5 ms·

60-80% of graduate students in STEM fields in the U.S. are international students. It seems like having 60-80% fewer graduates would accelerate the decline of A

• zaroth 7y ago
  “[B]etween 1995 and 2015, the number of full-time domestic students enrolled in graduate computer science programs increased by 45 percent, from 8,627 to 12,539 students, while the number of full-time international graduate students increased by about 480 percent, from 7,883 in 1995 to 45,790 in 2015.” CS went from less than 50% to nearly 80% foreign graduate students over 10 years. Quite interesting! https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign-students-and-graduate-stem-enrollment https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
• kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  The lack of a stable career path accelerates the decline of American science.
• scottlocklin 7y ago
  The schools might have to let natives in; the horror. We might have to return to the dark ages of the 1950s when the STEM graduates were majority Americans and we actually were making technological progress in something other than lithography. "Science" is addicted to cheap foreign labor, which has ruined the market for natives.
  • mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
    Who are these natives you speak of? Last I checked we are a nation of immigrants. If not you then your parents, grandparents and their parents.
    • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Natives = people who were born and grew up here. Stop being intentionally obtuse. Nobody is native on a long enough timeline.
  • tntn 7y ago
    Certainly increased acceptance rates for domestic students would impact which schools they go to. But do you have any data indicating that a) there are a significant number of domestic students who apply to STEM programs and get rejected from all of them and relatedly b) the demand for grad school positions is sufficiently elastic to match an 80% increase in supply? I'm not sure what your point was with the casual dismissal of 70 years of research in every field besides lithography. Am I supposed to think that international students only work on lithography? Most lithography research, as far as I'm aware, doesn't even happen in academia.
    • scottlocklin 7y ago
      Compared to the previous 70 years, the last 70 years of scientific and technological research has been complete and utter shit, except for lithography. Pretty simple, really. The presence of all that cheap labor in the last 70 years has objectively not made things better. Mind you, in raw numbers we have at least 10x the number of active workers in the sciences in the last 70 years as in the previous 70 years; and less is getting done. Imagine that! Your first point is a red herring: the presence of cheap labor in the sciences and the lack of decent jobs makes it unattractive to any sane person who was born in a first world country.
  • DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    If you restrict the pool of applicants, the quality of the student body will go down. That's basically a law of nature. Schools aren't accepting foreign students because they're cheaper. They actually have greater apprehension about foreign students, because their language skills might be lacking, and because the American professors judging the applications might not personally know the foreign professors writing the recommendation letters. Science is largely done by graduate students and postdocs. Professors are busy writing grants, teaching classes, advising students and sitting on committees. Their role in science is largely managerial, and in providing overall vision. All the grunt work and detail gets done by people below them. My point is that having smart and capable students is critical. If you go into a top STEM department in the US, you'll probably see that a large majority of students are foreigners. If you were to exclude them, you could replace them with Americans, but those Americans would, on average, have lower grades, lower test scores and less previous research experience. Their work would not be as good, and the productivity of the department would fall. The excluded students would instead go to top universities in other countries. Those universities would begin doing better research as a result. My prediction is that within a decade, you would see Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley et al. fall off the top of the rankings, replaced by the top universities in Europe, one or two universities in Canada, and perhaps a few Asian universities.
• ashelmire 7y ago
  Don’t most of them return to their home countries? Seems like freeing up those spots for American students that will stay would be a boon for American science.
  • rbg246 7y ago
    That would seem to indicate that Americans who want to do STEM courses cannot currently do them? That doesn't sound right to me.
  • nl 7y ago
    No, because graduate students are actually doing the science in the US. If they are replaced by less capable students then the work being done will be of a lower quality.
  • rchaud 7y ago
    "Freeing up those spots" implies that US students are barred from competing for grad school places or that international students have some advantage that domestic students do not.
    • ashelmire 7y ago
      > international students have some advantage that domestic students do not. They often do have more money. And rampant cheating. But regardless, Chinese students can attend any university in China or the US, while an American cannot realistically attend school in China. Obviously that means China is going to have a brighter educational future, as they use our system to advance their own.
      • throwaway6969 7y ago
        If they're cheating then they won't hang on to those research spots for long.
      • rchaud 7y ago
        Money doesn't make a difference in grad school because everybody is there on some kind of fellowship or research grant. Certainly no international student I've ever met, Chinese or otherwise has paid a cent of tuition past undergrad. Only exceptions would be medical school, MBA and specialist MSc programs offered through business schools.