International Students Boost Startup Creation, Lifting Local Jobs and Revenue, New Research Shows
International graduate students created a disproportionate number of new business startups in the United States in the past decade. They also increased entrepreneurialism among their U.S.-born peers, according to new research from the University of California, Davis.
“The high quality of U.S. universities attracts the most talented students globally,” said Giovanni Peri, the director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center and professor of economics in the College of Letters and Science. “At the same time, limited options for students to stay in the country after graduation risks losing the talent and potential that our universities have helped to create.”
In their study, Peri and his co-authors paired information on international students graduating from U.S. master’s programs between 1999 and 2020 with data on the startups they founded in the years following. The study found that an increase of 150 international students in a graduating cohort led to one additional startup within five years, a rate eight to nine times higher than for an equivalent number of U.S.-born students. About a third of that increase in startups was generated by international students’ entrepreneurialism spilling over to their U.S.-born peers who also founded and co-founded firms.