The linked study is for children aged 8-12. How does a 12 year old "remove themselves from the running for STEM"? A six grader taking average math/science classes and getting average grades is on track for qualifying for a science/engineering/math undergraduate program. There's even opportunities later in life for those struggling in school to join STEM.

When I was 12 all my friends wanted to be rock stars or professional skateboarders. I seriously doubt the causation between what children want to be in the age group of 8-12 and what they grow up to become.

I agree that this feels a bit like a moral panic and wanting to be a YouTuber doesn't seem that different from wanting to be an actor, singer, or pro sports player, all dreams many more children have nursed in the past than have pursued in adulthood.

People often try to get into top tier high schools to help them in their STEM careers starting at ages 8-12. At elite universities, most students have already seen calculus by the time they get there. A student doing average at age 12 probably won't see calculus by then.

I think in reality, preparation for STEM takes years. It helps to have an education that fosters interest at a young age as well. I am specifically questioning the priorities of the US's view of education. As I said, we rely heavily on H1-B and have very large foreign populations in STEM degrees. Social media may not be the cause. What matters is that there clearly isn't early interest. Early interest translates to having more graduates. As I posted elsewhere, there is a clear difference in what degrees foreign students pursue in the US (more STEM) versus what US students pursue. This seems like a difference in values that I think we should examine.

Sure, children going to the most competitive universities will probably have began prep work before the age of 8. I would guess that "Did my parents go to an elite university?" has far more predicting power for who will enter an elite university than "What was my dream job at age 10." Elite schools are designed to be attended by only a small fraction of the population, hence the term elite. For the rest of the population, going to a state university, community college, or even a technology trade school can lead to meaningful employment.

I don't think you can move the extremes without moving the mean. We are already seeing the effects. First and second generation immigrants from foreign countries (like China) outperform Americans. This cycle could become self fulfilling. People expect immigrants to achieve at the extremes and prioritize other things in their lives. As you said, let's suppose having parents who go to these schools predict who will enter. At this point, recent immigrant families would outperform and others under perform and this can continue as cultural values are passed on. Is this is a sustainable situation? No, I think it bifurcates it and creates permanent classes.

On the other hand, more focus on STEM education broadly would translate to higher enrollments and self reliance. This also assumes that out performing immigrant families assimilate. Non-assimilation would exacerbate the bifurcation.

>People in the US believe that the top science and engineering roles should be filled by immigrants

Huh? Anecdotally, I have never heard this sentiment before.

Ya I wrote the reasoning following that. Look at these statistics[1]. It shows the ever growing number of foreign people earning both undergraduate and graduate STEM degrees in the US.

foreign students accounted for 54% of master’s degrees and 44% of doctorate degrees issued in STEM fields in the United States in SY2016-2017.

We rely on tens of thousands of H1-B visas per year to fill STEM roles which has been debated for years. We have accepted we have to import people to sustain our economy. I am questioning the merits and sustainability of these views and whether Americans have a unhealthy view of education. We certainly hold these visa holders to higher standards than ourselves. Why?

[1]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11347

Top graduate programs in STEM fields recruit internationally, because they're looking for the absolute best students, and Americans are only a small percentage of the world population.

The US is extremely lucky to have a large percentage of the top research universities in the world, so every year, it Hoovers a fairly large fraction of the best students worldwide, who naturally want to go to the best programs and work with the best scientists.

This is a positive feedback loop. The US has the best research universities, so it gets the best students. The best students come to the US, where they do research and maybe stay on as professors, so the US has the best research.

If the US were to consciously try to "Americanize" its STEM programs, that would fundamentally undermine the very thing that makes research in the US so strong - its ability to constantly draw in the top talent worldwide.

Yes, I am glad you brought this up. I think there are trade offs. There is a benefit to Americans that they accept the best globally. On the other hand, professors and elite STEM grads do form a high status caste who occupy the most powerful government and corporate positions and professorships that make decisions that affect Americans.

Some of my favorite people I know are foreign stem grads. But I have also met some who have nothing but contempt for uneducated americans. To tie this to my original post I do wonder if this is not only a security risk but a cultural risk which creates a mostly foreign immigrant group with high caste status in the US that is hereditary/permanent based on university admissions policies. There is lowered expectations for non immigrants.

The most provable issue is the security issue though not the cultural issue. A thought experiment: would France or Japan or China accept that their most elite people are heavily foreign? Probably not. One can imagine why this might be an issue. Professors with dual citizenship can leave at any moment and during a war that could devastate us. What real loyalty do they have?

My remedy is to nationalize an effort to focus less on tiktok dances, followers, and selling foot pics and more on education. It's what other countries are doing and I am afraid if the US doesn't react it is heading towards decay.

> Professors with dual citizenship can leave at any moment and during a war that could devastate us.

Look at the list of people who developed the atom and hydrogen bombs for the United States. They were overwhelmingly foreign-born.

Imagine you moved to another country at age 22, studied there, got married there, raised kids there, and built your career there over the course of 20-30 years. You would not simply "leave at any moment."

Maybe, but as far as I know, none were Soviet citizens who came on work visas. Even if it were possible to emigrate from there, I don't know that they would have been allowed to be professors or grad students either. This was during the Cold War. In some ways we are kind of in a cold war with China right now where a huge % of high skilled workers come. We're practically in a hot war with Russia and I don't need to repeat what has been said about them. I am not trying to single any country out but I don't think we can say we have no enemies abroad right now. Surely this is something to think about before creating a caste of foreign high skilled workers and academics?

> none were Soviet citizens who came on work visas

Many of them were from countries that were at war with the United States, like Germany and Italy.

George Gamow, one of the most important American physicists ever, was born in Russia, educated in the USSR and began his career there, before defecting to the US. He didn't work on the Manhattan Project, but he did consult on other military projects during WWII. There are lots of other examples of Soviet-American physicists, including one of the inventors of quark theory (George Zweig) and the one of the people who formulated perhaps the most famous paradox in quantum mechanics (Boris Podolsky).

> Surely this is something to think about before creating a caste of foreign high skilled workers and academics?

Casting suspicion on students and scientists in the United States because they come from "enemy" countries is not a healthy thing for society to do. I also object to your use of the word "caste." Castes are hereditary groups with defined roles in society. What we're talking about here are simply smart people who did well in school, and managed to get into top universities.

Although a defector is not a temporary student or H1-B, yes it is complicated but you are saying there is no cause for concern even though clearly Soviet citizens would not have been allowed in such high numbers into important roles and I suspect people would rightly question the numbers if nearly half of all STEM graduate students were Russian right now.

I call it a caste deliberately for those reasons. It is hereditary I believe whether through socioeconomic status or genetics or culture or legacy status. It's already becoming apparent. There may or may not be social consequences. I fear there will be.

H1-B visas didn't even exist in the 1940s. I don't know what the immigration system was like back then, except that it was fairly racist (this is before the reforms in the 1960s).

Most of the foreign-born STEM graduates I've come across in the US are not from a hereditary caste. I'd even say most of them are from the first generation in their families to obtain such a high level of education.

Legacy is something very different. It pertains mostly to undergraduate admissions at elite universities, and almost by definition, foreign-born students are not the main beneficiaries.

The report leaves out a crucial detail; the total number of STEM degrees increased significantly. Doing some backwards math, the total number of STEM degrees increased by 108% (x2.08) between 1988 to 2016. The US population only increased ~35% in the same period. Even if we assume the increase in the college age population was a bit higher (accounting for birth rate decline), the overall trend is growth in STEM degrees by both native and foreign students.

Given how much population and economic growth the main sources of foreign exchange students had during the same period, what we see is expected unless we actively tried to limit foreign exchange students. Native students aren't being replaced, they are still there.

We don't depend on visas to 'sustain' our economy. We use immigration to keep the massive comparative advantage we have had for the last ~80 years (since WW2). It's classic brain drain and the US has been on the winning side for most of recent history.

Part of the foreign STEM graduate degree phenomenon — not all of it — is that foreign students bring in more money to universities. This is one reason why universities were worried about the sky falling during the pandemic, because they wouldn't be able to fill their seats due to the foreign student flow being cutoff, and even if they did refill the seats with domestic students, it wouldn't be at the same net 'profit" level in many cases, as they usually end up paying more in net tuition per credit.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1025193562/the-u-s-attracts-f...

People who hold this view are mostly employers as far as I'm aware, unless we're conflating having a generally sympathetic view to skilled immigrants with not wanting Americans to learn engineering.

Because he is basing this claim off of his interpretation of his perception.

It's not so much people in the US who believe that top science and engineering roles should be filled by immigrants, but rather employers who want cheap labor and can control the immigration laws indirectly via lobbying and campaign contributions. US work visa laws give preference to foreign students who earn advanced degrees in US universities. Those students are thus more willing to tolerate low wages and poor treatment in PhD programs because it still beats returning to their home countries.

I don't blame the foreign students for this, but it's important to understand what's really driving the current situation.

Which BigTech employees are getting “cheap labor”? Cry me a river about a returning intern with no experience “only” being able to make $160K right out of college and a mid level dropped “only” making in the mid $200 in a couple of years.

Yes I work in BigTech and I’m one of only a very few native English speakers on my team and probably in my wider department. I never look at my coworkers and think of it weren’t for them I would be making even more than 3x to 4x the median income in the US.

Even on the corp dev side, after 3 or four years and one job hop, you can make twice the median income in any major city in the US.

" I never look at my coworkers and think if it weren’t for them I would be making even more than 3x to 4x the median income in the US."

You should think that, though: their presence is helping reduce wages, including yours. The fact that labor in tech is relatively well paid compared to other fields is entirely irrelevant.

Yes because I’m such a selfish human being I’m going to bemoan the fact that my coworkers who are also able to have a good life that ability because even with my unvested RSUs that are at half their all time highs, I’m still going to make over three times the national median household income.

For context: I’m not bragging, I’m not officially a software engineer by title and I only fell into BigTech three years ago at 45. I did a slight pivot to get in. I’m still paid less than an equivalent mid level software dev at my own company.

Not that I’m complaining I work remotely from - all over the US.

I look at it differently: tech companies get away with paying our immigrant peers less because they can, and we should work toward addressing that so that all of us benefit.

From looking at my companies internal “anonymous” #pay-equity Slack channel. I don’t see that as being the case.

The Slack channel is anonymous via a Slack workflow that posts on your behalf. As part of the workflow, it allows you to self identify your ethnicity and location.

Those self-reported salaries would be higher, on average, if companies didn't have access to a labor pool with workers willing to work for less.

Yes you’re right. We need to unionize. How are we going to feed our families and have and live the American dream only making $160K+ straight out of college up to $350k+ and the tech company I work for is considered the “frugal FAANG”.

If you stymie immigration, what’s to stop companies from just expanding their overseas offices?

I don't get why they can't just hire more citizens; can't most people agree that would be good? If you don't want the money, fine, but it just seems unreasonable that we force Americans to compete against people who are the top 0.001% of some other country with a billion people. Who benefits from that? The tech company does, that one person who may or may not even like Americans does. That person's former country could lose since their best leave or maybe they pressure them to steal tech who knows?

I don't think immigration is a cost free win for America in 100% of the cases. I am worried we are creating a caste of elite immigrants and their progeny who occupy the country's most elite positions and we're prioritizing foreign education to the detriment of US citizens. We have no reason to make things more competitive here if we can just import people from another country. It's bizarre to do this on a lot of different levels.

I think we should do what China is doing with their own citizens and try to make Americans more competitive and then we could talk about skilled immigration.

So do you think they should hire less skilled people? Isn’t that the much hated “affirmative action” instead of hiring based on merit?

As an American citizen you wouldn’t want to be considered a “diversity hire” would you?

Do Japanese people who work at an all Japanese company feel they were diversity hires because their company did not hire Indians, Americans, and Chinese people who had nicer credentials?

Are you saying you are unable to compete in an open market? All of the Big Tech companies make a lot if their money internationally. Why shouldn’t they recruit worldwide?

And holding up China and Japan as exemplars of economic development is not the winning argument you think it is…

>Are you saying you are unable to compete in an open market?

yes. ~350M vs ~7B (1.2B China, 1.1B India) means more elites in the bigger population. I am talking only about immigrant visas, not foreign offices. I have no problem with foreign offices hiring people from that country. I do take issue with continuous importation of elite-skilled people. This is doubly so if our education system relies on importing the best people rather than home growing them or trying to remain competitive. There is evidence Americans are declining in STEM right? we should try to reverse that.

I am less concerned about the short term economy as I am with turning the US into a global free for all for the best that US citizens can't possibly compete with presently. It could turn into a death cycle for current Americans. Surely that isn't sustainable or healthy. No doubt, dropping H1-B numbers would lower GDP but we should build it back more sustainably.

How is it in any way better to have a foreign office where none of the employees salary gets spent in the US than having immigration? Either way you are competing with foreign workers in aggregate.

And until this year, any CS grad that spent time practicing interviewing and could “grind LeetCode” for six months could get a job in tech. College teaches nothing that helps CS grads be employable at most companies.

Other countries graduate more prepared students because they don’t believe in the bullshit that college is meant to make you a “better citizen of the world” and they prepare their graduates with useful skills

can't reply any further on other branch.

My theory is that it could open up more space in the top graduate schools and undergrad for Americans who didn't make the cut otherwise. Maybe we can improve on this. We could work on making standard education a little harder too to fill the gap we would need. It's going to be hard competing globally though. We may need to bring people in but I believe the numbers we have are very high right now. I would like to see the mean of america become more educated and richer and more skilled as opposed to just the extremes.

I think you overvalue the quality of CS programs even in elite schools to prepare graduates for real jobs compared to other countries.

BTW, click on the time on the post to reply when the reply link isn’t available.

Those graphs are weird as fuck. Look at the actual percentages in China vs the other places: 37% want to be a professional athlete, which is more than youtuber in the UK/US.