> . If they further hamstring themselves by excluding Chinese students, the decline of American science will accelerate dramatically
it is a strange assumption to make since by all counts the US is already the country in the world with the most diverse population. It is not as if science is only the work of students or even in particular foreign students...
The US has a massive advantage in science (and business) in that many of the best and brightest from across the world want to come to the US, despite the hurdles and issues of getting student visas or work visas.
This means that as a country you don't have to pay for the primary and secondary schooling of all these people, but you get to reap the rewards of them working in your country and contributing to your scientific lead, to your economy.
But like all advantages, if you don't pay attention, you can squander it. You can make it easy for smart Chinese students (in this instance) to do science in the US and benefit US academia and businesses, or you can make it hard, and the same people will instead benefit some other economy.
It's not about diversity, it's about not realizing that the free firehose of cheap and willing smarts and labour isn't perpetual, that it actually has to be maintained and encouraged.
> This means that as a country you don't have to pay for the primary and secondary schooling of all these people
You don't have to pay for an order of magnitude more people: education is not a technology yet, it could give no guarantees on a results. To get one bright student you need to teach ten people through primary and secondary school.
A lot of the prestigious schools in the United States could not charge tuition going forward for decades and be fine financially still, they have massive endowments.
Harvard, Yale, University of Texas, Stanford, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Texas A&M, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Columbia University all have 10-30 billion EACH.
Roughly 100 colleges in the United States have endowments exceeding 1 billion dollars. Even with a billion in a broad market index fund they could burn 30 million a year and likely never run out of money, I think the most expensive tuition in the country is like 60k or some such, so the poorest of those 100 schools could take at least 500 students a year for free and not go broke.
There are about a dozen universities in the United States that have research budgets alone exceeding 1 billion dollars a year.
Kinda makes you wonder why college tuition is so expensive at those 100~ schools...
And I don't think those endowments include real estate value or income from IP the schools own thanks to research conducted there.
There were a lot fewer university students back when you could attend a polytechnical institute and make a living wage in a factory. With globalization and deindustrialization, Britain is now a "knowledge economy" so you have hundreds of thousands more in universities.
Funding was shifted to fees. Although considering how much of student loans is not expected to be repaid it's arguable that a lot is still state funded...
primary and secondary education costs virtually nothing compared to college so thats a pretty weak point to make.
You could make the exact reverse point, that universities in the US have built their expertise over decades if not centuries and Foreign students are largely benefiting more from them than whatever they could get in their home countries.
It's a win-win thing for the U.S. and the students. (arguably a loss for the country of origin who sees their best and brightest fly away.) No one here is denying the impact of restrictions on students, we are pointing out it is also bad for the US.
I don't think it's a conscious choice, I think that since the US has been a magnet for talent for so long, a lot of politicians, and a lot of people, have normalized it and think it's the natural order of things. They think that talent will keep coming, no matter what policies they implement, and that is simply not true.
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 American science.
“[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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
That depends a lot by what you call culturally diverse. This map makes you think that Africa is the most diverse continent of all, but the fact is pretty much only the US has and continues receiving people from all over the world, and not just neighboring countries.
it is a strange assumption to make since by all counts the US is already the country in the world with the most diverse population. It is not as if science is only the work of students or even in particular foreign students...