8 ms·

My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hir

My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support their researchers, workers, and communities. It's the death of research in the usa.

stainablesteel 4mo ago
[flagged]
- chneu 4mo ago
  Not really true but white Americans love to say that. Americans are the biggest bullies and and victims.
  - _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
    I know a ton of people who would love to get their Phd. When they can't make it work but see graduate programs heavily populated by foreign students (who may or may not stay) funded by (what they see as) their tax dollars, some become resentful. That's a pretty normal human reaction, not a uniquely white or American one. Understanding human realities and optics might have helped here. But instead you chose 'white people evil, Americans suck'. Not productive and in part how we got here with those positions now unfunded, and just as small minded as the attitudes you're condemning.
    - handle584 4mo ago
      Well why Americans are not willing to take those PhD offers that pay barely above poverty line for 5 years or so? The answer is obvious, they would rather take a job in industry that pays miles better. There is really no reason to be resentful because it is a voluntary choice, and foreign students are worse off in every aspect to start with. Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc. Situation is really similar to H1B workers discussed here a while ago. The options for Americans are plenty while for foreigners very scarce, and with the recent change it is getting even more so without giving Americans a bigger incentive, so it is really a lose-lose outcome.
      - _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
        I get all that. I grew up in Santa Cruz and wish I could go home but can't because of the cost. I can't imagine having to leave my entire country. I'm not trying to put down immigrants in those positions. I am inspired by immigrants. I am inspired by foreigners who come here. But none of that addresses that many Americans dream of being in those positions, and seeing foreigners who are doing it and are being funded by government dollars instills a human (not just white American) reaction. Human nature is our reality. It's not good or evil, it's just human. Feeding into it is evil. But that there are feelings is just natural. Responding to people feeling that with 'entitled white' does not improve anything. Does not encourage them to reflect on it, or realize 'yeah, it's a dream, but I saw the reality and chose something else'. I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying immigrants/foreign visitors should be maligned/made to feel bad. But if we don't address it in a productive way, those human feelings become identity, become politics/actions, become toxic and destructive. H1-B I would like to see addressed, I feel it is abused by companies to exploit people. But at the same time it's so toxic now it can't be addressed because the racism is too entrenched now. My fear is the same is being put in place with Phds. We need to not push it into identity with things like 'white entitled Americans' but push the reality that it's a nice daydream but people realize they don't want the reality (and not just in a 'American's don't want to do it' way, because again that isn't productive, because people do want it, just not enough to accept what comes with it). OP is (knowingly or not) making the US more xenophobic for no productive reason. Labeling people doesn't help anything and we shouldn't do that, just like we shouldn't feed human but negative responses to other's doing things we wish we could do.
        xp84 4mo ago
        A good and balanced take, this. Too bad we don't even allow those on the political stage anymore :( All we get is candidates who scream that the other side is stupid fascists or degenerates and that all their opinions are obviously stupid, since they came from obviously stupid irrational people.
      - whyagaindavid 4mo ago
        I think it is misunderstanding to think that Phd Salaries will increase to high level if immigrants left. Will NIH or NSF dump 3 x more money? If that is the case are civil servants in USA getting super great salary (a friend works for DMV in NJ and she says pay is awful)
    - chneu 4mo ago
      I'm a white American and I've heard a handful of my fellow white Americans say this, but they can't actually show me real world examples or show me how it actually affected them. It's willfull victim hood. It's a viewpoint of "I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" White Americans are so acquainted to benefitting the systemic issues that hold others back that equality seems unequal to white Americans. "Why is that immigrant applying for a PhD? They're pushing out a good white American!!" When I go to academic events in the US(less often now since Trump) it's still 95% white folks. Wild how that happens. Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude. It's just that white Americans have no idea how entitled they are. The second someone else gets a morsel of a crumb it becomes a question of "Why did this person get something?" This is the exact thing trump and conservatives say to rile up their base and it works. It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this. It's a question of "How much?" not if.
      - _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
        None of this addresses that it's basic human nature. Nor provides any way to improve anything. "I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" Again, it is normal for people to respond when a system changes to their detriment. Not a white people issue. It's also not wild/"white people" to think citizens should be favored over non-citizens by government funded programs. We have to lead people to a better position. Attempts at shaming them into it isn't going to work. Telling them 'things are just going to be worse for you you whining entitled white boy' isn't going to improve anything. "Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude." Pick one of the above. You can't pick both. "It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this." It's endemic to human nature, not just white American culture. You might want to broaden your human experience if you truly think this.
    - conception 4mo ago
      What tax dollars are you referring to? America famously does not pay for people to go to higher education at any real scale.
      - gs17 4mo ago
        They're talking about PhDs, many of which are funded by grants.
        conception 4mo ago
        Post docs and PhD’s working in labs get Grants sure. grad students however which is what we’re talking about here, do not. Or at least not government ones.
- btrettel 4mo ago
  As a US citizen with a PhD, I didn't experience any clear discrimination in favor of foreign students during grad school. I think the main reason so few US citizens get PhDs is because PhD "student" (they're actually workers) positions pay so poorly. Make PhD student positions have non-poverty wages and you'll see a lot more interest from US citizens. On the flip side, I think foreign students experienced a lot of abusive conditions that I could more easily say no to because I didn't have a visa that required me to work at the university. I've seen some of that first hand. I don't mean to imply that there would be no cost to me saying no, just that I wouldn't have to leave the country if I said no.
  - stainablesteel 4mo ago
    im referring to the admissions process, and this discrimination has been present for decades
    - btrettel 4mo ago
      I don't think I experienced discrimination during admissions either. Off the top of my head, I don't know any US citizens who told me that they wanted to go to grad school but were unable to be admitted to a school.
      - mikeyouse 4mo ago
        Yeah, it's just nativist nonsense from completely the uninformed.
    - handle584 4mo ago
      Any source? In my field US Citizens and permanent residents are actually preferred for at least two reasons, first they are eligible for graduate grants like NSF so they are not using department's money; second upon graduation they are eligible for more jobs because places like national labs do not hire foreigners.
      - throwaway0123_5 4mo ago
- eitally 4mo ago
  When I was in grad school (2008-2011), of the 60 people in my program only 5 were American. The vast majority were Indian or Chinese (~50). I wouldn't say there was discrimination, though. The matriculation statistics were interest-based, mostly. A lot of the Americans who received their BS went immediately to industry.
  - tennfown 4mo ago
    My understanding this is because being a grad student is hardly an economically good deal for a typical American student, but for the sort of foreigner who can afford to send their child to school in the US, it can still be valuable.
  - Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
    During my engineering grad program I was fascinated by the gender disparity among americans (almost no women) versus the nearly equal gender balance among engineering grad students from India, the Middle East (including Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia), and China. The engineering gender imbalance seems to be almost unique to the USA. Countries with awful records on women's rights sent just as many women to get PhDs as men.
    - arjie 4mo ago
      Others have observed this as well, but it is considered a disputed finding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
  - stainablesteel 4mo ago
    yeah most people are normal human beings, im saying the discrimination happens in getting admitted into the program
    - alchemism 4mo ago
      My 1.8 GPA is literally discriminated-against, too. So unfair!
0xbadcafebee 4mo ago
Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly
- Tangurena2 4mo ago
  Back to the 1930s. People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.
  - pstuart 4mo ago
    Huh? That seems counter to my perceptions. Any links to expound upon that?
    - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
      Nicole Rudolph just did a video on this topic. I haven't watched it yet though.
    - odysseus 4mo ago
      Probably because the nuclear family doesn’t include grandparents helping.
- Espressosaurus 4mo ago
  The fifties are when a lot of this infrastructure got its start. They want the 1850s.
  - downrightmike 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  - lostdog 4mo ago
    1850s was the beginning of the railroad boom. You're thinking 1750s.
- bigyabai 4mo ago
drnick1 4mo ago
> they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.
- gs17 4mo ago
  Then it should have been easy to cut only those grants instead of the "real science", right?
  - paytonjjones 4mo ago
    I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise. As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!
    - gs17 4mo ago
      I don't think it's an easy task in reality, but they were claiming there's "countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda" outnumbering the important grants and taking up all the funding, which should be a lot easier to audit for and cut a large portion of it without killing any "real science". Instead, we got a clumsy keyword search.
      - paytonjjones 4mo ago
        I'm sure I'll get heat for this, but I think a low-resolution first pass a la keyword search was actually an excellent call from a macro standpoint. It (1) clears out a good chunk of cruft, instantly, with little effort and (2) scares people away from doing further explicitly ideological work. There are a surprising number of social scientists who engage in both good basic research and useless ideological bone-picking, and the low resolution pass effectively pushes them to focus on their real work.
burningChrome 4mo ago
Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make. He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest. Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.
- matsemann 4mo ago
  I wonder what discoveries that could've helped people are now pushed back years if not decades.
  - opsnooperfax 4mo ago
    Given the reproducibility crisis and perverse incentives of the past several decades, it may be less significant than you think. There’s no philosopher stone that turns money into impactful research. Fewer people in it for the love of the game focused on fewer problems may actually be a good thing.
    - Peaches4Rent 4mo ago
      Booooo Yeah just milk those suckers dry. Hope dare they try to do something good and ask to get paid
    - matsemann 4mo ago
      What a weird argument, sorry. You're positing that those working in science aren't doing it for your decided "correct" reasons. Does this go for other industries as well? We should fire all bus drivers that aren't in it for the love of the game? Can't one still provide value? I also think you're wrong in how this would shape incentives and the "reproducibility crisis". It certainly doesn't help that random things get axed and people can't survive in academics.
johnsmith1840 4mo ago
If you knew how the academia sauce was made you'd agree with their drastic actions. Could it have been done better? Yes. But there is literally no way an attempt at that wouldn't have gone exactly like it is now. The closer you are to ivy leauge research the worse it looks a huge numbers of researchers have completely lost the plot. I can't imagine how bad that gets the further you get away from ivy leauge.

stainablesteel 4mo ago

[flagged]

chneu 4mo ago
Not really true but white Americans love to say that. Americans are the biggest bullies and and victims.
- _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
  I know a ton of people who would love to get their Phd. When they can't make it work but see graduate programs heavily populated by foreign students (who may or may not stay) funded by (what they see as) their tax dollars, some become resentful. That's a pretty normal human reaction, not a uniquely white or American one. Understanding human realities and optics might have helped here. But instead you chose 'white people evil, Americans suck'. Not productive and in part how we got here with those positions now unfunded, and just as small minded as the attitudes you're condemning.
  - handle584 4mo ago
    Well why Americans are not willing to take those PhD offers that pay barely above poverty line for 5 years or so? The answer is obvious, they would rather take a job in industry that pays miles better. There is really no reason to be resentful because it is a voluntary choice, and foreign students are worse off in every aspect to start with. Leaving friends & family behind, travel often involves long-haul flights, different culture to blend in, not eligible for NSF grants and national lab jobs, etc. Situation is really similar to H1B workers discussed here a while ago. The options for Americans are plenty while for foreigners very scarce, and with the recent change it is getting even more so without giving Americans a bigger incentive, so it is really a lose-lose outcome.
    - _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
      I get all that. I grew up in Santa Cruz and wish I could go home but can't because of the cost. I can't imagine having to leave my entire country. I'm not trying to put down immigrants in those positions. I am inspired by immigrants. I am inspired by foreigners who come here. But none of that addresses that many Americans dream of being in those positions, and seeing foreigners who are doing it and are being funded by government dollars instills a human (not just white American) reaction. Human nature is our reality. It's not good or evil, it's just human. Feeding into it is evil. But that there are feelings is just natural. Responding to people feeling that with 'entitled white' does not improve anything. Does not encourage them to reflect on it, or realize 'yeah, it's a dream, but I saw the reality and chose something else'. I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying immigrants/foreign visitors should be maligned/made to feel bad. But if we don't address it in a productive way, those human feelings become identity, become politics/actions, become toxic and destructive. H1-B I would like to see addressed, I feel it is abused by companies to exploit people. But at the same time it's so toxic now it can't be addressed because the racism is too entrenched now. My fear is the same is being put in place with Phds. We need to not push it into identity with things like 'white entitled Americans' but push the reality that it's a nice daydream but people realize they don't want the reality (and not just in a 'American's don't want to do it' way, because again that isn't productive, because people do want it, just not enough to accept what comes with it). OP is (knowingly or not) making the US more xenophobic for no productive reason. Labeling people doesn't help anything and we shouldn't do that, just like we shouldn't feed human but negative responses to other's doing things we wish we could do.
      - xp84 4mo ago
        A good and balanced take, this. Too bad we don't even allow those on the political stage anymore :( All we get is candidates who scream that the other side is stupid fascists or degenerates and that all their opinions are obviously stupid, since they came from obviously stupid irrational people.
    - whyagaindavid 4mo ago
      I think it is misunderstanding to think that Phd Salaries will increase to high level if immigrants left. Will NIH or NSF dump 3 x more money? If that is the case are civil servants in USA getting super great salary (a friend works for DMV in NJ and she says pay is awful)
  - chneu 4mo ago
    I'm a white American and I've heard a handful of my fellow white Americans say this, but they can't actually show me real world examples or show me how it actually affected them. It's willfull victim hood. It's a viewpoint of "I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" White Americans are so acquainted to benefitting the systemic issues that hold others back that equality seems unequal to white Americans. "Why is that immigrant applying for a PhD? They're pushing out a good white American!!" When I go to academic events in the US(less often now since Trump) it's still 95% white folks. Wild how that happens. Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude. It's just that white Americans have no idea how entitled they are. The second someone else gets a morsel of a crumb it becomes a question of "Why did this person get something?" This is the exact thing trump and conservatives say to rile up their base and it works. It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this. It's a question of "How much?" not if.
    - _DeadFred_ 4mo ago
      None of this addresses that it's basic human nature. Nor provides any way to improve anything. "I'm a victim in a system that has benefited me, why isn't it benefiting me over those other people anymore?" Again, it is normal for people to respond when a system changes to their detriment. Not a white people issue. It's also not wild/"white people" to think citizens should be favored over non-citizens by government funded programs. We have to lead people to a better position. Attempts at shaming them into it isn't going to work. Telling them 'things are just going to be worse for you you whining entitled white boy' isn't going to improve anything. "Lol constant victims. I'm not trying to be a dick or rude." Pick one of the above. You can't pick both. "It's endemic to American culture so there's no denying this." It's endemic to human nature, not just white American culture. You might want to broaden your human experience if you truly think this.
  - conception 4mo ago
    What tax dollars are you referring to? America famously does not pay for people to go to higher education at any real scale.
    - gs17 4mo ago
      They're talking about PhDs, many of which are funded by grants.
      - conception 4mo ago
        Post docs and PhD’s working in labs get Grants sure. grad students however which is what we’re talking about here, do not. Or at least not government ones.
btrettel 4mo ago
As a US citizen with a PhD, I didn't experience any clear discrimination in favor of foreign students during grad school. I think the main reason so few US citizens get PhDs is because PhD "student" (they're actually workers) positions pay so poorly. Make PhD student positions have non-poverty wages and you'll see a lot more interest from US citizens. On the flip side, I think foreign students experienced a lot of abusive conditions that I could more easily say no to because I didn't have a visa that required me to work at the university. I've seen some of that first hand. I don't mean to imply that there would be no cost to me saying no, just that I wouldn't have to leave the country if I said no.
- stainablesteel 4mo ago
  im referring to the admissions process, and this discrimination has been present for decades
  - btrettel 4mo ago
    I don't think I experienced discrimination during admissions either. Off the top of my head, I don't know any US citizens who told me that they wanted to go to grad school but were unable to be admitted to a school.
    - mikeyouse 4mo ago
      Yeah, it's just nativist nonsense from completely the uninformed.
  - handle584 4mo ago
    Any source? In my field US Citizens and permanent residents are actually preferred for at least two reasons, first they are eligible for graduate grants like NSF so they are not using department's money; second upon graduation they are eligible for more jobs because places like national labs do not hire foreigners.
    - throwaway0123_5 4mo ago
eitally 4mo ago
When I was in grad school (2008-2011), of the 60 people in my program only 5 were American. The vast majority were Indian or Chinese (~50). I wouldn't say there was discrimination, though. The matriculation statistics were interest-based, mostly. A lot of the Americans who received their BS went immediately to industry.
- tennfown 4mo ago
  My understanding this is because being a grad student is hardly an economically good deal for a typical American student, but for the sort of foreigner who can afford to send their child to school in the US, it can still be valuable.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
  During my engineering grad program I was fascinated by the gender disparity among americans (almost no women) versus the nearly equal gender balance among engineering grad students from India, the Middle East (including Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia), and China. The engineering gender imbalance seems to be almost unique to the USA. Countries with awful records on women's rights sent just as many women to get PhDs as men.
  - arjie 4mo ago
    Others have observed this as well, but it is considered a disputed finding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
- stainablesteel 4mo ago
  yeah most people are normal human beings, im saying the discrimination happens in getting admitted into the program
  - alchemism 4mo ago
    My 1.8 GPA is literally discriminated-against, too. So unfair!

0xbadcafebee 4mo ago

Americans voted to bring the country back to the 1950's and the plan is working perfectly

Tangurena2 4mo ago
Back to the 1930s. People in the 1950s were convinced that the nuclear family was a disaster and the leading cause of divorce/poverty.
- pstuart 4mo ago
  Huh? That seems counter to my perceptions. Any links to expound upon that?
  - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    Nicole Rudolph just did a video on this topic. I haven't watched it yet though.
  - odysseus 4mo ago
    Probably because the nuclear family doesn’t include grandparents helping.
Espressosaurus 4mo ago
The fifties are when a lot of this infrastructure got its start. They want the 1850s.
- downrightmike 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- lostdog 4mo ago
  1850s was the beginning of the railroad boom. You're thinking 1750s.
bigyabai 4mo ago

drnick1 4mo ago

> they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.

gs17 4mo ago
Then it should have been easy to cut only those grants instead of the "real science", right?
- paytonjjones 4mo ago
  I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise. As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!
  - gs17 4mo ago
    I don't think it's an easy task in reality, but they were claiming there's "countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda" outnumbering the important grants and taking up all the funding, which should be a lot easier to audit for and cut a large portion of it without killing any "real science". Instead, we got a clumsy keyword search.
    - paytonjjones 4mo ago
      I'm sure I'll get heat for this, but I think a low-resolution first pass a la keyword search was actually an excellent call from a macro standpoint. It (1) clears out a good chunk of cruft, instantly, with little effort and (2) scares people away from doing further explicitly ideological work. There are a surprising number of social scientists who engage in both good basic research and useless ideological bone-picking, and the low resolution pass effectively pushes them to focus on their real work.

burningChrome 4mo ago

Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make. He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest. Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.

matsemann 4mo ago
I wonder what discoveries that could've helped people are now pushed back years if not decades.
- opsnooperfax 4mo ago
  Given the reproducibility crisis and perverse incentives of the past several decades, it may be less significant than you think. There’s no philosopher stone that turns money into impactful research. Fewer people in it for the love of the game focused on fewer problems may actually be a good thing.
  - Peaches4Rent 4mo ago
    Booooo Yeah just milk those suckers dry. Hope dare they try to do something good and ask to get paid
  - matsemann 4mo ago
    What a weird argument, sorry. You're positing that those working in science aren't doing it for your decided "correct" reasons. Does this go for other industries as well? We should fire all bus drivers that aren't in it for the love of the game? Can't one still provide value? I also think you're wrong in how this would shape incentives and the "reproducibility crisis". It certainly doesn't help that random things get axed and people can't survive in academics.

johnsmith1840 4mo ago

If you knew how the academia sauce was made you'd agree with their drastic actions. Could it have been done better? Yes. But there is literally no way an attempt at that wouldn't have gone exactly like it is now. The closer you are to ivy leauge research the worse it looks a huge numbers of researchers have completely lost the plot. I can't imagine how bad that gets the further you get away from ivy leauge.