Only a small number of people graduating from Canadian schools have been moving to the United States for work, but those who do go tend to be highly-skilled graduates in fields such as health, engineering and natural and applied sciences, Statistics Canada said Friday.

A Statscan survey showed that 1.5 per cent of the more than 300,000 people who graduated from Canadian post-secondary institutions in 1995 moved to the United States after leaving school.

According to the survey, graduates who moved to the U.S. were very successful, getting good jobs that paid better than what their counterparts in Canada earned.

Scientists, engineers, computer systems analysts and programmers had the highest salaries -- a median annual salary of $76,300 at the time of the survey in March 1999.

Relatively few graduates cited lower taxes as an incentive to move south of the border.

More than half of the graduates who left Canada ended up in a few states, the survey showed. Texas was the most popular destination, followed by California, New York and Florida.

About 36 per cent of the graduates who were working upon arrival in the United States were in health occupations. About one in five were nurses.

The figures lend support to people on both sides of the "brain drain" debate.

That debate is about whether Canada is losing many highly-skilled graduates to other countries -- mainly the U.S. -- when their are shortages in their areas of expertise.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien said recently that the Canadian "brain drain" is exaggerated.

In addition to economic factors, social forces played a role in motivating some people to move.

Twenty-three per cent of the 1995 graduates who left did so for education purposes, and about seventeen per cent relocated for marriage or relationships -- the majority of these being women.