9 ms·

America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain

64 points by mraniki 1y ago

Aldipower 1y ago
Reading trough the comments, it seems Harvard is the only university in the US. Didn't know that.. :-D
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  What kind of comment is that? Do you not think something similar could ever happen to another university?
- atmavatar 1y ago
  No, but Harvard is being made example of because it dared try standing up to the Trump administration.
mraniki 1y ago
https://archive.is/2025.05.23-060333/https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/05/21/america-is-in-danger-of-experiencing-an-academic-brain-drain https://archive.is/2025.05.23-060333/https://www.economist.c...
hunglee2 1y ago
banning Harvard from enrolling international students is a pretty clear signal to elite intellectual capital that the US is no longer the obvious place to study. Trump 2.0 is fascinating social experiment - can reducing aggregate brainpower lead to better outcomes for the country? Not a rhetorical question, being smart is not the only way to win
- homarp 1y ago
  smart or educated?
  - falcor84 1y ago
    Arguably, smart people seek better education, such that making American universities less competitive will lead to smart people going elsewhere.
  - hunglee2 1y ago
    fair observation
  - draugadrotten 1y ago
    Studying at Harvard isn’t about the books or the lectures. It’s about rubbing elbows with future CEOs at late-night pizza runs.
- aniviacat 1y ago
  Putting aside the negatives, I see zero upsides of reducing brain power. The people being more equal perhaps? Maybe the path to the fabled middle class is to bring down the upper class.
  - lemming 1y ago
    I see zero upsides of reducing brain power You have fewer annoying people pointing out logical problems with your policies.
  - levzettelin 1y ago
    These days, a lot of brainpower is spent on scamming people (case in point: Vivek Ramaswamy). One can really make quite a good living off of scamming people these days. If you could reduce the brainpower of that demographic, I think this would be good for everyone else.
- patrickdavey 1y ago
  I'm genuinely curious: how do you think reducing aggregate brainpower could lead to better outcomes?
  - levzettelin 1y ago
    If you primarily reduce the brainpower of scammers, like Vivek Ramaswamy, I think that would help, even if it reduces overall brainpower.
  - hunglee2 1y ago
    being smarter doesn't always lead to better decision making - many people overly intellectualise a problem and fail to move to action. Trump is definitely action oriented, a lot of it really dumb, but it does alter the external conditions which may produce better outcomes.
    - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
      True. Because clearly the problem for China the last few decades has been a failure to move to action. The Chinese need to start installing a whole dumber bunch of people to lead their country so their leaders are more action oriented.
      - hunglee2 1y ago
        China doesn't have a leadership problem atm, though certainly has had its fair share of anti-intellectual leaders. Trump's actions are very familiar to Chinese people, especially ones who have been educated on the excesses of Maoism. That said, point of post is - will Trump anti-intellectualism 'work', where work = benefiting America. Ostensibly, the answer looks like 'of course not' but in my view, it is too early to say
  - lmpdev 1y ago
    Sigh Brainpower is not a commodity and this discussion is absurd
  - tremon 1y ago
- lwo32k 1y ago
  It's not the only way in an "Attention Economy" cause you don't need to be Einstein to collect the most likes and followers in the land. Where the Attention Economy takes the real US Economy we shall see soon as AI explodes Supply of content with Demand hardly growing.
Herring 1y ago
Vote for republicans => get red state policies. Trump won the popular vote. America is trying very hard to become one big red state. Red states have had the worst outcomes for generations but they keep going back to republicans. The reasons escape me. The Civil War was basically southerners strongly preferring to use slaves instead of modernizing. Maybe China will motivate them to get their act together.
- tzs 1y ago
  > Trump won the popular vote. America is trying very hard to become one big red state. He won with a plurality. A majority did not want him.
  - the_other 1y ago
    > He won with a plurality. A majority did not want him. Tomato tomato.
  - LadyCailin 1y ago
    No, a majority either wanted him, or didn’t care. Only a minority didn’t want him. In the US, you don’t vote FOR a candidate. You only vote against a candidate. If you cast your vote for the Republican, or don’t cast a vote (or cast your vote for a third party), and live in a red state, then you voted against the Democrat. And vice versa. So the only people that you can fairly say didn’t want him were the democratic voters. It’s not a good system, it’s utter garbage, but it’s the current reality in the US, and the longer people fail to acknowledge this, the longer it will remain like this.
    - tzs 1y ago
      1. Many voters do not know about strategic voting. They vote for the candidate they think is best for the job. 2. A voter who knows their vote won't make a difference in the outcome due to the electoral college might vote third party to increase the chances of there being viable third parties in later elections.
constantcrying 1y ago
To where will these scientists go? Europe, only those willing to accept much lower wages and more bureaucracy. China, unlikely to even accept them. Rest of the world, far fewer resources and often far more doubtful regimes.
- runsWphotons 1y ago
  It is weird that this is downvoted. No one else is close to making up the funding. And Harvard is just ignoring requests from DHS? They were warned for a month? If the Secretary of Homeland Security sends a letter requesting information, do you not have to comply?
  - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
    No, not if the demands are blatantly illegal. And the US does have the first amendment which a whole bunch of right wing free speech warriors start whining about immediately the moment someone criticizes them in public, but in reality the first amendment exists primarily to protect private speech (defined broadly, including things like making your own hiring decisions, etc) from government censorship.
  - thrance 1y ago
    If the demands are illegal, then yeah, by any means, you shouldn't comply. Do resist a criminal state that's using intimidation instead of laws, isn't this the American spirit?
    - runsWphotons 1y ago
      Is there a good analysis of which demands are illegal? Is Harvard suing? I sort of agree with you, but also don't buy into the victim narrative from Harvard, which has been happy to comply with illegal requests before and has clearly violated Civil Rights laws for years.
      - runsWphotons 1y ago
blueflow 1y ago
Has been happening since 2015, and in such scales that "going expat" is synonymous to "moving to Berlin".
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  Care to elaborate in detail? I think the term "expats" and "brain drain" are two distinct groups that even though are often used interchangeably, can have little overlap. All brain drains are expats, but not all expats are valuable brains who's draining is worth anything. For example, it's one thing to import a math/physics Olympiad winner from India/China/Romania prioritizing to move to the hottest place in tech funding and cutting edge R&D, and another to import an unemployed standup comedian seeking to move to the most hipster city for raves and parties where he can tweet form his MacBook how happy he is he left Trump's "fascist" America. In my case, I also see a lot more American expats where I live here in my European college town, but when I talk to them about their jobs/careers, most seem to be net drain on our system (au pairs, dog walkers, under the table English teachers, etc) who moved here for the chill life and free healthcare, rather than some highly ambitious well paid engineers or scientists who are gonna boost our economy to overtake the US. Most valuable brains are met here still seem to come from Balkans, Eastern Europe, India, Iran and Asia in general. Do you see my point? Edit: please see my grandchild comment below for detailing on my thoughts on this
  - Symbiote 1y ago
    A friend who heads a well-funded research group here in Denmark says the recent change is not so much in the number of Americans applying, but the quality/prestige. He's now receiving serious enquiries from graduates of Stanford, MIT etc, who previously were unlikely to leave the USA.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      I don't doubt that, but researchers and post-docs always tend to move around he world, especially in niche fields, where you can't usually find an opportunity in your area of expertise right in your back yard in a timely manner(some PhD friends had to move from the EU to Korea because of that), but my main point is whether that will dethrone the US economically and boost the EU in the same way, or if the end result will be negligeable in practice. I suspect as long as the US pays the highest wages in the world by a long shot, and hosts the world's top companies, both civilian and military, it will not run out of brains willing to move there. Because for every American leaving to Copenhagen because of Trump, the US might get 10 new brains in return from China, India, Vietnam, Korea, Turkey, Serbia, etc. for the wages. Plus, Trump is a passing event that will be replaced in 3,5 years with someone else who could turn things around. You'd probably need 10-20 Trumps in a row to cause any lasting damage to the US. And also, no matter how moronic Trump or a US president can be, corporations like Apple, Nvidia, AMD, SpaceX, etc are not, and will always lobby Trump or whoever will be president to maintain policies that will keep the US attractive to brains for them so they can get the best talent in the world. Do you see where I'm coming from when I say I doubt the US will suffer much or at all?
pharrington 1y ago
The correct play for Harvard is to make no changes to their enrollment polices, and then fight the Trump administration in court.
- disqard 1y ago
  The administration can shake you like a snow globe longer than you can keep functioning. (what if Harvard loses half of its faculty next, because some visa category is declared "illegal" by the administration?)
  - pharrington 1y ago
    Same thing.
snapdaddy 1y ago
I feel like this is a wild mis-characterisation. American isn't in danger of becoming a victim; America is trying to suppress academic pursuits and intellectualism. It is politically inconvenient, which means it needs to be eradicated.
- danaris 1y ago
  Except that "America" is not monolithic. America is currently a victim of Trump's batshit insane policies. A plurality of Americans voted for Trump, but not all of even that percentage actually support or desire what is happening now. Most Americans are not in favor of this, so saying that "America is doing this to itself" rather than "this is happening to America" feels like it ignores all those people who very much do not want this.
  - krapp 1y ago
    >Most Americans are not in favor of this, so saying that "America is doing this to itself" rather than "this is happening to America" feels like it ignores all those people who very much do not want this. And saying "this is happening to America" ignores all those people who very much do. Trump's election wasn't an act of God nor an unavoidable consequence of physical laws. People voted for him. Between the two, it's more correct to say "America is doing this to itself." If I stab myself in the leg, it's still a conscious and willful act on my part even though my leg wasn't holding the knife. It didn't just "happen."
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >America is currently a victim of Trump's batshit insane policies. You're not a victim over your voters' democratic choice. If I choose to cut my nose to spite my face, I'm not a victim. Why are people so bad about taking accountability over their actions? It's always someone else's fault. >Most Americans are not in favor of this Most American voters voted for this, this is how democracy works: sometimes your candidate wins, sometimes the other candidate wins, and you have to just suck it up and live with it till the next elections, this isn't being a victim. Rinse and repeat.
computerthings 1y ago
[dead]
anonymousiam 1y ago
It's inevitable, and it has little to do with Trump. I saw a version of the chart in this document about 10 years ago. https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/China-is-Fast-Outpacing-U.S.-STEM-PhD-Growth.pdf https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/China-is-Fast...
readthenotes1 1y ago
I wonder how the academic brain drain will affect the replicability crisis? I'm assuming if they end up in Salamanca U it will get worse, but don't really know...

64 points by mraniki 1y ago

Aldipower 1y ago

Reading trough the comments, it seems Harvard is the only university in the US. Didn't know that.. :-D

actionfromafar 1y ago
What kind of comment is that? Do you not think something similar could ever happen to another university?
atmavatar 1y ago
No, but Harvard is being made example of because it dared try standing up to the Trump administration.

mraniki 1y ago

https://archive.is/2025.05.23-060333/https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/05/21/america-is-in-danger-of-experiencing-an-academic-brain-drain https://archive.is/2025.05.23-060333/https://www.economist.c...

hunglee2 1y ago

banning Harvard from enrolling international students is a pretty clear signal to elite intellectual capital that the US is no longer the obvious place to study. Trump 2.0 is fascinating social experiment - can reducing aggregate brainpower lead to better outcomes for the country? Not a rhetorical question, being smart is not the only way to win

homarp 1y ago
smart or educated?
- falcor84 1y ago
  Arguably, smart people seek better education, such that making American universities less competitive will lead to smart people going elsewhere.
- hunglee2 1y ago
  fair observation
- draugadrotten 1y ago
  Studying at Harvard isn’t about the books or the lectures. It’s about rubbing elbows with future CEOs at late-night pizza runs.
aniviacat 1y ago
Putting aside the negatives, I see zero upsides of reducing brain power. The people being more equal perhaps? Maybe the path to the fabled middle class is to bring down the upper class.
- lemming 1y ago
  I see zero upsides of reducing brain power You have fewer annoying people pointing out logical problems with your policies.
- levzettelin 1y ago
  These days, a lot of brainpower is spent on scamming people (case in point: Vivek Ramaswamy). One can really make quite a good living off of scamming people these days. If you could reduce the brainpower of that demographic, I think this would be good for everyone else.
patrickdavey 1y ago
I'm genuinely curious: how do you think reducing aggregate brainpower could lead to better outcomes?
- levzettelin 1y ago
  If you primarily reduce the brainpower of scammers, like Vivek Ramaswamy, I think that would help, even if it reduces overall brainpower.
- hunglee2 1y ago
  being smarter doesn't always lead to better decision making - many people overly intellectualise a problem and fail to move to action. Trump is definitely action oriented, a lot of it really dumb, but it does alter the external conditions which may produce better outcomes.
  - hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
    True. Because clearly the problem for China the last few decades has been a failure to move to action. The Chinese need to start installing a whole dumber bunch of people to lead their country so their leaders are more action oriented.
    - hunglee2 1y ago
      China doesn't have a leadership problem atm, though certainly has had its fair share of anti-intellectual leaders. Trump's actions are very familiar to Chinese people, especially ones who have been educated on the excesses of Maoism. That said, point of post is - will Trump anti-intellectualism 'work', where work = benefiting America. Ostensibly, the answer looks like 'of course not' but in my view, it is too early to say
- lmpdev 1y ago
  Sigh Brainpower is not a commodity and this discussion is absurd
- tremon 1y ago
lwo32k 1y ago
It's not the only way in an "Attention Economy" cause you don't need to be Einstein to collect the most likes and followers in the land. Where the Attention Economy takes the real US Economy we shall see soon as AI explodes Supply of content with Demand hardly growing.

Herring 1y ago

Vote for republicans => get red state policies. Trump won the popular vote. America is trying very hard to become one big red state. Red states have had the worst outcomes for generations but they keep going back to republicans. The reasons escape me. The Civil War was basically southerners strongly preferring to use slaves instead of modernizing. Maybe China will motivate them to get their act together.

tzs 1y ago
> Trump won the popular vote. America is trying very hard to become one big red state. He won with a plurality. A majority did not want him.
- the_other 1y ago
  > He won with a plurality. A majority did not want him. Tomato tomato.
- LadyCailin 1y ago
  No, a majority either wanted him, or didn’t care. Only a minority didn’t want him. In the US, you don’t vote FOR a candidate. You only vote against a candidate. If you cast your vote for the Republican, or don’t cast a vote (or cast your vote for a third party), and live in a red state, then you voted against the Democrat. And vice versa. So the only people that you can fairly say didn’t want him were the democratic voters. It’s not a good system, it’s utter garbage, but it’s the current reality in the US, and the longer people fail to acknowledge this, the longer it will remain like this.
  - tzs 1y ago
    1. Many voters do not know about strategic voting. They vote for the candidate they think is best for the job. 2. A voter who knows their vote won't make a difference in the outcome due to the electoral college might vote third party to increase the chances of there being viable third parties in later elections.

constantcrying 1y ago

To where will these scientists go? Europe, only those willing to accept much lower wages and more bureaucracy. China, unlikely to even accept them. Rest of the world, far fewer resources and often far more doubtful regimes.

runsWphotons 1y ago
It is weird that this is downvoted. No one else is close to making up the funding. And Harvard is just ignoring requests from DHS? They were warned for a month? If the Secretary of Homeland Security sends a letter requesting information, do you not have to comply?
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  No, not if the demands are blatantly illegal. And the US does have the first amendment which a whole bunch of right wing free speech warriors start whining about immediately the moment someone criticizes them in public, but in reality the first amendment exists primarily to protect private speech (defined broadly, including things like making your own hiring decisions, etc) from government censorship.
- thrance 1y ago
  If the demands are illegal, then yeah, by any means, you shouldn't comply. Do resist a criminal state that's using intimidation instead of laws, isn't this the American spirit?
  - runsWphotons 1y ago
    Is there a good analysis of which demands are illegal? Is Harvard suing? I sort of agree with you, but also don't buy into the victim narrative from Harvard, which has been happy to comply with illegal requests before and has clearly violated Civil Rights laws for years.
    - runsWphotons 1y ago

blueflow 1y ago

Has been happening since 2015, and in such scales that "going expat" is synonymous to "moving to Berlin".

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
Care to elaborate in detail? I think the term "expats" and "brain drain" are two distinct groups that even though are often used interchangeably, can have little overlap. All brain drains are expats, but not all expats are valuable brains who's draining is worth anything. For example, it's one thing to import a math/physics Olympiad winner from India/China/Romania prioritizing to move to the hottest place in tech funding and cutting edge R&D, and another to import an unemployed standup comedian seeking to move to the most hipster city for raves and parties where he can tweet form his MacBook how happy he is he left Trump's "fascist" America. In my case, I also see a lot more American expats where I live here in my European college town, but when I talk to them about their jobs/careers, most seem to be net drain on our system (au pairs, dog walkers, under the table English teachers, etc) who moved here for the chill life and free healthcare, rather than some highly ambitious well paid engineers or scientists who are gonna boost our economy to overtake the US. Most valuable brains are met here still seem to come from Balkans, Eastern Europe, India, Iran and Asia in general. Do you see my point? Edit: please see my grandchild comment below for detailing on my thoughts on this
- Symbiote 1y ago
  A friend who heads a well-funded research group here in Denmark says the recent change is not so much in the number of Americans applying, but the quality/prestige. He's now receiving serious enquiries from graduates of Stanford, MIT etc, who previously were unlikely to leave the USA.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    I don't doubt that, but researchers and post-docs always tend to move around he world, especially in niche fields, where you can't usually find an opportunity in your area of expertise right in your back yard in a timely manner(some PhD friends had to move from the EU to Korea because of that), but my main point is whether that will dethrone the US economically and boost the EU in the same way, or if the end result will be negligeable in practice. I suspect as long as the US pays the highest wages in the world by a long shot, and hosts the world's top companies, both civilian and military, it will not run out of brains willing to move there. Because for every American leaving to Copenhagen because of Trump, the US might get 10 new brains in return from China, India, Vietnam, Korea, Turkey, Serbia, etc. for the wages. Plus, Trump is a passing event that will be replaced in 3,5 years with someone else who could turn things around. You'd probably need 10-20 Trumps in a row to cause any lasting damage to the US. And also, no matter how moronic Trump or a US president can be, corporations like Apple, Nvidia, AMD, SpaceX, etc are not, and will always lobby Trump or whoever will be president to maintain policies that will keep the US attractive to brains for them so they can get the best talent in the world. Do you see where I'm coming from when I say I doubt the US will suffer much or at all?

pharrington 1y ago

The correct play for Harvard is to make no changes to their enrollment polices, and then fight the Trump administration in court.

disqard 1y ago
The administration can shake you like a snow globe longer than you can keep functioning. (what if Harvard loses half of its faculty next, because some visa category is declared "illegal" by the administration?)
- pharrington 1y ago
  Same thing.

snapdaddy 1y ago

I feel like this is a wild mis-characterisation. American isn't in danger of becoming a victim; America is trying to suppress academic pursuits and intellectualism. It is politically inconvenient, which means it needs to be eradicated.

danaris 1y ago
Except that "America" is not monolithic. America is currently a victim of Trump's batshit insane policies. A plurality of Americans voted for Trump, but not all of even that percentage actually support or desire what is happening now. Most Americans are not in favor of this, so saying that "America is doing this to itself" rather than "this is happening to America" feels like it ignores all those people who very much do not want this.
- krapp 1y ago
  >Most Americans are not in favor of this, so saying that "America is doing this to itself" rather than "this is happening to America" feels like it ignores all those people who very much do not want this. And saying "this is happening to America" ignores all those people who very much do. Trump's election wasn't an act of God nor an unavoidable consequence of physical laws. People voted for him. Between the two, it's more correct to say "America is doing this to itself." If I stab myself in the leg, it's still a conscious and willful act on my part even though my leg wasn't holding the knife. It didn't just "happen."
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >America is currently a victim of Trump's batshit insane policies. You're not a victim over your voters' democratic choice. If I choose to cut my nose to spite my face, I'm not a victim. Why are people so bad about taking accountability over their actions? It's always someone else's fault. >Most Americans are not in favor of this Most American voters voted for this, this is how democracy works: sometimes your candidate wins, sometimes the other candidate wins, and you have to just suck it up and live with it till the next elections, this isn't being a victim. Rinse and repeat.

computerthings 1y ago

[dead]

anonymousiam 1y ago

It's inevitable, and it has little to do with Trump. I saw a version of the chart in this document about 10 years ago. https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/China-is-Fast-Outpacing-U.S.-STEM-PhD-Growth.pdf https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/China-is-Fast...

readthenotes1 1y ago

I wonder how the academic brain drain will affect the replicability crisis? I'm assuming if they end up in Salamanca U it will get worse, but don't really know...