The first point is false. R&D spending is at a record high: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44307.pdf Government's share of funding has fallen below 50%, but only because business r&d spending has increased so much. Federal R&D budgets are increasing: https://cen.acs.org/policy/research-funding/US-science-fundi...
If the 2nd part is true, it's only because the amount of proposals is growing faster than the funding.
National funding for academic research, unfortunately, has been flat (or falling) over the last several years, and has repeatedly been targeted for cuts by the President (luckily reined in by Congress). For example, see the NSF's funding survey: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsb20181/assets/968/figu...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
First a student asks for an F-1 (sometimes J-1) visa. This can be delivered for a single entry (typical for Iranian students for instance), or for 1 or like 5 years (the common case for international students). The visa lets you _enter_ the country.
Once admitted in the US, a student can remain indefinitely while maintaining its student status (including school transfers). This applies to Chinese students as well. There is no renewal and if you only go to school or transfer school, nothing can really happen. There's nothing to renew every year.
The issue that arises is when a student leaves the US with an expired VISA. Then he has to apply for a new one before coming back. This is where it can get complicated. I have a student/friend who go stuck 4 months (in China) waiting to renew his VISA.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-inf...
No, the VISA gives you an opportunity to talk to border control and not to deny entry immediately. They decide if they let you in or not.
For the uninformed downvoter crew:
"Entering the U.S. on an employment visa may be described as a three-step process in most cases.[5] First, the employer files an application with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requesting a particular type of category visa for a specific individual.[5] If the employer's application is approved, it only authorizes the individual to apply for a visa; the approved application is not actually a visa.[5] The individual then applies for a visa and is usually interviewed at a U.S. embassy or consulate in the native country.[5] If the embassy or consulate gives the visa, the individual is then allowed to travel to the U.S.[5] At the border crossing, airport, or other point of entry into the U.S.,
>>>>>> the individual speaks with an officer from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to ask for admission to the U.S.[5] If approved, the individual may then enter the U.S.[5] <<<<<<<"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_the_United_Stat...
F-1 VISA are _typically_ granted for 5 years, but PhDs may be longer (6 or even more). Once your VISA expires, and if you go home, you need to reapply for a new one.
For some (a small fraction through), VISA are granted for 1 year or are single entry. Those categories of students sometimes chose not to leave the country, for the risk of getting their VISA denied (and, hence, their whole studies and everything with it) is too high (since they got a short in the first place). This is very common thinking within Chinese or Iranian communities.
There needs to be a balance. Cutting out every Chinese academic is absurd and xenophobic, but more scrutiny is needed.
This issue isn't black and white; a more nuanced approach is required. To pretend that there isn't some merit to some of these ideas is just as absurd as saying that every academic is a spy.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/29/fbi-director-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/education-or-espionage-ch...
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3007903/chi...
Just going to leave this here [1]. That's at Peking University, top school in the country. Sure, if you're a foreigner, you'll probably be left alone, but your classmates are not allowed to be themselves, and that's part of your learning environment.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/if-i-disap...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Except that this isn't true at all.
And it's really, really actively fighting against it: electing Trump (and the consequences with it) is not the least they did in that perspective.
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...
"Science" is addicted to cheap foreign labor, which has ruined the market for natives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It makes a very big difference in getting there.
If they are replaced by less capable students then the work being done will be of a lower quality.
This is hardly a surprising move considering the recent realization that the Chinese government has been pushing propaganda against American values like freedom, democracy, and basic human rights, on American soil. One notable example is confucius institutes [0].
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2019/01/1...
Yet, here you are claiming it's "all just Chinese propaganda", apparently completely unaware about the fact that a statement like that is pretty much it's very own propaganda by deflecting everything that could be wrong as a mere invention by the "enemy from outside".
But when outrageous claims are made about China [0], the vast majority of people just gobble them up like it's manifest truth itself, without even thinking about questioning the methodology or the involved parties motives.
[0] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/mapping-xinjiangs-re-educatio...
I don't disagree with the rest of your statements. But I think even after disregarding an open southern border, the US is still relatively open.
By requesting their social network identity, right. That's being conscious.
> propaganda against American values like freedom, democracy, and basic human rights, on American soil.
Well... someone skipped reading the news for the past 3 years. The best propaganda against these values comes from your very current president and administration.
Which didn't do a good job of informing the public.
The argument is dishonest, because policies related to surveillance were implemented by all governments of the last decade. On the contrary, this lead to many, many people to say "fuck it", let us just take this madness to the next level and see what happens.
Had the current president not won, we would certainly have increased efforts in the war on terror. The US even created a complete new agency for checking travelers. That has been the strategy for both parties for quite some time, at least a decade now.
This is technically correct but I'd like to point out it easily rounds to two decades. Most of the surveillance state stuff ramped up after 9/11 which was almost 20yr ago.
Not saying Democrats are clean either - however, in this instance, last time I checked history books, Reagan/Bush & Republicans mostly inherit the chaos they unleashed by their interventions in Middle East in the past 30 years.
Had the current president not won... who cares? He _is_ there today. And he _is_ _breaking_ the country that elected him as well as _all the alliances this country built in the past century.
The apathy is real.
If requesting social network identity is not being more conscious, what is it? It is not a blanket ban. For all we know, social network identity is just more information for making a more informed decision on the visa application.
Maybe they're less likely to get searched/caught, but when they are it seems to be enforced. I can't find any stats supporting either position though.
PhD students do a lot a the grunt work that more famous people get most of the credit for.
And can willingly, or under coercion by their home government (We'll put your parents in prison, rape your mother, have you stabbed in the street), hand over every last bit of data they have access to on any project(s). Considering most decent educational institutions receive mountains of defense department money and have all sorts of government-involved research projects for all sorts of emerging technologies that have anything remotely approaching intelligence community or military applications... I can see why we'd want to crack down, purely for opsec reasons, on students coming from a country that is most likely going to overtly be our enemy sometime in the near to mid-term future.
Frankly, I don't think we should educate anyone that goes back to a hostile country. China is rising, and that can cause a lot of problems for us, see China Sea for one. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/china-army-colonel-says-beij...
Create a hostile environment for Chinese students so that they are encouraged to return home.
Then prevent them from coming at all because they may return home.
This completely ignored that the massive majority of Chinese stay in the US, and even more would stay in the US contributing disproportionately more than nearly every other grouping of people.
If it wasn't for the US driving them away, it's hard to see why any Chinese national, especially a well educated one, would ever choose to leave the US for China.
This would be an utterly disasterous policy. The only reason to enact it is if your own side is actively seeking war.
And may I note that irrespective of the overall behaviour of the two regimes, in the case of complaining about China causing problems for US interests in the China sea, the China sea is a lot nearer to China than it is to the US.
Trade routes over for one. Freedom of navigation is another reason. What they might go after next time is another concern. Like it or not, USA has interests and allies over there.
Doesn't this get checked when you leave, at passport control?
I would think at the very least it would raise a huge red flag the next time you try to enter US...
I also doubt that any serious employer would hire someone without checking his/her paperwork, outside maybe of seasonal/server jobs.
Are these people not from Immigration/Border control?
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification
>Doesn't this get checked when you leave, at passport control?
Imagine that there is this huge underground market dedicated to solving this problem for you attached mysteriously to the entire US bar industry.
edit - this is honestly the only thing that makes sense. I haven't ever done so, but brits working their US holidays and massively over staying visas by years is not uncommon and I can only think of one example of someone who ended up in actual shit.
The US is not really leading the way. It's a bit strange to "consider" Europe as a potential good place for research, it's already way ahead the US.
In fact, getting a M.S. from a mediocre U.S. school is a popular method young people use to immigrate.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/chines...
The lack of infrastructure, support and adequate living conditions is all that severely limits them from reaching their potential and they know this, which is why they climb the Everest of bureaucratic hurdles to get to a place like the US. China is a unique case because it has become wealthy (enough) very quickly and critically also has a very large population, which statistically increases the chances of very intelligent people appearing given the right conditions; if 1% of a billion population is very intelligent that's 10 million people in real terms.
I don't think the US has the dominance it did in science like it did in the 60s, when Europe and Japan were still recovering from war and China was still poor. I think the loss of a large number of Chinese students would certainly have an affect on the US's development in science today.
No, they really don’t. Where’s your source for this? You make it sound like we’re just admitting 350,000 spies into the States each year.
However, it is true that if you make these folks feel thoroughly unwelcome, they will want to just go home and help out - and that’s exactly what you’ll do by (a) being baselessly suspicious of them and (b) being harsh when they try to stay for studies or immigrate.
What on earth are you talking about? I mean they have to get a passport, true. This takes about 10 days, but has no special requirements.
But that's the same situation as in the US, where school students literally recite the pledge of allegiance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_passport#Fee_and_proce...
Today, the US “competes” (to some extent) with Europe for the best and brightest.
"What's going to get us to the Moon? Good old American know-how, provided by good old Americans like Herr Doktor Werner von Braun."
The US already lost out on multiple academic generations of bright Iranian students and scientists thanks to their restrictive visa policies. If they further hamstring themselves by excluding Chinese students, the decline of American science will accelerate dramatically. Already, science budgets are continually slashed and grants are harder to find. Slowing the pace of scientific development is a short-sighted move that will likely not be felt in full for decades, but it will definitely be felt.
Science exists outside of the USA - now is as good a time as any to consider research in places like Canada, Europe, Japan, Korea, and yes, even China. Language doesn’t need to be a barrier - increasingly, many prolific institutions are conducting much of their work in English.