Brain Drain: Who Wins? Who Loses? The case of Portugal

For decades, education has generally been viewed as an effective instrument for social mobility. Education has always taken different forms in time and space, chasing and pursuing goals and objectives, crossing human societies. Structured around their actors the apprentice and the master; the student and the teacher; the trainee and the trainer education as a socially constructed product is influenced by social changes, while its embodiments can influence directly in those mutations. Those changes are thus a consequence of ideological, material and social conditions in which education is produced and the role that society commits it in the construction of the society itself, defining it and giving it its own rationality, structuring and justifying even their existence: education as a form of acquisition, development and transmission of knowledge changes individual and collective thinking and acting, to the service of the development of individuals and societies. In the current "global and totalitarian society" (Ramonet, 1997), characterized by mass production and mass-enjoyment of the results of productive activity, the function of "school" has changed. Today it is expected that the school not only contributes to the development of citizenship but most particularly that "produces" socially useful citizens, i.e. citizens that are able to enter into the labour market and respond to requests that it imposes. Education must produce individuals able to be in a constant state of employability. However, in Portugal, since the late 2010s the situation is the reverse and the country faces an increasing number of university graduates who do not get any recognition by the market and which thickens the ranks of unemployed in the country. Simultaneously, many thousands of higher education graduates, including doctoral ones, seek emigration in the achievement of its objectives: have adequate work to their academic qualification, leading to an exodus of highly skilled labour. Based on official data on unemployment of graduates, including by scientific areas and ages, and the highly skilled emigration, this article questions the employability of different scientific areas of higher education and discuss the educational and economic policies that generate a real brain drain in Portugal in the last decade. Purpose - In recent years, youth unemployment has increased very quickly and intensely in Portugal, namely regarding the higher education qualified workforce. This scenario, in addition to the existing poor statistics that reflects this phenomenon were the switch for this pioneering research in Portugal that aims to discuss and to understand the outlines of this highly qualified migration; and to test the comprehensive power of the theses on which brain drain has been analysed: the model of the Exodus vs the model of the Diaspora. Design/methodology/approach - The research strategy is suitable to the characteristics of an exploratory study that allows to enunciate questions and hypotheses that can be studied in later steps of the research. Articulating an extensive research with an in-depth analysis we seek to identify the subjectivity of the direct actors of emigration in some of its main working contexts. We use a mixed strategy which makes use of multilateral technical quantitative and qualitative data collection: questionnaire surveys; life stories; and interviews with focus groups. Originality/value - This is a pioneering study in Portugal with relevant information for higher education institutions and policy makers. The study puts in evidence the importance of higher education institutions and policy makers learn from the results and testimonies collected. Furthermore, this research will contribute to a better understanding of the brain drain, helping to fill a gap in migration studies. Practical implications - From a practical point of view, the findings from the questionnaire, applied to a sample of skilled Portuguese emigrants in Europe, will allow to know the socio-economic and cultural background of these graduates; the reasons that led them to emigrate: the reasons that would make or not make them to return to Portugal; its employment status, career and remuneration in the host country; among others. All these results are supplemented by interviews with a wide range of interviewed, drawing a set of life stories.