News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia. Parent comment

Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by bjourne on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @09:23AM (#31752494)
"The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association. In comparison, only about 9 percent of undergraduates in computer science were international students (perhaps, deans posit, because families are nervous about sending offspring who are barely adults across the ocean to study)."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...

Note that the definition of "international student" excludes those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of PhDs though.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by overeater on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @09:58PM (#31761754)
> Note that the definition of "international student" excludes those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of PhDs though.

Why are you interested in the percentage of foreign born PhD students? You realize that a lot of Americans are "foreign born". It seems like an archaic way of thinking about things.

"International student" should indeed exclude those who are permanent residents. Which means they have been living here permanently before becoming a student, likely grew up in America, or just waiting for the citizenship, etc. "International student" means someone who moved here to study.

I'm assuming good intentions, but want to make sure we're not intentionally trying to gatekeep what it means to be an American.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for cha... by bjourne on Thursday June 16, 2022 @04:03AM (#31763568)
Because the statement that was challenged was "I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration" and almost all people not born in the US but living in the US are immigrants.
[ Parent | on HN ]