My understanding is that scientific research has a dual problem, where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. The result being that most trained PhDs must leave (US) academia because there are no jobs for them. In fact, I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more help finding a job in industry after they graduate.
Given all that, where are professors supposed to find and hire students who don't want to stay in academia themselves? I think a lot of these students wind up being aspiring immigrants, and I'm not surprised that a lot of them would also have a hard time finding a place for themselves after graduating and that many of them would leave. Also, the abstract seems to argue that that US still benefits greatly from this arrangement: "though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share."
If the culture normalized such that a much larger proportion of research was conducted by permanent, non-faculty, research employees, this would both reduce the need for so many students and increase the jobs available for students, and create a new employment niche with a different balance of teaching/administration/research. It would basically be turning "post doc" into an actual career rather than a stop over.
This would be better for everyone involved, at the admitted cost of being quite a bit more expensive. My guess is that the market would naturally converge on this equilibrium if the information of job placement rates on a per-program (or even per lab/advisor) were more readily available.
A person arrives on a 18 month funded postdoc (believe me, plenty exist). They have just completed a PhD which means they probably have a couple papers published and maybe another one or two in the pipeline. So as they spin up their time with you, they are also finishing these papers from their previous job. By six months in they are done with that and fully onboarded to the project. So they spend six months working. But now, they only have six months left of contract. You don't have money to keep them or perhaps your country will require you to offer a permanent contract if it is being renewed so you cannot offer them to extend their position with you. So they spend the final six months of their postdoc looking for a job. So, for 18 months of salary, you get six to eight months of work. It's unreasonable. Things need to change.
Or lets say you have a mission critical project that must be done by a postdoc. You offer them a 3 year contract that is grant funded. It is three years because most grant agencies work on three year cycles. The project requires a year commitment to building an apparatus (maybe its a lab experiment, maybe it's training some foundation model, whatever). After that year, the apparatus can be used for science. Your postdoc comes to you in year 2 month 3 and says, well I have been offered a faculty position at university X so I am leaving in the fall. So you get 18 months of work out of them and now cannot hire anyone else because you only have 18 months of funding left, but your country requires you to offer a minimum of 24 months contract. Things need to change.
It's important to note that academics often keep projects from their former positions going at their new ones. But as soon as someone leaves to industry, this falls apart. Because industrial positions expect the person to work on the project they specify, they rarely hire someone to work as an academic, pursuing their own research directions.
I think the solution here is as others have suggested, spend more money on hiring people for longer term and with higher salaries. But we shall see if anyone listens to that advice.
This isn't really a culture problem, IMO, as much as a funding one.
My group currently employs two people of the description you have, and it does reduce the need for students (and honestly, increase productivity).
It's also by far the most stressful part of my job. Funding them involves writing multiple grants per year (because the expectation of any particular grant is low, even with a decent hit rate) and I am constantly worried that I won't be able to keep them employed.
If one of them leaves this year, I'm not likely to replace them, simply because in the current funding environment, I can't look someone in the eye and promise them a long term position. There are so many more ways to fund a student, and they're inherently time limited, so even if things collapse, there's ways to white knuckle through it in a way there aren't for staff scientists.
The funding problem is a cultural problem though. Religious right wing politicians in the US have attacked science and education funding at every opportunity. Science and education produce ideas that are at odds with right wing religious orthodoxy, so those things must not be allowed in society.
It's not just that science contradicts orthodox religious views. It's also that humanities education and exposure to a diversity of people and thought can "deprogram" students away from traditional ways of thinking, which is a threat to traditional power hierarchies.
Notably even the role of the professor has drastically changed in the last few decades. The "publish or perish" paradigm has really taken over and changed the type of research being done. Higgs famously said he wouldn't make it as a non-tenured faculty in today's academic culture.
Not to mention that the type of research being done has drastically changed too. There's many more projects that require wide collaboration. You're not going to do something like CERN, DESI, LIGO, or many other scientific mega projects from a single lab, or even single field of study.
The academic deal has changed. It used to be that by becoming a professor you were granted facilities and time to carry out your research. In return you had to help educate and foster the next generation. It is mutually beneficial. There were definitely abusers of the system, but it is generally not too difficult to tell who in your own department is trying to take advantage of the system, but incredibly difficult to identify these people when looking from the perspective of a university administration. There's been more centralization in the university administration and I'm afraid Goodhart's Law is in full force now.
What I'd like to see is more a return to the Laissez-faire approach. It shouldn't be completely relaxed, but to summarize Mervin Kelly (who ran Bell Labs): "You don't manage a bunch of geniuses, they already know what needs to be worked on. That's what makes them experts in the first place." At the end of the day we can't run academia like a business and it really shouldn't be. The profits generated from academia are less direct and more distributed through society. Evaluating universities by focusing on their expenditures and direct profits alone is incredibly naive. We're better able to make less naive evaluations today, but we still typically don't (it is still fairly complex)
Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem. If the scientific enterprise were just about churning out widgets, then yes it’s better to have permanent staff.
But having a strong training pipeline for the globe is a huge plus for US prestige, and the top people are still offered jobs as faculty or industry within the country, so it still a net gain for USA. But it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists
While I'm more skeptical than you are of the value of a string of new students coming through as opposed to just keeping the very best students, I'm also not suggesting we mandate this change or force it. I'm suggesting that we give people more information to make better informed decisions. If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change. If they aren't satisfied with that, and we decide that actually they were performing a valuable service, then it behoovs society to pay them enough that they becoming willing to make that gamble again.
The current information assymetry is exploitative. One of two things would happen under my proposed system: either nothing would change because students think they are getting a good deal as is or students don't think the deal is worth it which means that the current system only works because students are having the reality of the job market hidden from them.
I think a mix of the current system with more permanent researchers makes sense.
There is a lot of work in research that fits the permanent worker better than the fresh 22 year old. But having that fresh talent is really beneficial to science.
> If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change.
The problem is in my opinion not this low job placement rate per se (it is very easy to find out that this is the case for basically every prospective researcher). The problem rather is the "politics" involved in filling these positions, and additionally the fact that positions are commonly filled by what is currently "fashionable". If you, for some (often good) reason, did good research in an area that simply did not become "fashionable": good luck finding an academic position.
> Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem
Why? That paradigm doesn't change the influx of new students.
But the current system has a problem of training people for a job and then sending them to do something else. Even a professorship is a very different job than a graduate researcher or postdoc. Most professors do little research themselves these days, instead managing research. Don't you think that's a little odd, not to mention wasteful? We definitely should have managers, and managers with research backgrounds themselves, but why not let people continue honing their research skills?
> it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists
It is. But this is also a social choice dictated by how much we as a country want to fund research.
Thats interesting, I don't know if I have ever seen this kind of labor market logic applied to science before. Is this an agreed upon idea? In my mind, science and the kind of focused research it entails is kind of definitionally distinct from something like "innovation." Like, frankly, yes, I want a stream of widgets; if that means consistent units of research done to contribute to an important area/problem, which are reviewed and judged by peers.
Like what's even the alternative? We want a Steve Jobs of science? That's really what we are going for?
Are you suggesting science and innovation are distinct?
Scientific progress is largely driven by the “Steve Jobs” of sciences.
Only a tiny fraction of papers remain relevant. So that means the quality of the average paper doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the best paper.
What you’re describing sounds a lot like the Department of Energy national labs. They have (or had) many permanent-track research roles without teaching obligations, where scientists can have long stable research careers.
The problem, as always, is funding. In the US, the federal govt is essentially the only “customer” of basic research. There’s some private funding, often from kooky millionaires who want someone to invent a time machine, but it’s the exception that proves the rule. Universities sometimes have pure research roles, but they’re generally dependent on the employee paying themselves with a constant stream of grants. It’s a stressful and precarious position.
To a large extent, I think this could be solved by labs having more long-term permanent research staff (technicians, data analysts, scientists) and reducing the number of PhD students. Many students would gladly stay on in that position instead of leaving, so it increases job opportunities. It would also improve the quality of the science because the permanent staff would have more historical knowledge, in contrast to the current situation where students constantly rotate in and out with somewhat messy hand-offs. The students could also then focus more on scholarly work, planning and overseeing research execution with the team. The problem is that the incentives are aligned to allocate students to doing all lab tasks, not long term staff. I think we could change this through changes to the requirements and structure of science funding mechanisms however, since ultimately that's the source of the incentives.
Academia is a pyramid, like most organizations, eventually most PhDs cannot get a full time position.
The fact that many PhDs leave is..normal..if you get few high impact publications you can find full time positions outside US, even as an associate professor and not just a researcher.
And the reason why many go to universities around the world for PhDs is not because they want to stay in that place necessarily but because you're more likely to fund your PhD research and get a high impact publication.
> much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available
Expanding on this a bit, insight credited to bonoboTP: in a steady state the number of junior faculty positions will only open up at the same rate as current faculty retires. But each faculty member is expected to train dozens of students that are all in principle qualified for such jobs. Therefore, the vast majority, let's say 95%, of PhD graduates have to take industry jobs, there is no way around it. But this does not seem to be the goal of the 95%, hence the incredibly tight job market. Returning to their home country for a faculty job acts as another release valve, but sooner or later those will be filled as well, except in countries in the rapidly expanding phase in terms of university education.
The tenure system is incredibly broken as a result. Ideally, I think there needs to be more non-faculty careers available for PhD graduates either outside or inside academia. After all, there is clearly some value in the work a PhD student does, otherwise they would not be paid. Perhaps we can have public or semi-public research institutions that hire these scientists for actual development. Most likely this will require an upstream incentive change so that grants are awarded to these newly minted organizations.
Universities charge a large overhead in part to cover the "tuition" for the PhD students, which is really a meaningless number since it's taken out of the same check they give you the remainder of. If we just strip out this part and give most of it to the scientist, economically it should be a viable salary.
When I was a physics grad student ~35 years go, this was called "the birth control problem. I had every intention of going into industry. I described it to my dad who got his PhD in the 1950s and he said it was the same back then. But there's a perennial "this time it will be different."
It wasn't the same in the 1950s. When it became really clear to me how dire the long term job situation was when I getting my PhD in the 1990s I started combing through issues of Physics Today and noticed that the field and academia as a whole was explosively expanding from 1920-1968 or so and there was a sudden crisis in the late 1960s, with an echo in the late 1970s and also when I was in in the late 1990s. (Physics Today said I had 2% odds of getting a permanent job even coming from a top school)
I had one day when I'd posted a Java applet to the web that got 100,000 impressions and getting so much attention for that and so little attention for papers that took me a year to write made me resolve to tell my thesis advisor that I was going to quit. Before I could tell him, he told me he had just a year of funding for me and I thought.. I could tough it out for a year. People were shocked when I did a postdoc when most of my cohort were going straight to finance.
My mental health went downhill in Germany and I stomped away, in retrospect I was the only native English speaker at the institute and I could have found a place for myself for some time had I taken on the task of proofreading papers and I can easily imagine I could have made it in academia but heck, life on a horse farm doing many sorts of software development has been a blast.
One big disruption in the job market was that mandatory age-based retirement was outlawed. This created a span of several years when there were virtually no retirements.
I should have mentioned that my dad's degree was in chemistry, and it might have been a different vibe. But the production of PhDs at a rate faster than they could be absorbed by academic hiring was a thing. My dad (and mom, she got her master's in chemistry) went into industry too, so maybe I was lucky to have good role models.
"Ideally, I think there needs to be more non-faculty careers available for PhD graduates either outside or inside academia."
For awhile, I loved that my field had lots of opportunities outside academia for PhD students, and that they were held in pretty equal regard, prestige wise, with academic positions.
Then the current administration gutted the entire field.
I was accepted into a PhD CS program despite applying for a masters. The advisor had something on his door about the limited number of slots open for people who graduate from grad school. Tried to discourage me from the program.
There's that and the fact that a lot of people who attain graduate degrees are immigrants who do so for the sake of immigration.
The whole system essentially self selects for cheap labor and exploitation.
If the feds put a high salary requirement on it like the E or O series visas, perhaps the system might change.
The scientific minds of India, China, and Russia don't come to the US and slave away in the lab purely out of passion for advancing science, they do so because it's a path towards the green card. The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests.
> The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests.
In my observation there do exist quite some people among the PIs and laboratory heads who are quite highly idealistic for research, but have no other option than playing this rigged game of academia.
> where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available.
This is definitely true, there are more physics PhDs graduating from the top 2 schools than there are total faculty positions listed each year.
BUT you are missing that there is still demand for positions out in industry as well as government labs. But there's also a decline in that right now as we're going through a time of encouraging more engineering and less research.
In reality there's a pipeline of research. If you haven't been introduced to it, I like to point to NASA's TRL (Technology Readiness Level) chart[0]. The pipeline is from very basic research to proven systems. Traditionally academia and government labs do the majority of work in the low TRL while industry research handles mid level (stuff that isn't quite ready for production). The reason for this is due to the higher rate of failure of low level research and so shifts risks away from industry. Not to mention that industry has different incentives and is going to be more narrowly focused. Academia and gov labs can research more long term projects that will have large revenue growths but may take decades to get those returns. I mean how much do we get from the invention of calculus? Or the creation of WWW? We'd also get far less growth and profits were these not more distributed.
So while yes, getting a professorship is a challenge and highly competitive, it is far from the only path for these graduates. We can also do a lot to increase (or decrease) their options by increasing (or decreasing) funding for science. There's a lot of science that happens outside academic labs and they still depend on PhD graduates to be able to do most of that work. If you want these people to have jobs, fund more low level research[1]
> I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more help finding a job in industry after they graduate.
A big reason for this is that networking is still a big issue. I can tell you as someone who does not have a good relationship with my former advisor that this has made job hunting a much harder experience compared to other peers. While my credentials are better than some of those people they come in through a side door (often skipping things like LeetCode challenges) and instead I have to go through the standard applicant pool. I don't think they don't deserve those jobs (most of them do), but just pointing out that networking is still a critical part of hiring. I mean even one simple part is that when applying you might not even know what a group is doing and if that's what you want to do. Solicitations are often vague. Even if there were no advantage to the hiring process networking still provides a huge advantage to the filtering process.
I mean even putting the personal experience to the side, don't we want to make the most use of the resources we have? Don't we want to get graduates connected to labs/work places where they will be most effective? This is still a surprisingly complex problem to resolve and even limiting the hiring problem to PhDs (where there's far less noise than general hiring) it is still a complicated problem.
[1] But I'd also say that we might be encouraging too many people to do PhDs. Doing a PhD "for a job" is a bit odd. A masters is better intended for that. But a PhD is more directed towards doing research work. That said, in the worst case a PhD says "this person can work on ill-defined tasks and has the diligence to see them through." Regardless of the industry, that is a pretty useful skill.
> That said, in the worst case a PhD says "this person can work on ill-defined tasks and has the diligence to see them through." Regardless of the industry, that is a pretty useful skill.
Very few companies and industries want employees who
- are very conscientious ("has the diligence to see [the tasks] through"), and
- are much more effective working on their own, i.e. are no "team players" because they don't really need a team ("this person can work on ill-defined tasks").
"Using newly-assembled data from 1980 through 2024, we show that 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating."
I believe there will be a significant "discontinuity" in the data beginning in 2025. Likely along the lines of (1) US-born science majors going abroad for their PhD's (and likely staying there afterwards), and (2) a major decline in foreign students coming to the US. Blocking disbursement of ongoing grants, immediate and dramatic slashing funding for the sciences, holding up universities under pain of blocking federal funding, eliminating fellowships, firing government scientists, stuffing agencies and commissions with politically appointed yes men, having oaths of fealty in all but name, deporting and blocking return of foreign students, and many more actions of similar character tend to fo that.
One of the greatest national scientific establishments was irreparably damaged in a matter of months. No discussion, no process -- just pulling the rug out. The US will coast for a few years on the technologies that just popped out of the university pipeline of development, but that pipeline is now essentially broken.
I wonder how much generational impacts there are here. My son is a PhD student at an ivy. The most lucrative tuition source for the university is foreign students (as in, they bring in far more tuition dollars for each foreign student than they do native). He has also observed that the payers of these tuitions are usually the parents, who tend to be people who rose through the ideal of "the dream of american education" that is now 20+ years old. As the students (children) go through the programs, they are finding it increasingly more hostile to live and study here. So they end up wanting to "go back home". The Xenophobic rhetoric, as well as the policies, are having an effect. He does not see this as a good thing at all.
Multiple of my children have considered moving abroad to study. It's weird to sit between them and their frustration of the system, and their grandparents (our parents) who seem to think that the crap they're embibing off of fox news, all so that advertisers can target/fleece the older generation, will actually lead to good for their grandchildren.
Why is it necessary to have a flood of foreign money to operate the university? Universities in the past operated without an influx of wealthy foreign students paying outrageous tuition.
Today they are bloated with administration that is nothing but a cost center, meanwhile they eliminate tenured professorships and have classes taught by tenuous adjunct faculty who are paid poverty wages. Universities could easily right the ship by cutting the administration and focusing on teaching and research, but the people who need to make the decision to do that are the ones who would be cut.
More money, more income. That's why flood of foreign money is good for a university. But, it is a fallacy to think that this has no cost.
In my experience, the large influx of foreign students are typically at the masters level. MS classes are typically (not always lol!) more advanced than undergraduate classes. So, you need more qualified instructors, such as your tenured/tenure track faculty to teach them. When you take T/TT faculty out of undergraduate classes and replace them with teaching faculty, you lose a lot. (Let me know if you need what's lost to be spelled out.)
Continual cuts to both state funding and federal research support is a large part of it for public universities. Essentially, every time there is a major budget crisis, state support gets slashed, and it never gets put back when things get better.
Tuition is one of the few levers left, and while people will object to tuition hikes for in-state students, very few people will do the same for foreign students.
>
Why is it necessary to have a flood of foreign money to operate the university? Universities in the past operated without an influx of wealthy foreign students paying outrageous tuition.
I guess it is not strictly necessary, but it brings in a lot more money, which the university is of course very eager to take.
> The most lucrative tuition source for the university is foreign students (as in, they bring in far more tuition dollars for each foreign student than they do native).
Those probably aren't STEM PhD students, whose tuition (especially at Ivies!) is normally paid for out of research grants or teaching funds.
In 2007 I was an Italian citizen studying at a university in Texas.
For a final project, we built a cool autopilot, and demoed it on several vehicles, including a precision dropper airplane, and a sailboat.
The airplane happened to be slightly better than what the USAF admitted to having at the time.
There were 5 of us working on that project, including 1 US citizen.
The citizen got a NASA internship out of it. The rest of us were put on a list and I for one had a very tough time getting a green card later on even with a NIW.
I shudder to think what this maladministration is doing to foreign STEM students now!
This phenomenon (which is just an extreme version of out-of-state tuition for state schools) is almost entirely undergraduate driven, not STEM PhDs, who as mentioned in other posts, have tuition either waived or paid for via grants.
There was a whole thing if you recall in the first Trump admin about treating tuition waivers as income, which at an Ivy is potentially a financially catastrophic thing for a grad student.
It doesn't sound like a lot to me, either. I have known many people who moved to another country for graduate study. Some of them ended up settling in that country, but others pursued further study or employment in yet other countries. And perhaps the largest group among my acquaintances are those who eventually moved back to their home countries. They feel more comfortable there, they have family there, or, in many cases, returning home is what they intended to do all along.
It really depends on which 25% it is. Is it evenly distributed or is it the best and brightest, or the worst who are leaving. In addition, its institutional knowledge you are losing. I care much more about losing the guy with 15 years of experience than a fresh post-doc.
This is the plan not a coincidence. China pays huge “grants” to their citizens to come to the US, get educated, work in big tech/science, then bring it all home.
Perhaps, be anecdotally I've seen a significant shift in students from China in Canada and the US over the last couple of decades. It used to be that pretty much if someone can stay post graduation they will. Now many are choosing to go back to China, even if the opportunity to stay is there. This isn't just US policy, but also just the development of China. There are just a lot more opportunities there than there was 20 years ago.
Probably almost 40% of them came from China in the first place, because China has almost 40% of the candidates who are accepted to US grad programs in the first place. And, even without any grants, returning to China probably seems a lot more appealing than returning to Nigeria, Paraguay, or Bangladesh, whose acceptance rates are already handicapped by the much lower quality of undergraduate education available there.
When are people going to drop the immigration is good at all costs assumption.
We need a well managed set of immigration polices or country WILL take advantage of US. These are our military rivals and we sell our most advanced math, physics and engineering seats to the highest bidder. It’s a self districting disaster and it’s not just on us to treat people better.
Look at the rate of Indian asylum seekers in Canada to see the most extreme case. It happens anywhere you extend naivety and boundless good will.
The US could retain a lot of that talent if it put the same level of funding into science that China is, and remained welcoming to foreign nationals. The US has been brain-draining the rest of the world for decades with enormous benefits to us. We then led in most fields and the flywheel kept spinning. Now we are cutting research spending and closing the door, while China continues to increase its science funding year over year. The sclaes are tipping and talent will be drawn to the leading edge, wherever that is.
Thousand talent tier incentive is drop in the bucket, most sea turtles return because only so high you can climb in US with cold war bamboo ceiling. Past certain point, both US PRC can cut big checks, PRC lets a yellow face climb to top.
South Asian (Indian) / White / East Asian ceo gap something like 3 / 2 / 0.5 per million pop in US. Chinese long recognized this ceiling, and more are returning to PRC because of it. More and more, PRC getting Chinese returnees that are credentialled 40yro stuck at manager / director level who see greener PRC grass leaving after accumulating industry knowledge / experience taking their entire network / ip / tacit knowledge with them. PRC use to pay a lot of recruit these folks, but we're at that point a lot of Chinese Americans from 80s-90s are in their 30s-40s, who know how high they can climb in US. Meanwhile PRC printing highend jobs that attract Chinese talent with comparable compensation, and a better title / social status.
CEO gap mostly goes away when controlling for pop. age / cultural differences (less assertive), not nebulous racism like first comment. PRC still pays a lot to recruit through 1000 talents, USDOJ continues to uncover cases where $X00,000+ offered for IP / research. Meanwhile Chinese (m|b)illionaires make exit plans in case they get Jack Ma’d or worse.
Yes, yes and Asian tertiary applicants has worse personality except not. Eitherway, I didn't bring up racism. I said Chinese want leadership positions, they're not getting it vs the usual other races in US, so some go where they can get it, which happens to be increasingly PRC.
X00,000 USD is... not a lot anymore. That's normal compensation for high tier jobs, aka PRC tier1 opportunities is simply default globally competitive especially when you factor in other allowances. Top tier 1000 talent tier inducements where PRC build you a lab, give 7 digit in guaranteed funding, aka exactly the kind of opportunities bamboo ceiling is cutting off in US is pretty rare, almost rounding error in overall flow of talent. NVM DoJ has prosecuted ~0/150 thousand talent cases for actual espionage, i.e. never uncovered anything but candidates double dipping on PRC and NIH/NSF grants.
I don't know what billionaires capita flighting fraction of their liquidity has to do with anything. Ultimately whats more damaging for geopolitical S&T competition, capital flight, or knowledge flight.
There might be a plan but more likely Chinese salaries have grown a lot in the last 20 years. 20 years ago US salaries were much higher - it makes sense to get a US degree and work here. Now you might as well go home again, it isn't better to be in the US any more.
If this is true (I doubt it happens at scale), then the US got to benefit from some severely underpaid labor for a couple years at no cost to the taxpayer. What's there not to like?
It happens at scale. UK universities are also heavily subsidised by Chinese students. I also, where I am, I don't really see these students working in part-time jobs to pay the bills.
Daughter in the Material Science Phd progam at major state university with "world class" MS program. Vast majority of her peers are from abroad. Met some. All were the nicest, smartest folks you have ever met. I guess a benefit is that the probability of them leaving may help to increase the teamwork aspect in the program. But that is a guess. Great group of folks who hopefully might help change the world. Went to the recent Phd presentation where recent Phd graduates were honored. Let me tell you... hard to describe how inspiring these folks are. (MS is a pretty hard subject, with amazing applications. You may be thanking one guy who recently got his Phd should you ever get cancer.) Glad our universities welcome talent not demographics. HTH, RF.
Abstract: "Using newly-assembled data from 1980 through 2024, we show that 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating. Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades. Contrary to common perceptions, US technology benefits from these graduates' work even if they leave: though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share, and as large as all other countries combined. These results highlight the value that the US derives from training foreign scientists - not only when they stay, but even when they leave."
The more important question is: what is the rate of scientists coming in vs going out?
If they are in balance, then it looks a lot less of a problem. It may even be the case that because of the desirability of working in the US for US institutions the US is gaining the best from all around the world and shipping out a more mixed ability set.
"Using new data which tracks US-trained STEM PhDs through 2024, we show that despite foreign nationals comprising nearly 50% of trainees, only 10% leave the US within five years of graduating, and only 25% within 15 years."
That sounds like net benefit for the US. Foreign nationals come, the US sells them (overpriced) education, they do relatively low-paid but high-value PhD research, and then most of them stay and continue to contribute to US research endeavors and the economy. This is such an enviable position, and this administration wants to close the doors? This is the secret sauce. This is what has made america great.
> We use SED data to measure the number of PhD graduates in our focal STEM fields who were non-US citizens at the time of graduation.
[...]
> Emigration rates across PhD cohorts correlate strongly with the foreign national share of graduates ( = 0.86 to 0.95) [...] In all cohorts, the 5-year (15-year) emigration rate is approximately 25% (50%) of the foreign national share
I am not sure if they did this on purpose or not but they missed putting that critical part in the title or right in the abstract. The majority here are not US citizens but foreign nationals. And, most importantly, I couldn't find where they mentioned (or maybe they don't) that these students are studying in US on non-immigrant visas. They're not supposed to or expected to stay after they are done studying. Some stay if they find a company to sponsor them for an internship (Optional Practical Training) but unless they change their visa type they're still expected to leave for their home country.
Without that part highlighted it makes it sound like these US citizens who were born and grew up in US, went to universities here, and then graduated and went to work in China or Europe or something. There is a number of those but, it's not the majority. Maybe they can study just that cohort separately, I think that would be a more interesting thing to look at.
While indeed a positive outlook, I think alot of Americans are beginning to wonder what the benefit will be to them.
The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development. While I dont agree with the sentiment, its not entirely incorrect to describe such relationships are parasitic more then symbiotic when they become increasingly one-sided.
Why should Americans be exporting PHDs to other countries when they dont seem to be reaping the benefits?
Given that most PhD students pay for their earlier education and then do underpaid grunt work as part of their program, the US should already be reaping the benefits. It's only failing to reap them in the sense that more could be gained if they stayed, and that a citizen would be more likely to stay.
Having a fraction of US PhD leave might be a good thing for cross-pollination. The fact that they've left doesn't mean their contacts and relationships vaporize. This could help America stay abreast and integrated with foreign research.
Germany has taxpayer-subsidized education even for foreign students. They may stay, the may leave. One of its views is that the time the student spent in the country helps foster cultural ties and understanding, and generates goodwill towards the country...
I suppose "goodwill" is hard to translate to cold hard cash, so America doesn't really like it ;-)
The US is not "exporting" anything. PhDs are people, they pay for their education and they leave.
Nevertheless responding to your question:
>Contrary to common perceptions, US technology benefits from these graduates' work even if they leave: though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share
STEM PhD students typically pay with labor rather than cash. Labor to teach undergrads, and to perform other university research. (though they typically pay their undergrad with large piles of cash).
That is, very much, a substantial form of payment.
This is manifestly not true. What leads you to believe this? Certainly there are some who don't, just as with undergraduate education. But there's no blanket program in the US to pay for all STEM PhDs.
All of the dozens of US STEM PhDs I know from recent decades had to pay their tuition by working as TAs, RAs, or usually both. They didn't walk in the door with a trust fund, work through the coursework, and then write up a dissertation. I'm not sure that's even a possibility in most STEM fields: you need access to millions of dollars of ultra-specialized equipment which you can realistically only get by working in an existing lab, which means being an RA.
So let me see: a person from another country receives a service that is exclusive, very limited and in high demand (PhD), pays for it, and that person eventually takes it back to country of origin.
US education must be in a woeful state because that is the definition of export.
Given the exclusivity and value of the service you'd think you'd want to hang on to it, but I guess xenophobia is one thing that is more important than money.
I've been hearing nothing but bad things about the actual education in US institutions. I think they've tarnished their name at this point to no return.
"...a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development"
That "growing sense" is not growing organically, it's being energetically fertilized. The problem isn't that most Americans aren't benefiting from global goodwill and development, it's that they aren't benefiting from domestic development. And the minority who are benefiting disproportionately from domestic economic growth are expending significant resources to convince everybody else that the problem lies with the rest of the world.
> isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development
I think the rhetoric is the cause, not the response to that sense (besides the obvious feedback loop). Internationalism created a world of unprecendented - literally in human history - freedom, peace and prosperity. You can see what things look like with even the beginnings of nationalism.
I would implore you to empathize with the American working class, who have seen their living standards continuously deteriorate over multiple generations.
I know the hackernews audience skews more affluent and wealthy, with demographics pulling from more developed coastal cities, but the vast majority of citizens do not exist in such living conditions. Focusing entirely on the development an prosperity of only a handful of our cities is what has created the perfect fertile soil for Xenophobia to grow.
I dont see the rhetoric as the cause, just the motions of opportunists taking advantage of a situation that we are all at fault for.
Despite all the freedom, peace, and prosperity, its so unevenly distributed that many citizens live in squalor rivaling some destitute underdeveloped nations.
> The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development.
I'm not sure I buy your claim that this is the reason for the rhetoric. And if you're right that this is the reason for the rhetoric, it's extremely flawed reasoning.
Diminishing material conditions makes a fertil breeding ground for right wing nationalism (isolationism and xenophobia). It's a pattern being replicated all over the world. UK citizens don't have high heat bills and sewage leaking into their rivers because of privatization and Brexit, it's because there's too many refugees!
Of course it's incorrect, but without the diminishing material conditions, it's a lot harder to get people to drum up the energy to be racist.
The US got talent for free for years; young people whose upbringing and education has been paid by/in a foreign country. The most expensive formative years had been paid for by the sponsoring country.
> The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development
The rhetoric is learned from a well balanced media diet, served for free by the 0.0001%
"Increasingly few Americans are" getting to evade the consequence of wealth concentration and monopolies. Large parts of the US economy have been starved by monopolist practices in the past decennia. I recently linked a very approachable documentary¹ from ARTE, in thee parts, if you want to understand what is really happening.
Maybe try a vpn? It is an European production, I am not sure, but there could be some rights limitation. It is available till end of January. Protonvpn is free and has EUR servers.
Bit of a shame for the hassle though, the documentary is very good and the topics it touches are rarely highlighted. So give it an other try.
My read: China is seen as a serious geopolitical rival that the United States must beat in a shooting or Cold or AI or <insert here> war. As a result PHDs to China as an export would be a negative impact, not a positive one potentially.
Or their constant threats against Taiwan, or their oppression of LGBT people in their borders, or their genocide against the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, or their heel-turn into racialized nationalism (Han Chauvinism).
On top of that, it is a significant reverse brain drain. Like 20-25 years ago you'd be hard pressed to find tenure track CS faculty at most America programs let alone a major program lime Cal or UIUC consider returning to a program like Shanghai Jiao Tong or IIT Bombay compared to today.
It has upskilled academia in those countries, but we also lost talent who could have remained here.
It is it really our talent though? The US has been so addicted to China and India for STEM talent for so long that...what did they expect was going to happen? And the effect is much more prominent for China than India: China has a lot of money to dump into modernizing while India is still a relatively poor country. Imagine what will happen when India gets richer as well?
Based on personal experience (friends who either entered academia/industry or me being the son of white collar immigrants to the US) I'd say large portion want to return to China and India due to family ties, but a number would have stayed in the US if immigration wasn't such a PITA - especially because companies and programs don't really like filing for an O-1s unless they found a unicorn.
You hit the nail on the head on developing countries not being as poor anymore, and opportunties proliferating which reduces the pull factor, but there are a decent amount of academics and professionals who would gladly work in the US if given the opportunity and it wasn't such a headache.
>though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share, and as large as all other countries combined.
Perhaps it is a good thing that innovation is not encumbered by patents as much in other countries as it has been in the US.
The US is going to lose its edge regardless. American exceptionalism after WW2 was always going to be temporary. With just 4% of the world's population the US could not stay on top of anything forever.
Not only do people leave the US but stay in Academia, plenty of people leave the research pipeline after receiving years and years of highly specialized, expert training. As an American who used to work in Tech and is currently getting a PhD, the geographic constraints on the (top tier) academic job market are more severe than people outside of Academia typically realize. It's a shame, because if it were the norm that science could happen by university-trained experts but in non-university institutions, we could a) fix the leaky pipeline, and b) see greater scientific progress.
What I mean is that if you don't like the company you work for in, say, SF, you can switch companies without having to switch houses. In Academia... it's akin to going to conservatory for classical music: you have to travel to where the orchestral openings are. This is a bit of a legacy problem from Wilhelm von Humboldt's idea to combine teaching and research, which led to the modern university system.
I'm far from the first person to say this, btw. Convergent Research's "Focused Research Organization" concept as well as The Arc and Astera Institutes are a few recent examples of people trying to provide escape routes from having to deal the large degree of "institutional tech/systems debt" in university contexts. For a great essay on why this is necessary, see "A Vision of Meta-science" (highly recommended if you are interested) [1].
The good news is that people are starting to come around to the idea that the scientific ecosystem would benefit from more diversity in the shape, size, and form of science-generating institutions.=The NSF just announced a new program to fund such "independent research organizations." I think this could give people who want to go into the sciences as a second career and who have a bit of an entrepreneurial tendency a new kind of Job opportunity [2]. We talk about Founders all of the time in Tech, we should probably have some equivalent in the best possible sense of the term, in the Sciences.
> 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating.
This is a feature not a bug.
For people missing the abstract, here it is and I'm giving emphesis to an important part.
Using newly-assembled data from 1980 through 2024, we show that 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating. Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades. ***Contrary to common perceptions, US technology benefits from these graduates' work even if they leave: though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share, and as large as all other countries combined. These results highlight the value that the US derives from training foreign scientists - not only when they stay, but even when they leave.***
Not only that but there's the whole cultural export too. Come live in America for 4-10 years and you're going to be acclimated to some of the cultures and customs. You don't think you're going to go home and take some of that with you? Conversely, America isn't a "melting-pot" because of a monoculture, but because it brings many different cultures together. The whole education system is as much a part of "cultural warfare" as is the movie industry, music industry, or even Korea's K-Pop scene (which has been incredibly successful, just like Thailand's program for restaurants in foreign countries).
While personally I'd staple Green Cards to every Ph.D. given to a foreign national, I simultaneously want them to go back to their home countries and make their countries better. To take the good from America, leave the bad, and to build lasting relationships between the countries. That's a win-win situation. Both countries benefit from this! As well as the people. (I'd staple Green Cards so the person can make that choice.)
I haven't read the whole paper (nor will I), but I get the impression that much of this will not be addressed in it. Perfectly okay, they're focused on the easier to measure parts. But let's also not forget that there is a whole lot more to the bigger picture here. A whole lot more than my comment even implies.
Let me ask you this: when trained scientists from {other economy} arrive in the US, do you ask yourself why? Is it of necessity because {other economy} is "worse" and US is "better" or can it be personal, unrelated, case-by-case?
What is a natural, good flow for people between economies in this instance? is it zero or 100% where along this arc does it lie, and why?
It's the second (so far bc he hasn't ruled out a third) presidential term for a strongly anti-immigrant / anti-immigration president who has a lot of support domestically.
Immigrants are being chased out of the US in record numbers. Many of my friends with brown skin (second generation immigrants) are worried their kids will be harrassed by ICE, etc.
The sad fact is that there are a LOT of Americans who deeply resent when someone from another country comes to the US, works hard, and earns a prosperous and happy life.
The US is now led by an emotional revenge-driven crusade against the American Dream, against capitalism, against the "melting pot" that fuels culture and innovation. It's a weird kind of revenge idiocracy going on right now.
In case it's not obvious, many of us here are deeply ashamed of what is going on and we will make it right eventually. I'm personally looking forward to the lawsuits that end up paying people mistreated by ICE significant sums of money, give them flights back to the US, etc. The US has a labor shortage and a talent shortage right now, we need the best and brightest, the most hard working, etc., not the lazy ones who think they are owed something and believe the orange clown.
Sorry to ruin your mudslinging, but if you read the second sentence of the linked study, you'll see the American voters' choice of president has nothing to do with this:
> Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades
Sorry to ruin your ruining, but if you read past the abstract and look at the data, you'll see it tends to correlate with whether a democrat or republican is in office. Immigration policy is also mentioned in the discussion.
> Given these findings, a corollary question is what attracts foreign graduate students to the US and leads them to stay. Prior research points to immigration policy—a subject of perennial public interest—having a large effect on stay rates
Not true. The article asserts that immigration policy is a big driver of "stay rates" for immigrants.
Also, I did not assert that either party is "good" on immigration. The US should relax restrictions and allow many more immigrants to enter/study/work/live.
If we really want growth, fully open borders would double world GDP.
Education is one of our greatest exports. What's wrong with people getting training here and going back home to enrich their community? If they don't do that we're going to be accused of promoting "brain drain".
> Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades
The US has been completely dominant in technology innovation for the last several decades. So, the answer is no: the loss of 1/4 of the STEM scientists is not important.
I’m a US sixth generation or more citizen and a scientist and I want to leave if the next election doesn’t go wildly different than the 2024 one. The brain drain is real. It’s sad to see it happen in your own country.
It's hard to compare across countries. No other country has anything like the US's research-university system, although China is working on it. But foreign students in China probably aren't hoping to be able to live there for the rest of their lives—China's immigration policies are considerably more xenophobic. The UK might be the closest comparison?
Generally speaking, American exceptionalism is nonsense. The US isn't the only free country, the freest country, the only democratic country, the most democratic country, the richest country, the most diverse country, a city on the hill, divinely inspired, uniquely blessed by God, the only capitalist country, any of that nonsense. It was some of those when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, but it hasn't been for decades. But the US's research university system is unique in the world, and nobody else even comes close.
The grad-student system in science at US R1 universities is sort of like a dollar auction. You know how a dollar auction works? I have a dollar bill, and I'll give it to whoever bids the highest for it—as long as both they and the #2 bidder pay me their final bids. The #2 bidder gets nothing. Bidding can start at 5¢. Once the bid goes over a dollar, the two remaining bidders are no longer competing to win free money; they're jockeying to lose less. It typically goes up to 2 to 5 dollars before one of them decides to cut their losses.
Numerous doctoral students (and postdocs, and adjuncts) are competing for a much smaller number of tenure-track positions with their research work. If their publication record looks just a little better than the #2 candidate, they can escape from the postdoc grind and land a nice assistant professorship. Then it's only seven more years of busting their ass before they find out whether they washed out, or are set for life with a cushy associate professorship, maybe a full professorship.
People are willing to sacrifice a lot for that. But the vast majority of those who make the sacrifice don't make it, like the #2 bidder in the dollar auction. They put in years on somewhat-above-minimum-wage grad-student and postdoc stipends, doing incredibly difficult and sometimes dangerous work, often postponing childbearing, leaving behind their families each time they have to move to a new university, and either leaving behind their intimate partners or uprooting them as well. All of that redounds to the glory of the PI who runs the lab they work in—but many of those doing all that work regret the sacrifice.
Scientific progress isn't just a matter of doling out research grants and possessing fancy lab equipment. It needs talent, but that isn't nearly enough—the talented people need to work incredibly hard for many years to make real progress. For decades the US has been recruiting the top talent from the rest of the world with this dollar-auction game, paying them peanuts to sacrifice the best years of their lives.
A doctorate doesn't sound like a bad life to me, really. But you have to feel that the system, like minor-league baseball, is kind of taking advantage of doctoral students' hopes and dreams to get the rather astounding rate of scientific progress we see today (at least by some measures). It funds public goods for everyone out of those sacrifices.
The least the US could do would be to show a little more gratitude by guaranteeing them permanent US residency after they graduate, but they don't even get that—many people are kicked out of the US, where they've spent most of their adult lives, when they wash out of the academic pipeline. And the current deplorable administration has promised to worsen this already deplorable situation.
> The least the US could do would be to show a little more gratitude by guaranteeing them permanent US residency after they graduate, but they don't even get that—many people are kicked out of the US, where they've spent most of their adult life, when they wash out of the academic pipeline.
And they often have no choice but to work in academia too, because Academic H1B are lottery exempt but not Industry H1B and they aren't transferable. Pretty messed up.
10-15 years ago my foreign grad students all wanted to stay. Only question was how.
There was always a big crowd who found the process of staying in the US painful, random, humiliating, and sometimes even downright abusive, so they went home.
What has really changed is China. That's what this paper shows too. Many of the Chinese students want go back home.
10-15 years ago when I would talk to grad students from China most wanted freedom and democracy. Now most tell me about how the Western system has failed and how a centralized government is more efficient.
Between making it harder to stay, China changing the narrative on dictatorships, and the West doing a horrific job in the last decade on pretty much every front, yeah, we're going to see a lot of folks move back.
Even 10 years they wanted to stay. I was at Microsoft China at the time, and management would complain about Google or Facebook in CA still getting the best prospects from Qinghua/PKU. It wasn't about freedom or democracy at all, they just wanted big paychecks without the 996.
Today it is an easier case to stay, although 996 is still a thing. Still, if you can make your FU money by age 35 (and it still has to be by age 35 according to a relative), you have it set.
There was no "change of narrative", the West just stopped delivering, similar to what happened to the Soviet system starting with the 1970s (and which ended the way it did by the early 1990s).
Knowledge and intelligence are wasted outside of the US. You could build great stuff but if you're not in the US, your chance of success is extremely low because the media algorithms will work against you. Not to mention regulations. In Europe, it felt like politicians were being paid to suppress tech.
I'm jealous of tech people who live in media-sovereign countries like the US, China or Russia who don't have to experience algorithm discrimination.
IMO, tech/science people who leave the US before accumulating big money are making a mistake. They underestimate how rigged the tech industry is. You've got to leverage the rigging. You either benefit from the rigging or you are victim of it. I cannot wrap my mind around people who are born in the US and leave. People don't understand how lucky and privileged they are before it's gone.
Well. Duh. The US PERM process is a nightmare. And it's not just the requirements and regional quotas. It's also the complete opacity of the process, with the USCIS taking _years_ to process straightforward applications in some cases.
Dude, seriously. I'm a citizen and work in a lab, and I have a world expert in my lab... One of maybe 5 in the world, Canadian... And the difficulty for him to stay is insane.
If you asked any American how hard he should have it, they'd probably expect he just needed to fill out a form, pay $150, and wait 1-2 years.
What does it mean to "leave" the US? I know several people with advanced degrees in the sciences who had children in Europe and raised their kids there for years, but eventually came back. One family returned to Europe a second time. When you have a company or university sponsoring you it's not too difficult to move freely, so "leaving" feels like a moving target for this particular socioeconomic group.
my view for a long time has been that the usa is a net importer of talent and ideas. that its cheaper to have someone spend 20 odd years training in another country and then just lure them in with the promise of big $... isnt that how its been working? or is this some new spin.
US doesn't train anyone, that headline would only make sense somewhere in... every other country in the world (more or less), where the government actually subsidizes education (a lot of the times up to 100%).
In the US, people pay for their own training, so they can damn well go wherever they please.
My understanding is that scientific research has a dual problem, where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. The result being that most trained PhDs must leave (US) academia because there are no jobs for them. In fact, I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more help finding a job in industry after they graduate.
Given all that, where are professors supposed to find and hire students who don't want to stay in academia themselves? I think a lot of these students wind up being aspiring immigrants, and I'm not surprised that a lot of them would also have a hard time finding a place for themselves after graduating and that many of them would leave. Also, the abstract seems to argue that that US still benefits greatly from this arrangement: "though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share."
If the culture normalized such that a much larger proportion of research was conducted by permanent, non-faculty, research employees, this would both reduce the need for so many students and increase the jobs available for students, and create a new employment niche with a different balance of teaching/administration/research. It would basically be turning "post doc" into an actual career rather than a stop over.
This would be better for everyone involved, at the admitted cost of being quite a bit more expensive. My guess is that the market would naturally converge on this equilibrium if the information of job placement rates on a per-program (or even per lab/advisor) were more readily available.
Also, consider what the postdoc is.
A person arrives on a 18 month funded postdoc (believe me, plenty exist). They have just completed a PhD which means they probably have a couple papers published and maybe another one or two in the pipeline. So as they spin up their time with you, they are also finishing these papers from their previous job. By six months in they are done with that and fully onboarded to the project. So they spend six months working. But now, they only have six months left of contract. You don't have money to keep them or perhaps your country will require you to offer a permanent contract if it is being renewed so you cannot offer them to extend their position with you. So they spend the final six months of their postdoc looking for a job. So, for 18 months of salary, you get six to eight months of work. It's unreasonable. Things need to change.
Or lets say you have a mission critical project that must be done by a postdoc. You offer them a 3 year contract that is grant funded. It is three years because most grant agencies work on three year cycles. The project requires a year commitment to building an apparatus (maybe its a lab experiment, maybe it's training some foundation model, whatever). After that year, the apparatus can be used for science. Your postdoc comes to you in year 2 month 3 and says, well I have been offered a faculty position at university X so I am leaving in the fall. So you get 18 months of work out of them and now cannot hire anyone else because you only have 18 months of funding left, but your country requires you to offer a minimum of 24 months contract. Things need to change.
It's important to note that academics often keep projects from their former positions going at their new ones. But as soon as someone leaves to industry, this falls apart. Because industrial positions expect the person to work on the project they specify, they rarely hire someone to work as an academic, pursuing their own research directions.
I think the solution here is as others have suggested, spend more money on hiring people for longer term and with higher salaries. But we shall see if anyone listens to that advice.
This isn't really a culture problem, IMO, as much as a funding one.
My group currently employs two people of the description you have, and it does reduce the need for students (and honestly, increase productivity).
It's also by far the most stressful part of my job. Funding them involves writing multiple grants per year (because the expectation of any particular grant is low, even with a decent hit rate) and I am constantly worried that I won't be able to keep them employed.
If one of them leaves this year, I'm not likely to replace them, simply because in the current funding environment, I can't look someone in the eye and promise them a long term position. There are so many more ways to fund a student, and they're inherently time limited, so even if things collapse, there's ways to white knuckle through it in a way there aren't for staff scientists.
The funding problem is a cultural problem though. Religious right wing politicians in the US have attacked science and education funding at every opportunity. Science and education produce ideas that are at odds with right wing religious orthodoxy, so those things must not be allowed in society.
I don't think it's that simple.
I'm not religious, but I think a lot of academic funding is wasteful.
It's not just that science contradicts orthodox religious views. It's also that humanities education and exposure to a diversity of people and thought can "deprogram" students away from traditional ways of thinking, which is a threat to traditional power hierarchies.
Notably even the role of the professor has drastically changed in the last few decades. The "publish or perish" paradigm has really taken over and changed the type of research being done. Higgs famously said he wouldn't make it as a non-tenured faculty in today's academic culture.
Not to mention that the type of research being done has drastically changed too. There's many more projects that require wide collaboration. You're not going to do something like CERN, DESI, LIGO, or many other scientific mega projects from a single lab, or even single field of study.
The academic deal has changed. It used to be that by becoming a professor you were granted facilities and time to carry out your research. In return you had to help educate and foster the next generation. It is mutually beneficial. There were definitely abusers of the system, but it is generally not too difficult to tell who in your own department is trying to take advantage of the system, but incredibly difficult to identify these people when looking from the perspective of a university administration. There's been more centralization in the university administration and I'm afraid Goodhart's Law is in full force now.
What I'd like to see is more a return to the Laissez-faire approach. It shouldn't be completely relaxed, but to summarize Mervin Kelly (who ran Bell Labs): "You don't manage a bunch of geniuses, they already know what needs to be worked on. That's what makes them experts in the first place." At the end of the day we can't run academia like a business and it really shouldn't be. The profits generated from academia are less direct and more distributed through society. Evaluating universities by focusing on their expenditures and direct profits alone is incredibly naive. We're better able to make less naive evaluations today, but we still typically don't (it is still fairly complex)
Your suggestion would have fewer fresh eyes to look at the problem. If the scientific enterprise were just about churning out widgets, then yes it’s better to have permanent staff.
But having a strong training pipeline for the globe is a huge plus for US prestige, and the top people are still offered jobs as faculty or industry within the country, so it still a net gain for USA. But it’s brutally competitive for the individual scientists
While I'm more skeptical than you are of the value of a string of new students coming through as opposed to just keeping the very best students, I'm also not suggesting we mandate this change or force it. I'm suggesting that we give people more information to make better informed decisions. If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change. If they aren't satisfied with that, and we decide that actually they were performing a valuable service, then it behoovs society to pay them enough that they becoming willing to make that gamble again.
The current information assymetry is exploitative. One of two things would happen under my proposed system: either nothing would change because students think they are getting a good deal as is or students don't think the deal is worth it which means that the current system only works because students are having the reality of the job market hidden from them.
AI in industry was basically made my PhD grads. Without that pipeline, there would be no AI, and I am not exaggerating much at all.
I think a mix of the current system with more permanent researchers makes sense.
There is a lot of work in research that fits the permanent worker better than the fresh 22 year old. But having that fresh talent is really beneficial to science.
> If students decide that they are comfortable with a sub 20% job placement rate, then great, nothing needs to change.
The problem is in my opinion not this low job placement rate per se (it is very easy to find out that this is the case for basically every prospective researcher). The problem rather is the "politics" involved in filling these positions, and additionally the fact that positions are commonly filled by what is currently "fashionable". If you, for some (often good) reason, did good research in an area that simply did not become "fashionable": good luck finding an academic position.
But the current system has a problem of training people for a job and then sending them to do something else. Even a professorship is a very different job than a graduate researcher or postdoc. Most professors do little research themselves these days, instead managing research. Don't you think that's a little odd, not to mention wasteful? We definitely should have managers, and managers with research backgrounds themselves, but why not let people continue honing their research skills?
It is. But this is also a social choice dictated by how much we as a country want to fund research.In a practical sense, I would argue the scientific is primarily about churning out grants and papers.
Thats interesting, I don't know if I have ever seen this kind of labor market logic applied to science before. Is this an agreed upon idea? In my mind, science and the kind of focused research it entails is kind of definitionally distinct from something like "innovation." Like, frankly, yes, I want a stream of widgets; if that means consistent units of research done to contribute to an important area/problem, which are reviewed and judged by peers.
Like what's even the alternative? We want a Steve Jobs of science? That's really what we are going for?
Are you suggesting science and innovation are distinct?
Scientific progress is largely driven by the “Steve Jobs” of sciences.
Only a tiny fraction of papers remain relevant. So that means the quality of the average paper doesn’t matter as much as the quality of the best paper.
What you’re describing sounds a lot like the Department of Energy national labs. They have (or had) many permanent-track research roles without teaching obligations, where scientists can have long stable research careers.
The problem, as always, is funding. In the US, the federal govt is essentially the only “customer” of basic research. There’s some private funding, often from kooky millionaires who want someone to invent a time machine, but it’s the exception that proves the rule. Universities sometimes have pure research roles, but they’re generally dependent on the employee paying themselves with a constant stream of grants. It’s a stressful and precarious position.
To a large extent, I think this could be solved by labs having more long-term permanent research staff (technicians, data analysts, scientists) and reducing the number of PhD students. Many students would gladly stay on in that position instead of leaving, so it increases job opportunities. It would also improve the quality of the science because the permanent staff would have more historical knowledge, in contrast to the current situation where students constantly rotate in and out with somewhat messy hand-offs. The students could also then focus more on scholarly work, planning and overseeing research execution with the team. The problem is that the incentives are aligned to allocate students to doing all lab tasks, not long term staff. I think we could change this through changes to the requirements and structure of science funding mechanisms however, since ultimately that's the source of the incentives.
Academia is a pyramid, like most organizations, eventually most PhDs cannot get a full time position.
The fact that many PhDs leave is..normal..if you get few high impact publications you can find full time positions outside US, even as an associate professor and not just a researcher.
And the reason why many go to universities around the world for PhDs is not because they want to stay in that place necessarily but because you're more likely to fund your PhD research and get a high impact publication.
> much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available
Expanding on this a bit, insight credited to bonoboTP: in a steady state the number of junior faculty positions will only open up at the same rate as current faculty retires. But each faculty member is expected to train dozens of students that are all in principle qualified for such jobs. Therefore, the vast majority, let's say 95%, of PhD graduates have to take industry jobs, there is no way around it. But this does not seem to be the goal of the 95%, hence the incredibly tight job market. Returning to their home country for a faculty job acts as another release valve, but sooner or later those will be filled as well, except in countries in the rapidly expanding phase in terms of university education.
The tenure system is incredibly broken as a result. Ideally, I think there needs to be more non-faculty careers available for PhD graduates either outside or inside academia. After all, there is clearly some value in the work a PhD student does, otherwise they would not be paid. Perhaps we can have public or semi-public research institutions that hire these scientists for actual development. Most likely this will require an upstream incentive change so that grants are awarded to these newly minted organizations.
Universities charge a large overhead in part to cover the "tuition" for the PhD students, which is really a meaningless number since it's taken out of the same check they give you the remainder of. If we just strip out this part and give most of it to the scientist, economically it should be a viable salary.
When I was a physics grad student ~35 years go, this was called "the birth control problem. I had every intention of going into industry. I described it to my dad who got his PhD in the 1950s and he said it was the same back then. But there's a perennial "this time it will be different."
It wasn't the same in the 1950s. When it became really clear to me how dire the long term job situation was when I getting my PhD in the 1990s I started combing through issues of Physics Today and noticed that the field and academia as a whole was explosively expanding from 1920-1968 or so and there was a sudden crisis in the late 1960s, with an echo in the late 1970s and also when I was in in the late 1990s. (Physics Today said I had 2% odds of getting a permanent job even coming from a top school)
I had one day when I'd posted a Java applet to the web that got 100,000 impressions and getting so much attention for that and so little attention for papers that took me a year to write made me resolve to tell my thesis advisor that I was going to quit. Before I could tell him, he told me he had just a year of funding for me and I thought.. I could tough it out for a year. People were shocked when I did a postdoc when most of my cohort were going straight to finance.
My mental health went downhill in Germany and I stomped away, in retrospect I was the only native English speaker at the institute and I could have found a place for myself for some time had I taken on the task of proofreading papers and I can easily imagine I could have made it in academia but heck, life on a horse farm doing many sorts of software development has been a blast.
One big disruption in the job market was that mandatory age-based retirement was outlawed. This created a span of several years when there were virtually no retirements.
I should have mentioned that my dad's degree was in chemistry, and it might have been a different vibe. But the production of PhDs at a rate faster than they could be absorbed by academic hiring was a thing. My dad (and mom, she got her master's in chemistry) went into industry too, so maybe I was lucky to have good role models.
"Ideally, I think there needs to be more non-faculty careers available for PhD graduates either outside or inside academia."
For awhile, I loved that my field had lots of opportunities outside academia for PhD students, and that they were held in pretty equal regard, prestige wise, with academic positions.
Then the current administration gutted the entire field.
I was accepted into a PhD CS program despite applying for a masters. The advisor had something on his door about the limited number of slots open for people who graduate from grad school. Tried to discourage me from the program.
Quit after two semesters.
There's that and the fact that a lot of people who attain graduate degrees are immigrants who do so for the sake of immigration.
The whole system essentially self selects for cheap labor and exploitation.
If the feds put a high salary requirement on it like the E or O series visas, perhaps the system might change.
The scientific minds of India, China, and Russia don't come to the US and slave away in the lab purely out of passion for advancing science, they do so because it's a path towards the green card. The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests.
> The PIs and laboratory heads all know damn well how the system works, they are no better than those bosses of H1B sweatshops, except perhaps they do their exploitation from ivy filled ivory towers rather than in Patagonia vests.
In my observation there do exist quite some people among the PIs and laboratory heads who are quite highly idealistic for research, but have no other option than playing this rigged game of academia.
BUT you are missing that there is still demand for positions out in industry as well as government labs. But there's also a decline in that right now as we're going through a time of encouraging more engineering and less research.
In reality there's a pipeline of research. If you haven't been introduced to it, I like to point to NASA's TRL (Technology Readiness Level) chart[0]. The pipeline is from very basic research to proven systems. Traditionally academia and government labs do the majority of work in the low TRL while industry research handles mid level (stuff that isn't quite ready for production). The reason for this is due to the higher rate of failure of low level research and so shifts risks away from industry. Not to mention that industry has different incentives and is going to be more narrowly focused. Academia and gov labs can research more long term projects that will have large revenue growths but may take decades to get those returns. I mean how much do we get from the invention of calculus? Or the creation of WWW? We'd also get far less growth and profits were these not more distributed.
So while yes, getting a professorship is a challenge and highly competitive, it is far from the only path for these graduates. We can also do a lot to increase (or decrease) their options by increasing (or decreasing) funding for science. There's a lot of science that happens outside academic labs and they still depend on PhD graduates to be able to do most of that work. If you want these people to have jobs, fund more low level research[1]
A big reason for this is that networking is still a big issue. I can tell you as someone who does not have a good relationship with my former advisor that this has made job hunting a much harder experience compared to other peers. While my credentials are better than some of those people they come in through a side door (often skipping things like LeetCode challenges) and instead I have to go through the standard applicant pool. I don't think they don't deserve those jobs (most of them do), but just pointing out that networking is still a critical part of hiring. I mean even one simple part is that when applying you might not even know what a group is doing and if that's what you want to do. Solicitations are often vague. Even if there were no advantage to the hiring process networking still provides a huge advantage to the filtering process.I mean even putting the personal experience to the side, don't we want to make the most use of the resources we have? Don't we want to get graduates connected to labs/work places where they will be most effective? This is still a surprisingly complex problem to resolve and even limiting the hiring problem to PhDs (where there's far less noise than general hiring) it is still a complicated problem.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-...
[1] But I'd also say that we might be encouraging too many people to do PhDs. Doing a PhD "for a job" is a bit odd. A masters is better intended for that. But a PhD is more directed towards doing research work. That said, in the worst case a PhD says "this person can work on ill-defined tasks and has the diligence to see them through." Regardless of the industry, that is a pretty useful skill.
> That said, in the worst case a PhD says "this person can work on ill-defined tasks and has the diligence to see them through." Regardless of the industry, that is a pretty useful skill.
Very few companies and industries want employees who
- are very conscientious ("has the diligence to see [the tasks] through"), and
- are much more effective working on their own, i.e. are no "team players" because they don't really need a team ("this person can work on ill-defined tasks").
"Using newly-assembled data from 1980 through 2024, we show that 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating."
I believe there will be a significant "discontinuity" in the data beginning in 2025. Likely along the lines of (1) US-born science majors going abroad for their PhD's (and likely staying there afterwards), and (2) a major decline in foreign students coming to the US. Blocking disbursement of ongoing grants, immediate and dramatic slashing funding for the sciences, holding up universities under pain of blocking federal funding, eliminating fellowships, firing government scientists, stuffing agencies and commissions with politically appointed yes men, having oaths of fealty in all but name, deporting and blocking return of foreign students, and many more actions of similar character tend to fo that.
One of the greatest national scientific establishments was irreparably damaged in a matter of months. No discussion, no process -- just pulling the rug out. The US will coast for a few years on the technologies that just popped out of the university pipeline of development, but that pipeline is now essentially broken.
You'd very likely be wrong. People said the same thing in Trump's first cycle.
We tend to overestimate the short term effects due to polarization and the constant media cycle.
What happens at the NIH and NSF has absolutely no parallel in his first term. Don’t kid yourself, this is not more of the same.
Dumpty's first cycle still had a few sane people pulling his puppet strings.
I wonder how much generational impacts there are here. My son is a PhD student at an ivy. The most lucrative tuition source for the university is foreign students (as in, they bring in far more tuition dollars for each foreign student than they do native). He has also observed that the payers of these tuitions are usually the parents, who tend to be people who rose through the ideal of "the dream of american education" that is now 20+ years old. As the students (children) go through the programs, they are finding it increasingly more hostile to live and study here. So they end up wanting to "go back home". The Xenophobic rhetoric, as well as the policies, are having an effect. He does not see this as a good thing at all.
Multiple of my children have considered moving abroad to study. It's weird to sit between them and their frustration of the system, and their grandparents (our parents) who seem to think that the crap they're embibing off of fox news, all so that advertisers can target/fleece the older generation, will actually lead to good for their grandchildren.
Why is it necessary to have a flood of foreign money to operate the university? Universities in the past operated without an influx of wealthy foreign students paying outrageous tuition.
Today they are bloated with administration that is nothing but a cost center, meanwhile they eliminate tenured professorships and have classes taught by tenuous adjunct faculty who are paid poverty wages. Universities could easily right the ship by cutting the administration and focusing on teaching and research, but the people who need to make the decision to do that are the ones who would be cut.
More money, more income. That's why flood of foreign money is good for a university. But, it is a fallacy to think that this has no cost.
In my experience, the large influx of foreign students are typically at the masters level. MS classes are typically (not always lol!) more advanced than undergraduate classes. So, you need more qualified instructors, such as your tenured/tenure track faculty to teach them. When you take T/TT faculty out of undergraduate classes and replace them with teaching faculty, you lose a lot. (Let me know if you need what's lost to be spelled out.)
Continual cuts to both state funding and federal research support is a large part of it for public universities. Essentially, every time there is a major budget crisis, state support gets slashed, and it never gets put back when things get better.
Tuition is one of the few levers left, and while people will object to tuition hikes for in-state students, very few people will do the same for foreign students.
> Why is it necessary to have a flood of foreign money to operate the university? Universities in the past operated without an influx of wealthy foreign students paying outrageous tuition.
I guess it is not strictly necessary, but it brings in a lot more money, which the university is of course very eager to take.
>but the people who need to make the decision to do that are the ones who would be cut.
It's devastating when you learn so many of society's problems are due to this.
> The most lucrative tuition source for the university is foreign students (as in, they bring in far more tuition dollars for each foreign student than they do native).
Those probably aren't STEM PhD students, whose tuition (especially at Ivies!) is normally paid for out of research grants or teaching funds.
In 2007 I was an Italian citizen studying at a university in Texas.
For a final project, we built a cool autopilot, and demoed it on several vehicles, including a precision dropper airplane, and a sailboat.
The airplane happened to be slightly better than what the USAF admitted to having at the time.
There were 5 of us working on that project, including 1 US citizen.
The citizen got a NASA internship out of it. The rest of us were put on a list and I for one had a very tough time getting a green card later on even with a NIW.
I shudder to think what this maladministration is doing to foreign STEM students now!
Jesus. That's horrible. I'm glad you finally prevailed. Was this a doctoral program?
There is no shortage of US families who would pay the $100k/yr for top 10 university education.
This phenomenon (which is just an extreme version of out-of-state tuition for state schools) is almost entirely undergraduate driven, not STEM PhDs, who as mentioned in other posts, have tuition either waived or paid for via grants.
There was a whole thing if you recall in the first Trump admin about treating tuition waivers as income, which at an Ivy is potentially a financially catastrophic thing for a grad student.
1/4 within 15 years doesn’t sound like a huge problem.. if it were 80% within 5 years, ok you’d have my attention.
It doesn't sound like a lot to me, either. I have known many people who moved to another country for graduate study. Some of them ended up settling in that country, but others pursued further study or employment in yet other countries. And perhaps the largest group among my acquaintances are those who eventually moved back to their home countries. They feel more comfortable there, they have family there, or, in many cases, returning home is what they intended to do all along.
It really depends on which 25% it is. Is it evenly distributed or is it the best and brightest, or the worst who are leaving. In addition, its institutional knowledge you are losing. I care much more about losing the guy with 15 years of experience than a fresh post-doc.
“40% move to China”
This is the plan not a coincidence. China pays huge “grants” to their citizens to come to the US, get educated, work in big tech/science, then bring it all home.
Seems like chicken and the egg problem:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/discrimination-chine...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg78xng04xo
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/graduate/2025...
https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-congress-conside...
Perhaps, be anecdotally I've seen a significant shift in students from China in Canada and the US over the last couple of decades. It used to be that pretty much if someone can stay post graduation they will. Now many are choosing to go back to China, even if the opportunity to stay is there. This isn't just US policy, but also just the development of China. There are just a lot more opportunities there than there was 20 years ago.
Probably almost 40% of them came from China in the first place, because China has almost 40% of the candidates who are accepted to US grad programs in the first place. And, even without any grants, returning to China probably seems a lot more appealing than returning to Nigeria, Paraguay, or Bangladesh, whose acceptance rates are already handicapped by the much lower quality of undergraduate education available there.
Well that’s a very misleading thing. If the US immigration policy wasn’t this hostile to populous countries, more Chinese will want to stay.
When are people going to drop the immigration is good at all costs assumption.
We need a well managed set of immigration polices or country WILL take advantage of US. These are our military rivals and we sell our most advanced math, physics and engineering seats to the highest bidder. It’s a self districting disaster and it’s not just on us to treat people better.
Look at the rate of Indian asylum seekers in Canada to see the most extreme case. It happens anywhere you extend naivety and boundless good will.
The US could retain a lot of that talent if it put the same level of funding into science that China is, and remained welcoming to foreign nationals. The US has been brain-draining the rest of the world for decades with enormous benefits to us. We then led in most fields and the flywheel kept spinning. Now we are cutting research spending and closing the door, while China continues to increase its science funding year over year. The sclaes are tipping and talent will be drawn to the leading edge, wherever that is.
Thousand talent tier incentive is drop in the bucket, most sea turtles return because only so high you can climb in US with cold war bamboo ceiling. Past certain point, both US PRC can cut big checks, PRC lets a yellow face climb to top.
Maybe in the defense industry. Elsewhere? Nah.
South Asian (Indian) / White / East Asian ceo gap something like 3 / 2 / 0.5 per million pop in US. Chinese long recognized this ceiling, and more are returning to PRC because of it. More and more, PRC getting Chinese returnees that are credentialled 40yro stuck at manager / director level who see greener PRC grass leaving after accumulating industry knowledge / experience taking their entire network / ip / tacit knowledge with them. PRC use to pay a lot of recruit these folks, but we're at that point a lot of Chinese Americans from 80s-90s are in their 30s-40s, who know how high they can climb in US. Meanwhile PRC printing highend jobs that attract Chinese talent with comparable compensation, and a better title / social status.
CEO gap mostly goes away when controlling for pop. age / cultural differences (less assertive), not nebulous racism like first comment. PRC still pays a lot to recruit through 1000 talents, USDOJ continues to uncover cases where $X00,000+ offered for IP / research. Meanwhile Chinese (m|b)illionaires make exit plans in case they get Jack Ma’d or worse.
Yes, yes and Asian tertiary applicants has worse personality except not. Eitherway, I didn't bring up racism. I said Chinese want leadership positions, they're not getting it vs the usual other races in US, so some go where they can get it, which happens to be increasingly PRC.
X00,000 USD is... not a lot anymore. That's normal compensation for high tier jobs, aka PRC tier1 opportunities is simply default globally competitive especially when you factor in other allowances. Top tier 1000 talent tier inducements where PRC build you a lab, give 7 digit in guaranteed funding, aka exactly the kind of opportunities bamboo ceiling is cutting off in US is pretty rare, almost rounding error in overall flow of talent. NVM DoJ has prosecuted ~0/150 thousand talent cases for actual espionage, i.e. never uncovered anything but candidates double dipping on PRC and NIH/NSF grants.
I don't know what billionaires capita flighting fraction of their liquidity has to do with anything. Ultimately whats more damaging for geopolitical S&T competition, capital flight, or knowledge flight.
There might be a plan but more likely Chinese salaries have grown a lot in the last 20 years. 20 years ago US salaries were much higher - it makes sense to get a US degree and work here. Now you might as well go home again, it isn't better to be in the US any more.
If this is true (I doubt it happens at scale), then the US got to benefit from some severely underpaid labor for a couple years at no cost to the taxpayer. What's there not to like?
It happens at scale. UK universities are also heavily subsidised by Chinese students. I also, where I am, I don't really see these students working in part-time jobs to pay the bills.
I assume the underpaid labor they were talking about was the PhD.
Daughter in the Material Science Phd progam at major state university with "world class" MS program. Vast majority of her peers are from abroad. Met some. All were the nicest, smartest folks you have ever met. I guess a benefit is that the probability of them leaving may help to increase the teamwork aspect in the program. But that is a guess. Great group of folks who hopefully might help change the world. Went to the recent Phd presentation where recent Phd graduates were honored. Let me tell you... hard to describe how inspiring these folks are. (MS is a pretty hard subject, with amazing applications. You may be thanking one guy who recently got his Phd should you ever get cancer.) Glad our universities welcome talent not demographics. HTH, RF.
Abstract: "Using newly-assembled data from 1980 through 2024, we show that 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating. Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades. Contrary to common perceptions, US technology benefits from these graduates' work even if they leave: though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share, and as large as all other countries combined. These results highlight the value that the US derives from training foreign scientists - not only when they stay, but even when they leave."
>data from 1980 through 2024
This percentage is going to go up sharply in near future.
> "US Technology benfits from these graduates' work even if they leave."
Can someone please substatiate this claim? Many people I know are begining to question this and Id like to know more.
You are quoting abstract of a scientific paper dedicated to this issue. The one linked by the OP.
(arguably is not an easy read, but if you're looking for hard data is probably worth giving a shot)
The more important question is: what is the rate of scientists coming in vs going out?
If they are in balance, then it looks a lot less of a problem. It may even be the case that because of the desirability of working in the US for US institutions the US is gaining the best from all around the world and shipping out a more mixed ability set.
"Using new data which tracks US-trained STEM PhDs through 2024, we show that despite foreign nationals comprising nearly 50% of trainees, only 10% leave the US within five years of graduating, and only 25% within 15 years."
That sounds like net benefit for the US. Foreign nationals come, the US sells them (overpriced) education, they do relatively low-paid but high-value PhD research, and then most of them stay and continue to contribute to US research endeavors and the economy. This is such an enviable position, and this administration wants to close the doors? This is the secret sauce. This is what has made america great.
> We use SED data to measure the number of PhD graduates in our focal STEM fields who were non-US citizens at the time of graduation.
[...]
> Emigration rates across PhD cohorts correlate strongly with the foreign national share of graduates ( = 0.86 to 0.95) [...] In all cohorts, the 5-year (15-year) emigration rate is approximately 25% (50%) of the foreign national share
I am not sure if they did this on purpose or not but they missed putting that critical part in the title or right in the abstract. The majority here are not US citizens but foreign nationals. And, most importantly, I couldn't find where they mentioned (or maybe they don't) that these students are studying in US on non-immigrant visas. They're not supposed to or expected to stay after they are done studying. Some stay if they find a company to sponsor them for an internship (Optional Practical Training) but unless they change their visa type they're still expected to leave for their home country.
Without that part highlighted it makes it sound like these US citizens who were born and grew up in US, went to universities here, and then graduated and went to work in China or Europe or something. There is a number of those but, it's not the majority. Maybe they can study just that cohort separately, I think that would be a more interesting thing to look at.
A more positive-sum view is that the US is bringing the rest of the world up in science every time it exports a PhD.
While indeed a positive outlook, I think alot of Americans are beginning to wonder what the benefit will be to them.
The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development. While I dont agree with the sentiment, its not entirely incorrect to describe such relationships are parasitic more then symbiotic when they become increasingly one-sided. Why should Americans be exporting PHDs to other countries when they dont seem to be reaping the benefits?
Given that most PhD students pay for their earlier education and then do underpaid grunt work as part of their program, the US should already be reaping the benefits. It's only failing to reap them in the sense that more could be gained if they stayed, and that a citizen would be more likely to stay.
Having a fraction of US PhD leave might be a good thing for cross-pollination. The fact that they've left doesn't mean their contacts and relationships vaporize. This could help America stay abreast and integrated with foreign research.
> they dont seem to be reaping the benefits
"they" as in the USA or its people?
Germany has taxpayer-subsidized education even for foreign students. They may stay, the may leave. One of its views is that the time the student spent in the country helps foster cultural ties and understanding, and generates goodwill towards the country...
I suppose "goodwill" is hard to translate to cold hard cash, so America doesn't really like it ;-)
The US is not "exporting" anything. PhDs are people, they pay for their education and they leave.
Nevertheless responding to your question:
>Contrary to common perceptions, US technology benefits from these graduates' work even if they leave: though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share
STEM PhD students do not pay for their education
STEM PhD students typically pay with labor rather than cash. Labor to teach undergrads, and to perform other university research. (though they typically pay their undergrad with large piles of cash).
That is, very much, a substantial form of payment.
This is manifestly not true. What leads you to believe this? Certainly there are some who don't, just as with undergraduate education. But there's no blanket program in the US to pay for all STEM PhDs.
All of the dozens of US STEM PhDs I know from recent decades had to pay their tuition by working as TAs, RAs, or usually both. They didn't walk in the door with a trust fund, work through the coursework, and then write up a dissertation. I'm not sure that's even a possibility in most STEM fields: you need access to millions of dollars of ultra-specialized equipment which you can realistically only get by working in an existing lab, which means being an RA.
Right, they work a job to pay for their tuition. But they still pay, even if it's bartered.
You have a point!
They work like a 120k a year job for 30k a year.
True, but I would say a large fraction of foreign nationals who do PhDs in the US were undergrad educated at least partially in the US.
So let me see: a person from another country receives a service that is exclusive, very limited and in high demand (PhD), pays for it, and that person eventually takes it back to country of origin.
US education must be in a woeful state because that is the definition of export.
Given the exclusivity and value of the service you'd think you'd want to hang on to it, but I guess xenophobia is one thing that is more important than money.
I've been hearing nothing but bad things about the actual education in US institutions. I think they've tarnished their name at this point to no return.
exactly. that is why everyone is lining up to try to get in US colleges and acceptance rates of top schools is in the single digits :)
Isn't that how exporting works? People buy something in one place and take it another?
"...a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development"
That "growing sense" is not growing organically, it's being energetically fertilized. The problem isn't that most Americans aren't benefiting from global goodwill and development, it's that they aren't benefiting from domestic development. And the minority who are benefiting disproportionately from domestic economic growth are expending significant resources to convince everybody else that the problem lies with the rest of the world.
> isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development
I think the rhetoric is the cause, not the response to that sense (besides the obvious feedback loop). Internationalism created a world of unprecendented - literally in human history - freedom, peace and prosperity. You can see what things look like with even the beginnings of nationalism.
I would implore you to empathize with the American working class, who have seen their living standards continuously deteriorate over multiple generations.
I know the hackernews audience skews more affluent and wealthy, with demographics pulling from more developed coastal cities, but the vast majority of citizens do not exist in such living conditions. Focusing entirely on the development an prosperity of only a handful of our cities is what has created the perfect fertile soil for Xenophobia to grow. I dont see the rhetoric as the cause, just the motions of opportunists taking advantage of a situation that we are all at fault for. Despite all the freedom, peace, and prosperity, its so unevenly distributed that many citizens live in squalor rivaling some destitute underdeveloped nations.
I think you’re making a lot of unjustified assumptions about the HN audience
And about me.
I wasn’t addressing you but the comment replying to you.
So was I!
> The isolationist and xenophobic rhetoric of recent years is mostly a reaction to a growing sense that increasingly few Americans are benefiting from global goodwill and development.
I'm not sure I buy your claim that this is the reason for the rhetoric. And if you're right that this is the reason for the rhetoric, it's extremely flawed reasoning.
Diminishing material conditions makes a fertil breeding ground for right wing nationalism (isolationism and xenophobia). It's a pattern being replicated all over the world. UK citizens don't have high heat bills and sewage leaking into their rivers because of privatization and Brexit, it's because there's too many refugees!
Of course it's incorrect, but without the diminishing material conditions, it's a lot harder to get people to drum up the energy to be racist.
The idea that Americans don't get any benefit from the global order is absolutely ridiculous. There isn't a stick we ARE getting the short end of.
The US got talent for free for years; young people whose upbringing and education has been paid by/in a foreign country. The most expensive formative years had been paid for by the sponsoring country.
The rhetoric is learned from a well balanced media diet, served for free by the 0.0001%"Increasingly few Americans are" getting to evade the consequence of wealth concentration and monopolies. Large parts of the US economy have been starved by monopolist practices in the past decennia. I recently linked a very approachable documentary¹ from ARTE, in thee parts, if you want to understand what is really happening.
1. https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...
Tried to follow your link. It says: "This program is not available in your country". Wonder why...censorship?
Maybe try a vpn? It is an European production, I am not sure, but there could be some rights limitation. It is available till end of January. Protonvpn is free and has EUR servers.
Bit of a shame for the hassle though, the documentary is very good and the topics it touches are rarely highlighted. So give it an other try.
> global goodwill and development
Is that what we’re calling the $8-9 TRILLION spent killing millions of people across the world from the failed “Global War or Terror?”
Tell me where all this goodwill and development is happening
Depends pretty heavily on the destination of the export, i.e. not China.
not sure I understand, I read a lot of research papers from China.
My read: China is seen as a serious geopolitical rival that the United States must beat in a shooting or Cold or AI or <insert here> war. As a result PHDs to China as an export would be a negative impact, not a positive one potentially.
America gave China its space (and ballistic missile) program when they deported Qian Xuesen in 1955.
When looking at China, this fable has been on my mind for the longest even as I’d hoped that market forces would liberalize it: https://fablesofaesop.com/the-eagle-and-the-arrow.html
Obviously, any hopes evaporated with China’s heavy-handed approach to Hong Kong.
Or their constant threats against Taiwan, or their oppression of LGBT people in their borders, or their genocide against the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, or their heel-turn into racialized nationalism (Han Chauvinism).
Yeah, I read a lot of research papers from China too.
I wonder if US still manages to keep the most promising?
Yes, but today less so than yesterday? We also are benefiting less from the top students with state funded undergraduate education in China and India.
On top of that, it is a significant reverse brain drain. Like 20-25 years ago you'd be hard pressed to find tenure track CS faculty at most America programs let alone a major program lime Cal or UIUC consider returning to a program like Shanghai Jiao Tong or IIT Bombay compared to today.
It has upskilled academia in those countries, but we also lost talent who could have remained here.
It is it really our talent though? The US has been so addicted to China and India for STEM talent for so long that...what did they expect was going to happen? And the effect is much more prominent for China than India: China has a lot of money to dump into modernizing while India is still a relatively poor country. Imagine what will happen when India gets richer as well?
Based on personal experience (friends who either entered academia/industry or me being the son of white collar immigrants to the US) I'd say large portion want to return to China and India due to family ties, but a number would have stayed in the US if immigration wasn't such a PITA - especially because companies and programs don't really like filing for an O-1s unless they found a unicorn.
You hit the nail on the head on developing countries not being as poor anymore, and opportunties proliferating which reduces the pull factor, but there are a decent amount of academics and professionals who would gladly work in the US if given the opportunity and it wasn't such a headache.
So, three-quarters of the people remained. That's a good result.
>though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share, and as large as all other countries combined.
Perhaps it is a good thing that innovation is not encumbered by patents as much in other countries as it has been in the US.
The US is going to lose its edge regardless. American exceptionalism after WW2 was always going to be temporary. With just 4% of the world's population the US could not stay on top of anything forever.
But USA might be receiving half of the scientists trained outside. And these might happen to be brighter and hard-working.
Not only do people leave the US but stay in Academia, plenty of people leave the research pipeline after receiving years and years of highly specialized, expert training. As an American who used to work in Tech and is currently getting a PhD, the geographic constraints on the (top tier) academic job market are more severe than people outside of Academia typically realize. It's a shame, because if it were the norm that science could happen by university-trained experts but in non-university institutions, we could a) fix the leaky pipeline, and b) see greater scientific progress.
What I mean is that if you don't like the company you work for in, say, SF, you can switch companies without having to switch houses. In Academia... it's akin to going to conservatory for classical music: you have to travel to where the orchestral openings are. This is a bit of a legacy problem from Wilhelm von Humboldt's idea to combine teaching and research, which led to the modern university system.
I'm far from the first person to say this, btw. Convergent Research's "Focused Research Organization" concept as well as The Arc and Astera Institutes are a few recent examples of people trying to provide escape routes from having to deal the large degree of "institutional tech/systems debt" in university contexts. For a great essay on why this is necessary, see "A Vision of Meta-science" (highly recommended if you are interested) [1].
The good news is that people are starting to come around to the idea that the scientific ecosystem would benefit from more diversity in the shape, size, and form of science-generating institutions.=The NSF just announced a new program to fund such "independent research organizations." I think this could give people who want to go into the sciences as a second career and who have a bit of an entrepreneurial tendency a new kind of Job opportunity [2]. We talk about Founders all of the time in Tech, we should probably have some equivalent in the best possible sense of the term, in the Sciences.
[1] https://scienceplusplus.org/metascience/ [2] https://www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-announces-new-initiative-launch...
For people missing the abstract, here it is and I'm giving emphesis to an important part.
Not only that but there's the whole cultural export too. Come live in America for 4-10 years and you're going to be acclimated to some of the cultures and customs. You don't think you're going to go home and take some of that with you? Conversely, America isn't a "melting-pot" because of a monoculture, but because it brings many different cultures together. The whole education system is as much a part of "cultural warfare" as is the movie industry, music industry, or even Korea's K-Pop scene (which has been incredibly successful, just like Thailand's program for restaurants in foreign countries).While personally I'd staple Green Cards to every Ph.D. given to a foreign national, I simultaneously want them to go back to their home countries and make their countries better. To take the good from America, leave the bad, and to build lasting relationships between the countries. That's a win-win situation. Both countries benefit from this! As well as the people. (I'd staple Green Cards so the person can make that choice.)
I haven't read the whole paper (nor will I), but I get the impression that much of this will not be addressed in it. Perfectly okay, they're focused on the easier to measure parts. But let's also not forget that there is a whole lot more to the bigger picture here. A whole lot more than my comment even implies.
Let me ask you this: when trained scientists from {other economy} arrive in the US, do you ask yourself why? Is it of necessity because {other economy} is "worse" and US is "better" or can it be personal, unrelated, case-by-case?
What is a natural, good flow for people between economies in this instance? is it zero or 100% where along this arc does it lie, and why?
It's the second (so far bc he hasn't ruled out a third) presidential term for a strongly anti-immigrant / anti-immigration president who has a lot of support domestically.
Immigrants are being chased out of the US in record numbers. Many of my friends with brown skin (second generation immigrants) are worried their kids will be harrassed by ICE, etc.
The sad fact is that there are a LOT of Americans who deeply resent when someone from another country comes to the US, works hard, and earns a prosperous and happy life.
The US is now led by an emotional revenge-driven crusade against the American Dream, against capitalism, against the "melting pot" that fuels culture and innovation. It's a weird kind of revenge idiocracy going on right now.
In case it's not obvious, many of us here are deeply ashamed of what is going on and we will make it right eventually. I'm personally looking forward to the lawsuits that end up paying people mistreated by ICE significant sums of money, give them flights back to the US, etc. The US has a labor shortage and a talent shortage right now, we need the best and brightest, the most hard working, etc., not the lazy ones who think they are owed something and believe the orange clown.
Sorry to ruin your mudslinging, but if you read the second sentence of the linked study, you'll see the American voters' choice of president has nothing to do with this:
> Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades
Sorry to ruin your ruining, but if you read past the abstract and look at the data, you'll see it tends to correlate with whether a democrat or republican is in office. Immigration policy is also mentioned in the discussion.
> Given these findings, a corollary question is what attracts foreign graduate students to the US and leads them to stay. Prior research points to immigration policy—a subject of perennial public interest—having a large effect on stay rates
Not true. The article asserts that immigration policy is a big driver of "stay rates" for immigrants.
Also, I did not assert that either party is "good" on immigration. The US should relax restrictions and allow many more immigrants to enter/study/work/live.
If we really want growth, fully open borders would double world GDP.
Education is one of our greatest exports. What's wrong with people getting training here and going back home to enrich their community? If they don't do that we're going to be accused of promoting "brain drain".
Second sentence of abstract:
> Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades
The US has been completely dominant in technology innovation for the last several decades. So, the answer is no: the loss of 1/4 of the STEM scientists is not important.
I’m a US sixth generation or more citizen and a scientist and I want to leave if the next election doesn’t go wildly different than the 2024 one. The brain drain is real. It’s sad to see it happen in your own country.
The number of colleagues who have gone from "Eh, maybe a sabbatical year..." to "Yes, I am actively looking" is really frightening.
How does this compare to the fraction of foreign students studying in other countries and choosing to remain there?
It's hard to compare across countries. No other country has anything like the US's research-university system, although China is working on it. But foreign students in China probably aren't hoping to be able to live there for the rest of their lives—China's immigration policies are considerably more xenophobic. The UK might be the closest comparison?
Generally speaking, American exceptionalism is nonsense. The US isn't the only free country, the freest country, the only democratic country, the most democratic country, the richest country, the most diverse country, a city on the hill, divinely inspired, uniquely blessed by God, the only capitalist country, any of that nonsense. It was some of those when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, but it hasn't been for decades. But the US's research university system is unique in the world, and nobody else even comes close.
Nope, it's just growing an export business.
And other countries probably have it worse
The grad-student system in science at US R1 universities is sort of like a dollar auction. You know how a dollar auction works? I have a dollar bill, and I'll give it to whoever bids the highest for it—as long as both they and the #2 bidder pay me their final bids. The #2 bidder gets nothing. Bidding can start at 5¢. Once the bid goes over a dollar, the two remaining bidders are no longer competing to win free money; they're jockeying to lose less. It typically goes up to 2 to 5 dollars before one of them decides to cut their losses.
Numerous doctoral students (and postdocs, and adjuncts) are competing for a much smaller number of tenure-track positions with their research work. If their publication record looks just a little better than the #2 candidate, they can escape from the postdoc grind and land a nice assistant professorship. Then it's only seven more years of busting their ass before they find out whether they washed out, or are set for life with a cushy associate professorship, maybe a full professorship.
People are willing to sacrifice a lot for that. But the vast majority of those who make the sacrifice don't make it, like the #2 bidder in the dollar auction. They put in years on somewhat-above-minimum-wage grad-student and postdoc stipends, doing incredibly difficult and sometimes dangerous work, often postponing childbearing, leaving behind their families each time they have to move to a new university, and either leaving behind their intimate partners or uprooting them as well. All of that redounds to the glory of the PI who runs the lab they work in—but many of those doing all that work regret the sacrifice.
Scientific progress isn't just a matter of doling out research grants and possessing fancy lab equipment. It needs talent, but that isn't nearly enough—the talented people need to work incredibly hard for many years to make real progress. For decades the US has been recruiting the top talent from the rest of the world with this dollar-auction game, paying them peanuts to sacrifice the best years of their lives.
A doctorate doesn't sound like a bad life to me, really. But you have to feel that the system, like minor-league baseball, is kind of taking advantage of doctoral students' hopes and dreams to get the rather astounding rate of scientific progress we see today (at least by some measures). It funds public goods for everyone out of those sacrifices.
The least the US could do would be to show a little more gratitude by guaranteeing them permanent US residency after they graduate, but they don't even get that—many people are kicked out of the US, where they've spent most of their adult lives, when they wash out of the academic pipeline. And the current deplorable administration has promised to worsen this already deplorable situation.
> The least the US could do would be to show a little more gratitude by guaranteeing them permanent US residency after they graduate, but they don't even get that—many people are kicked out of the US, where they've spent most of their adult life, when they wash out of the academic pipeline.
And they often have no choice but to work in academia too, because Academic H1B are lottery exempt but not Industry H1B and they aren't transferable. Pretty messed up.
The conversation has radically changed.
10-15 years ago my foreign grad students all wanted to stay. Only question was how.
There was always a big crowd who found the process of staying in the US painful, random, humiliating, and sometimes even downright abusive, so they went home.
What has really changed is China. That's what this paper shows too. Many of the Chinese students want go back home.
10-15 years ago when I would talk to grad students from China most wanted freedom and democracy. Now most tell me about how the Western system has failed and how a centralized government is more efficient.
Between making it harder to stay, China changing the narrative on dictatorships, and the West doing a horrific job in the last decade on pretty much every front, yeah, we're going to see a lot of folks move back.
Note: This is at a top-tier US university.
Even 10 years they wanted to stay. I was at Microsoft China at the time, and management would complain about Google or Facebook in CA still getting the best prospects from Qinghua/PKU. It wasn't about freedom or democracy at all, they just wanted big paychecks without the 996.
Today it is an easier case to stay, although 996 is still a thing. Still, if you can make your FU money by age 35 (and it still has to be by age 35 according to a relative), you have it set.
> China changing the narrative on dictatorships
There was no "change of narrative", the West just stopped delivering, similar to what happened to the Soviet system starting with the 1970s (and which ended the way it did by the early 1990s).
Knowledge and intelligence are wasted outside of the US. You could build great stuff but if you're not in the US, your chance of success is extremely low because the media algorithms will work against you. Not to mention regulations. In Europe, it felt like politicians were being paid to suppress tech.
I'm jealous of tech people who live in media-sovereign countries like the US, China or Russia who don't have to experience algorithm discrimination.
IMO, tech/science people who leave the US before accumulating big money are making a mistake. They underestimate how rigged the tech industry is. You've got to leverage the rigging. You either benefit from the rigging or you are victim of it. I cannot wrap my mind around people who are born in the US and leave. People don't understand how lucky and privileged they are before it's gone.
Well. Duh. The US PERM process is a nightmare. And it's not just the requirements and regional quotas. It's also the complete opacity of the process, with the USCIS taking _years_ to process straightforward applications in some cases.
No wonder people just give up and leave.
Dude, seriously. I'm a citizen and work in a lab, and I have a world expert in my lab... One of maybe 5 in the world, Canadian... And the difficulty for him to stay is insane.
If you asked any American how hard he should have it, they'd probably expect he just needed to fill out a form, pay $150, and wait 1-2 years.
Yes.
What does it mean to "leave" the US? I know several people with advanced degrees in the sciences who had children in Europe and raised their kids there for years, but eventually came back. One family returned to Europe a second time. When you have a company or university sponsoring you it's not too difficult to move freely, so "leaving" feels like a moving target for this particular socioeconomic group.
my view for a long time has been that the usa is a net importer of talent and ideas. that its cheaper to have someone spend 20 odd years training in another country and then just lure them in with the promise of big $... isnt that how its been working? or is this some new spin.
Giving away? It's currently screaming in the ears and flogging the ass of everyone to get the fuck out and stay out.
US doesn't train anyone, that headline would only make sense somewhere in... every other country in the world (more or less), where the government actually subsidizes education (a lot of the times up to 100%).
In the US, people pay for their own training, so they can damn well go wherever they please.
I'm sure most of these are foreign students. Giving away an edge, no. Scamming them? Perhaps.
Eventually leave. So compelling.
The is a psyop, there arent that many science jobs, and a PHD from mississipi state is not "talent"
Even Mississippi State has a bar to clear - by the way, I know of PhDs from Jackson State who are faculty at CMU