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MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international. https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/ https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/
by htrp 5mo ago
MIT Current Graduate Student are 41% international.
https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/ https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoYup, it’s called a brain drain and it’s why until recently America held a vice grip on groundbreaking research and its commercialization.
- andix 5mo agoThe people decided that this sucks and have spoken. Dear god, make America stupid again!
- busterarm 5mo agoSo you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic I’ll take the bait. I think we need less electoral fetishisation. Our republic is woefully deficient on selection by lot, something which would seem to benefit e.g. our judiciary. > opposing points of view should pick better candidates Totally agree. But the primary-by-election system demonstrates, in a microcosm, why defaulting to electing everything isn’t a good strategy.
- ceejayoz 5mo ago> So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Well, what should a democratic society do when that democracy votes to overthrow it and do fascism?
- SiempreViernes 5mo agoProbably accept it wasn't actually a fair system and put in some proper legislation about district drawing algorithms, voting access, and campaign financing. You also have to take a good luck at the unelected legislative power of the supreme court, those clowns aren't doing democracy any favours.
- loeg 5mo agoNo one voted to "overthrow" democracy and do "fascism," cut the hyperbole.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoStop freaking out at thought experiments. I'm asking what should happen in such a scenario. Should a democratic society be able to vote to nuke their least favorite city? Should they be able to vote for slavery? Should they be able to vote to legalize raping kids? What should a democratic populace not be able to inflict upon the less powerful segments of society?
- loeg 5mo agoTo clarify, you agree that the Trump admin / MAGA political movement isn't fascism and his election wasn't an overthrow of democracy? Your earlier remarks were just a thought experiment? That isn't really the sense I've gotten from your historical comments.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoI don't agree; it's simply irrelevant here. We either accept "there are some things you shouldn't be able to democratically vote for" like, say, the Holocaust or reinstating slavery, or we do not. You added Trump to the conversation, not me.
- just_some_guy_2 5mo agoIsn't that basically what a constitution is for? A constitutional monarchy limits the power of the king, and a constitutional democracy limits the power of the elected government?
- seanmcdirmid 5mo agoMaybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because of their own policies.
- r2_pilot 5mo agoDon't consign us here in Mississippi, voting in every election, to not be represented in a democratic society. It's hard enough living here without getting dogpiled by external people who never visit and think that just because our "representatives" are a certain way that everyone here is like them, instead of the messier reality that power structures here are misaligned with the actual population's collective will.
- seanmcdirmid 5mo agoI lived in Texas, Mississippi, Florida before, so I’m unsure what you mean by not visiting. I didn’t list a state that I hadn’t lived in for at least 3 months. Unfortunately that was 5 years in Mississippi. Regardless what would you have us do? More autonomy for states? You can’t go out alone, and we have a nice red-blue state now to base a division on.
- greenie_beans 5mo agono, they are saying that by discarding mississippi, you are ignoring like 45%+ of the state that didn't vote for whatever politician you hate. and also you are ignoring the centuries of disenfranchisement that prevents more people from voting against whatever politician you hate. it's not a monolith. mississsippi is the blackest state in the union yet coastal liberals who are supposedly anti-racist are quick to throw out the state.
- cucumber3732842 5mo ago
- unethical_ban 5mo agoThis is trolling, or a glaring false dichotomy, or choosing not to recognize reality, or all three. Complaining about the outcome of an election is not equivalent to advocating for non-democracy. Much of what the US executive has done to intimidate foreign residents is illegal if not anti-American, such as revoking visas for writing op-eds in a student newspaper that the political leadership dislikes. The gutting of funding at various universities was also done as political punishment. So, I'm not sure what your point was.
- coryrc 5mo agoOur systems need to be MORE democratic! First Pass The Post is democratic, but the worst way of it. In most districts, 40-49% of voters are disenfranchised by gerrymandering. Mixed Member Proportional is far more representative. If you assume certain minority groups vote as a bloc, then you can't gerrymander them away like our current system does. The proportion of people not getting representation is capped by 1/number_of_reps. The whole "republicans in Senate stop the government from doing anything" needs to end. Parliamentary systems means the legislative body and head of state agree to work together. Our system means deadlock most of the time. Finally, "senior members" of the parties in both houses are the only ones who decide what bills can be voted on. That's not democratic. Every member should be able to bring at least some bills up for an up-or-down vote. Make them vote down "healthcare for veterans" instead of killing it in committee or amending it to add "only if you strip women of bodily autonomy".
- busterarm 5mo agoWe're (at least) 10 years into this mess now and still everyone is focused on restructuring our systems and prosecutions instead of putting forward a platform that broadly appeals to enough Americans to decisively win elections. What I said applies to both parties. We're not really all that different but all the incentives align towards pleasing extremists. Do you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it? Anything you build can be exploited against you when you're on the other side of the power balance. The solution is truly moving politics to the center.
- CamperBob2 5mo agoDo you really need any more evidence of this than people getting shot and people/press generally being okay with it? Democrats who push gun control at the cost of everything else -- such as the possibility of turning Texas blue -- are a big reason why the party lacks power to influence anything else.
- coryrc 5mo agoIt's First Pass the Post that causes that. We have maybe 30% is the population that wants guns highly restricted and a different 30% that wants abortions highly restricted. We have something like 52% that want Medicare4All. But we just seesaw between gun grabber and pussy grabber because those M4A aren't the majority of either party primary. MMP means the person running on M4A gets ranked in the middle by everybody, which is enough for a seat.
- nkoren 5mo agoThere are many ways that America could be more democratic, and simultaneously produce less stupid results: 1. Eliminate / work around the electoral college system, which makes it so that people in the most diverse, educated, and economically-productive parts of the country have dramatically less voting power than a small minority of people who live in more homogeneous, less educated, and less economically-productive areas. This would significantly change the messaging needed to win. 2. Eliminate first-pass-the-post voting, which encourage candidates with extreme views, eliminate anything other than (largely false) political binaries, make it possible to win elections while receiving a minority of the votes, and make it so that the only viable strategy is to vote for the lesser evil rather than somebody you actually want. 3. Get the money out of politics. Make untraceably-funded super-PACs illegal. 4. Gerrymandering should be super fucking illegal. Other places do this. They're more democratic than the US, and while they still frequently elect stupid politicians, none of those are as bottom-of-the-barrel as what the US is able to scrape together.
- rangestransform 5mo agore:2, proportional representation systems oftentimes have more extremist parties elected, they’re just severely kneecapped by not having enough votes to do anything extremist
- busterarm 5mo agoExcept that they can hold your coalition government hostage by making you concede on their pet issue or leave the coalition and force an election.
- andix 5mo agoI'm just stating an observation.
- nukedindia 5mo ago[dead]
- rexpop 5mo agoAre you trolling? Elections are won by spending, especially since Citizens United. Democracy has not survived oligarchical propaganda.
- jryio 5mo agoA brain drain means the intelligent population emigrates to other countries. The narrative and data do not support Americans going abroad. I think you're referring to a lack of competitive education for those coming outside of America and choosing Europe / China to study. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
- lokar 5mo agoI think they meant that in the past every other nation had a brain drain towards American research universities.
- Ifkaluva 5mo agoI think you’ve got it backwards. MIT used to be brain-draining China, India, Iran, Europe, etc into schools like MIT. The lower numbers mean this is happening less. There are likely multiple factors: becoming less attractive, their domestic options becoming more attractive, more aggressive immigration posture, etc
- jryio 5mo agoIf you "drain" something the subject of the verb is what is being drained not where it is draining to.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoBrain drain is a noun. In the context of American research universities, it’s historically been used one way because that was the direction of the drain.
- jknoepfler 5mo agoMonopolizing talent is a zero sum game. If your tally is in the negative, you're experiencing brain drain.
- chirau 5mo agoNo. They have it right. Brain drain, by definition, is emigration of educated and skilled labor out of country or region in search of greener pastures. America losing foreigners in education institutions is not 'brain drain' in the classical sense. There is no emigration (the drain) involved. America receiving all those students and skilled labor over the years was brain drain.
- groundzeros2015 5mo agoIsn’t the brain drain people leaving their home countries to make money in the US?
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> people leaving their home countries to make money in the US? To study and work, yes. We learned the trick when the Nazis chased off their scientists, doubled down on it by capturing Nazi scientists, and then developed it into a multi-decade advantage throughout the Cold War and the 1990s. Looking back, we started fucking it up with the Iraq War and financial crisis (see: A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry) and are now closing the chapter triumphantly.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- 1-more 5mo agoHighly recommend The Man from the Future biography of John von Neumann. We got The Martians for a steal because Europe was too hostile to minorities and we got the Manhattan Project and computers out of the deal. Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoThanks! Really appreciate the recommendation! > Never gonna have a brain drain arbitrage opportunity like that again. It’s sort of there for the taking for American elites. Someone just has to roll out a real red carpet.
- groundzeros2015 5mo agoThat’s not remotely similar.
- 1-more 5mo agoSimilar to what? Von Neumann was part of Europe's elite scientific brain drain to the US in the 20th century, that's all.
- slg 5mo agoHistorians looking back at this era are going to struggle to understand why we made the decisions we did.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoEh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.
- notahacker 5mo agoWe'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...
- zamfi 5mo agoOn its face this sounds like an indictment of an electorate. But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".
- csoups14 5mo agoOf course incumbents are going to be supportive of the system as it was and is, they're incumbents. You can't blame a person in power for maintaining a system giving them power any more than you can blame a bee for pollinating a flower. It's in their nature. The electorate misidentified the solution to their problems. Voters squarely hold the blame in my opinion. You can't vote for an arsonist and then complain when they set fire to everything. Leftists spend their time complaining online and disengaging from the political system instead of voting in primaries against incumbents. Independents and conservatives vote against their own interests consistently while keeping in power a party that is destroying our system of government.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
- seibelj 5mo ago[dead]
- taf2 5mo agoare there any stats pointing to these students going to different schools? we know birth rates fell sharply starting ~2008 and have stayed low. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr043.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr043.pdf]
- lumost 5mo agoIt's more complicated than this, The US has multiple challenge in its own domestic talent pipeline. In a world of finite slots for elite production and elite employment the US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population. Whether these slots should be finite or not is an independent problem, however for various reasons the slots are currently finite and potentially reducing in volume with income inequality.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> US must own the outcome of allocating those slots internationally and the resulting under-employment of its domestic population Slots are being cut across the board. For international students as well as domestic ones. Also, we’re talking about a couple hundred seats. And again, of graduate students. > Whether these slots should be finite or not They’re grad students. Extremely skilled. Artisanly trained, pretty much. There are fundamental limits on how many we can productively have. I’m guessing none at MIT are wasted.
- Tsarp 5mo agoWould be nice to see if this number dipped from before. International students typically end up paying out of station tuition and is a huge source of income for the univs.
- lokar 5mo agoBut not a factor for private universities
- ceejayoz 5mo agoYes, it still is. State/federal aid is still available to students at private universities.
- ghaff 5mo agoThat is much less true of grad programs in technical fields. Undergrad, international students are indeed more likely to pay full-boat--or at least larger boat--than US applicants.
- fastaguy88 5mo agoThis is not true for PhD programs in top-ranked institutions. It may have been true 20+ years ago, but today it is very difficult to buy your way into a graduate program.
- AnotherGoodName 5mo agoIt’s due to fewer positions mentioned in the link though right? MIT would always have more applicants than positions. The only thing that would drop total numbers of students should be fewer positions. Which of course is just as much of an issue since it highlights a blatant attack on education in general.
- lokar 5mo agoI assume it is due to less federal support in the form of research grants that support PhD students, labs, etc.
- armchairhacker 5mo agoEvery prestigious (STEM) college I’m aware of, a large ratio of graduate students and professors are foreign. Even in the EU, graduate students and professors come from other continents. Many are Indian and Chinese, but there are people from all over Europe, South America, Africa (certainly Australia but oddly I don’t know any OTOH)…it’s very diverse. But everyone speaks English.
- gNucleusAI 5mo agoah did not now. 41%
- ethagnawl 5mo agoWhat point are you trying to make by sharing this?
- BeetleB 5mo agoIf you look at most decent engineering universities, are they any different if you restrict to engineering/science departments? I don't have statistics, but when I was in grad school, the mini-institute I was part of (5-6 faculty members + students) had more than 70% foreigners. And I think all the non-foreigners were born abroad (whether Green Card or US citizen). In my very average undergrad university, the EE department had 2 American PhD students, and something like 6-10 international students.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoMight be the only thing keeping America great. We lose the Chinese, Indians and Russians and we’re going to be a scientific backwater in a decade.
- browningstreet 5mo agoI'm amazed at how many of the respondents in this HN thread aren't discussing the super-mega-seismic externalities laid upon universities by the current administration. Universities always have issues, but there's an orange elephant in the room. Somehow Trump manages to do 1,000 nasty things and people talk around their effects a few weeks/months later. We may be bored of talking about him, or centering conversations about what he wrought, but that's a mistake.
- ErneX 5mo agoAgree, they pretty much chased or scared foreign students away. This is the result.