U.S. science without international students? Not so much!
The take-away: if there are no international students coming to the US for PhD studies in STEM disciplines, we lose out on thousands of PhD scientists who would stay here and contribute to research and development in this country.
While the Trump administration continues to develop their travel ban, and is busy trying to get international students to “self-deport”, it’s worth considering the potential future impact of these steps on science in America. While people are generally aware that there are international students in the US, let’s look more closely at how many undergraduate and graduate degrees are awarded in STEM disciplines to those international students.
The immediate impact at the undergraduate level of losing all international students is not particularly extreme (2023 data). Though we should, however, keep in mind that undergraduate STEM students are the pool of people who feed PhD programs.
Continuing with 2023 data (most recent data available from the National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics), we see that there is enormous potential impact at the graduate level if all international students no longer studied in the U.S. (It seems reasonable to consider a complete drop to 0 since students from countries that are not included in a travel ban may well also choose not to study in the US).
Given my disciplinary bias, let’s take a deeper dive into Computer Science. Let’s factor in that 75% of international degree recipients tend to want to stay in the US after receiving their degree. If those people simply are no longer here, then our U.S. tech sector and academic CS departments lose 677 Computer Science PhDs. Plainly speaking, the number of new CS PhDs going into US-based companies or US academic CS departments will decrease by more than half!
Viewing the data this way also makes clear how desperately we need every educational and pedagogical intervention designed to encourage students to enter STEM overall and computer science in particular. Yet those initiatives are also under assault by the Trump administration, in the name of killing all diversity activities.
In sum, the Trump administration strategy in this arena is to 1) cut off international students, 2) cut off every effort designed to increase interest in STEM fields among domestic students, 3) cut off the indirect funding on remaining grants which further cripples university research capacity, 4) continue to pretend that we have a strong tech sector prepared to create the products and technology that will help build and maintain a strong 21st century economy. You don’t need a STEM PhD to work out that this strategy is doomed to fail.