To be fair, I do understand the point of international competition for those slots, but that’s not directly aligned with the interests of the American middle class that pays the tuition and grant money to those schools.
I don’t understand your ASML anecdote. The US has far more immigrant workers than any other country on earth. Is ASML avoiding us because that’s not enough? Are Taiwanese and Korean semiconductor industries failing due to their focus on citizen training and employment rather than labor imports?
Nothing could be further from the truth. Most STEM faculty are hyper-ambitious people who care about grant funding and their h-indexes above almost everything else. Secondly, the funding scenario makes it much easier to recruit US nationals over foreign citizens.
Most US universities desperately want to hire US nationals for their doctoral programs; it's cheaper and more grants are available (as many DoD/DoE projects require US nationals due to export control restrictions). During my grad school days earlier in the last decade, almost all US citizen Ph.D. students were on some national fellowship, such as NSF, NDSEG, SCGSR, or EGRC. As a result, their stipends were $10,000 more than mine. And due to these fellowships, they were free for their Ph.D. advisors, while I cost my advisor $65,000 per annum. Despite these scholarships, that we have to admit so many foreign nationals paint the correct picture of the ground reality - the US doctoral STEM pipeline is really narrow.
Part of this is plain numbers - India and China have 7-8 times more people than the US does. And in the college-going age, it's an even more significant gap, as the fertility rate in the US fell below the replacement level many decades back. The second factor is the cost of education in the US. However, it's screamed about more than it really is an issue. The largest STEM educators in the nation are all public schools, where in-state tuition rates are still reasonable, and a full degree costs less than $50,000. Still, college tuition is a significant problem, and we should solve it. At the very least, it will expand the pipeline quite a bit, but not, in my opinion, enough to fill the gap.
Honest question - have you talked with any US universities' graduate program officers rather than spouting off Steve Bannon's conspiracies.? You think your points look smart, but I know what it is - uninformed ramblings since I know the ground reality.
ASML and TSMC are running almost exclusively today by US trained people. The fact that the United States trained them and lost them - is a point of deep concern. And people like you will prolong this crisis through misguided xenophobia rather than contributing to a meaningful solution.
There were 55000 phds awarded in 2020, up from 40000 in 2000.
Your fact-free rants aside, what people forget is how few PhDs are there, actually. Let's take materials science; even the largest schools in the discipline do not even produce 30 PhDs per year. Less than 300 materials science PhDs graduate in total in the US per year; that's it. If all materials science PhDs ever granted in the US sit together (less than 30,000), they won't even fill a football stadium.
And you can't just scale things up, equipment is multi-million dollars and it takes years to train good scientists. Nativist attitudes like yours leads to a company like ASML residing outside the US rather than inside.
You want to dig your own country/communities' graves - go for it. Just don't expect kudos for doing harakiri.