give you some sense of the math, there are 3,808 international students at MIT as of 2017. 888 of them alone are from China – mostly at the graduate level (688 out of the 888). So China represents almost ¼ of MIT’s international student population.
Another thing that stood out for me was the drop off in Canadians in 2009. You can see that “V” roughly in the middle of the chart. Canada went from 233 to 144 students. I wonder if this had something to do with the economic climate at the time. Not sure.
Click here to see all of the visualizations.
Note that you can toggle by region and country, as well as by “Trump’s EO Countries.” That feature, as well as the quote at the beginning of this post, should give you an immediate appreciation for some of the motivations behind this exercise.
Images: MIT Senseable City Lab
Max Galka has created an incredible visualization of country-to-country net migration (from 2010 to 2015) on his blog, Metrocosm.
Here’s a screenshot:
But you really need to view the full screen interactive version.
In that version, you can hover over a country to see the total net migration number (+/-) and you can click on a country to see where people are moving to and from. A blue circle indicates positive net migration (greater inflows) and a red circle indicates negative net migration (greater outflows).
All of the data is from the United Nations Population Division. And though the numbers are estimates, it’s a fascinating look at global migration. For instance, look at the outflow from Syria.
Blogger and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Aaron M. Renn, recently published an interesting long-form article called, Rethinking America’s Cities’ Success Strategy.
One of the central themes is the idea that globalization has caused a kind of bifurcation in cities – a disconnect between the local and the global. In an effort to compete with other global cities around the world, we have begun to turn our back on local concerns. At the same time, not every city has the market power of, say, New York or London.
So what does this mean for cities? Here’s a quote from the article that I think does a good job explaining the mental model:
“Like the United States, and thanks to the United States, MIT gains tremendous strength by being a magnet for talent from around the world. Faculty, students, post-docs and staff from 134 other nations join us here because they love our mission, our values and our community.” -L.Rafael Reif, MIT President
The MIT Senseable City Lab recently analyzed nearly 20 years of ethnographic student data in order to visualize the origins of its international faculty, students, and researchers from 1999 to the present.
The above chart may be a bit small (larger version here), but it shows all students (undergraduate, graduate, and visiting/others) by country. The top 5 countries are China, India, Canada, South Korea, and France.
To give you some sense of the math, there are 3,808 international students at MIT as of 2017. 888 of them alone are from China – mostly at the graduate level (688 out of the 888). So China represents almost ¼ of MIT’s international student population.
Another thing that stood out for me was the drop off in Canadians in 2009. You can see that “V” roughly in the middle of the chart. Canada went from 233 to 144 students. I wonder if this had something to do with the economic climate at the time. Not sure.
Click here to see all of the visualizations.
Note that you can toggle by region and country, as well as by “Trump’s EO Countries.” That feature, as well as the quote at the beginning of this post, should give you an immediate appreciation for some of the motivations behind this exercise.
Images: MIT Senseable City Lab
Max Galka has created an incredible visualization of country-to-country net migration (from 2010 to 2015) on his blog, Metrocosm.
Here’s a screenshot:
But you really need to view the full screen interactive version.
In that version, you can hover over a country to see the total net migration number (+/-) and you can click on a country to see where people are moving to and from. A blue circle indicates positive net migration (greater inflows) and a red circle indicates negative net migration (greater outflows).
All of the data is from the United Nations Population Division. And though the numbers are estimates, it’s a fascinating look at global migration. For instance, look at the outflow from Syria.
Blogger and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Aaron M. Renn, recently published an interesting long-form article called, Rethinking America’s Cities’ Success Strategy.
One of the central themes is the idea that globalization has caused a kind of bifurcation in cities – a disconnect between the local and the global. In an effort to compete with other global cities around the world, we have begun to turn our back on local concerns. At the same time, not every city has the market power of, say, New York or London.
So what does this mean for cities? Here’s a quote from the article that I think does a good job explaining the mental model:
It would also be interesting to see these numbers on a per capita basis because some countries certainly punch above or below their weight in terms of migration. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Canada and Australia vis-à-vis the US.
At the end of the article, Aaron makes a number of recommendations for how to better think about local entrepreneurship and economic growth. The first one is as follows:
“Local civic priorities should favor building a successful and inclusive local economy, including entrepreneurship, over global concerns and real estate development.”
Despite this being seemingly contradictory to do what I do for a living, I think it’s important to note that on a fundamental level, architects and developers simply create space.
It might be a beautiful space. A space that improves well-being, creates value, and enables certain activities. But at the end of the day, there needs to be demand for that space. And a robust local economy is paramount to that equation. So I agree that we shouldn’t forget about local and expect that “if we build it, they will come.”
If you have the time, the full article is worth a read. It’s also part of a broader series on entrepreneurship and cities, so there are a bunch of other related articles on the same page.
It would also be interesting to see these numbers on a per capita basis because some countries certainly punch above or below their weight in terms of migration. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Canada and Australia vis-à-vis the US.
At the end of the article, Aaron makes a number of recommendations for how to better think about local entrepreneurship and economic growth. The first one is as follows:
“Local civic priorities should favor building a successful and inclusive local economy, including entrepreneurship, over global concerns and real estate development.”
Despite this being seemingly contradictory to do what I do for a living, I think it’s important to note that on a fundamental level, architects and developers simply create space.
It might be a beautiful space. A space that improves well-being, creates value, and enables certain activities. But at the end of the day, there needs to be demand for that space. And a robust local economy is paramount to that equation. So I agree that we shouldn’t forget about local and expect that “if we build it, they will come.”
If you have the time, the full article is worth a read. It’s also part of a broader series on entrepreneurship and cities, so there are a bunch of other related articles on the same page.
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