As a non-US resident that doesn’t much read the news, is there any particular reason for the comparison of ‘now’ vs ‘6 months ago’? Has there been a particular change in policy or some other big event in the US that’s motivated the sudden change in attitude?
yeah, Trump.
Not that things weren’t kind of shitty before, he just accelerated the problems by defunding science and preventing foreigners from coming here to study, which sadly make up many 1/3 of the students of our PhD programs, especially hard sciences.
higher education in the USA needs systematically reform, but I don’t think anything Trump has done has improved anything, just accelerated the issues by turning off the money/labor spigot so many research programs were overly-reliant on.
a lot of this talented foreign labor is now going to study in other countries rather than the USA and that will impact things for decades, reducing USA’s lead in many scientific fields.
“… money / labor spigot so many research programs were overly-reliant on.”
I don’t see how research or more generally anything at all could get done without money or labor.
academia is fat and lazy. they are not lean and mean.
our entire education system needs to be leaner and meaner. but that’s hard work, so we won’t do it. we’d rather pay 50% of the grant money to the PI and then pay everyone else peanuts and wonder why none of our own citizens want to do research…
I don’t think you’ve spent much time in academia. It’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s a trek through the desert where every drop of water counts. One of the big reasons why the whole thing is falling apart is that postdocs and undergrad researchers, who do all the actual work, have been tragically underpaid for years. Add in a tiny chance to be arrested and deported on top of that and it’s instantly not worth it to tons of foreign students who were thinking of going to college in America.
I spent 10 years. It was too much time.
And one of the reasons I left was how blatantly corrupt and awful it was, just like everything else in our society. Everything was about money and politics. Everyone who did good work got shafted, and those who played the corruption game got rewarded.
And most of the ‘underpaid’ people were all rich people living off family money anyway. They were not living off their stipends and grants. that includes a lot of the foreign students.
For people who spent about the same amount of time in academia, we had very different experiences.
US federal budgeting this year have pushed hard to gut science. I’ve heard talking points regurgitated by college educated folks that businesses will pay for it instead, but when pressed for examples or how it would work they are only able to point to engineering projects, they can’t differentiate between basic scientific research producing testable, accurate models and the products and services built using those models.
Businesses will pay for studies that help businesses or had a profit incentive. When you hear the govt spent a large sum of money studying how ocelots react to opium or somelike that, people usually say that’s a waste of money, rather than finding out why.
Like there was one Republican complaint about studying soybeans. Beans! Useless!
Yeah well guess what one of the biggest crops in the US is. We used to export soy to Asia.
I know it’s “science” but there’s too many articles where someone’s run a basic survey on the obvious that gets reported as “obviousness observed”
Trump is obviously a Russian asset. EVERYTHING HE HAS DONE HAS BENEFITTED PUTIN.
I almost got hired as a research assistant but the professor I wanted to work for told me he couldn’t afford to due to the budget cuts going around, I’ve also seen scholarship opportunities get cancelled as well
Both US and EU are already busted. See this from the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI): https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/aspis-critical-technology-tracker-2025-updates-and-10-new-technologies/
China now leads in 66 of the 74 technologies tracked, with the United States leading in the remaining eight
And you can see in the graph how the share of publications have gone down by like half in the US, EU and UK. While China and other developing nations have continued to invest in their people. Unfortunately our neoliberal leads do not know how to do anything else but privatize so the downward trend will continue.
China is the future of science now
i wouldnt put my bet on that, there is still the problem of them innovating and not controlling what research/cooking the books by the ccp. theres a reason why they are fleeing to europe and not china. they are exceling in certain areas. AND YES ccp has thier own problems to deal with, the massive amount of chinese graduates that cant find jobs, are already incensed that the ccp was luring foreigners for research/engineer positions, while ignoring the citizens.
Like Fallout predicted.
The brain drain is going to devastate science in the US for generations. Totally squandered in a matter of a couple years.
Europe too.
University is full of cheap to bribe “experts”, real research is not in private sector.
Just tell me what university invented planes or rockets.
What researchers? A lot of them just up and left when Trump started his shit.
The ones without the resources to just up and leave.
If you’re good at what you do money isn’t an issue.
Hey, what about those of us who are old and mediocre (but capable!) at what we do?!?
We get a convoy going.
only for PHD would be worth it. there seems to be vastly more people at the undergrad/ms that cant find jobs.
And as we all know, all researchers are equally as capable.
