U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office (opens in new tab)

There is an other thing that should make America worry.

Research grants have been cut everywhere in the US. That cuts deep and terminated many scientific collaborations between USA and the EU Horizons projects in many STEMs research fields.

That created a void.... and sciences is like nature: it hates void (and the lack of money...)

My perception in the domain is that the resulting void is been fulfilled everywhere by new collaborations with China. Because China has the money, the infrastructures, the will to progress and a shit ton of smart engineers/PhDs.

There is today 10x more conferences in China... more exchange with China... more common projects with China than 10y ago.

So congratulations to the Trump team: your anti-intellectualism is actually directly fueling new technologies and research breakthroughs to the country you consider 'your enemy'.

An optimist in me hopes that we can get back to unbiased science, where it doesn't have to agree with the current side, but both sides perceive it as fair and agree to leave it alone for common good. A realist thinks that it will happen in China, and the West has just run out of steam.

If it’s harder to fund them then it should be easier to recruit them. I don’t think both can be true at the same time, unless you’re saying it’s harder to fund foreign PhD’s with US tax dollars in which case I think you’ll find limited sympathy for your cause.

An MD is a doctorate-level degree and MD + residency is generally considered enough education for even research within a speciality, certainly patient care within it. MD/PhDs are rare, usually doing policy/leadership or extremely specific technical R&D. Almost never see them doing patient care, when you do it's normally because they misunderstood their own career interests in their 20s and now have to live with it.

This thing is real bad but psych treatment at the VA isn't why.

Under her PhD supervisor she directly worked with the NM department of transportation as a consultant. She did all that as an international student besides her graduate studies while being paid at 50% FTE (+tuition).

It takes between $10m (rural) to $100m (urban) to build a mile of interstate. Recycled materials can reduce the cost by 15-50% while still being equally as sustainable for decades.

Fortunately she is no longer at risk (or minimal risk) job/immigration wise. But others are not as fortunate. Just yesterday I learned that a PhD student from my alma mater was turned back from port of entry and his student visa denied. Reason? He traveled with his University provided laptop without written authorization. I understand that there are embargos and sanctions and trade restrictions, but really?

> 10,109 ... left their jobs

> departures outnumbered new hires last year by a ratio of 11 to one

That means that there were ~919 new hires, and thus it seems that 10,109 minus 919 equals

> a net loss of 4224

It appears that the "11 to one" ratio is the average, across agencies, of each individual ratio. It's left as an exercise to the reader to determine whether that average has any meaning at all.

EDIT: I would also like to say that i have never seen evidence that we can measure the performance of 10k PhDs in a single dimension at all. So a claim that this could be good for scientific research and development seems unprovable at best.

In the last century, the US led so many tech fields because of both academic and corporate research and the people to do it. Let's fix that system if needed and keep it well stocked.

The alternative is ignorance, leading to unskilled industries and an easily misled electorate.

Where’s the evidence these specific 10k were the low performers? The more likely scenario is that better performers left because they have options, while weaker performers stayed. If the issue is quality, you’d want systematic performance review, not mass departure driven by factors unrelated to competence.

No, you're making a completely illogical jump there, that is absolutely not assumed in any way.

The assumption, if there is one, is that the position that the work PhD was doing in the government served the public good, more than they were being paid.

US Government science positions are not academia, so your second sentence does not even apply to this! Unless your assumption is that if the person was trained with science that did little then their training can not be applied to anything that is worthwhile, which is an obviously false assumption.

Arguments with these sorts of gaping logical holes are the only defenses I ever see of cutting these positions. I have searched hard, but never found a defense that bothered to even base itself in relevant facts, and connect through with a logically sound argument.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it sure is damning when in a democracy there's not even a fig leaf of an intellectually sound argument backing a drastic and massive change in policy.

That's orthogonal to domain expertise and general ability.

If you can survive a PhD there's an adequate chance you know more about your subject than an undergrad and are more capable of focused independent work.

That's what employers are buying. Which is why STEM PhDs still get more attention from the private sector than generic mass-produced undergrads.

This intellectual capital is valuable, despite whatever the latest populist memes about professors claim.

PhDs seem to be quite employable by private industry, where competency is still valued.

Why do you feel like you can state this like its fact?

Just to save you energy, state that you are conservative first before writing fan fiction fantasy like that, because it will save people a lot of time assuming that you are speaking some sort of facts.

that in a large enough set of something there should be considered to be a normal distribution of high quality, medium quality and lower quality members in the set, unless one can show the distribution is biased in some way.

No, not really? That would be true if we were talking about hiring anyone with a STEM PhD. Or 1 random person.

In this case we have people leaving, and it's a group. So it's more like: The assumption that 10k PhD's, that we saw fit to hire in the first place, as a collective, are worth the cost.

Seems likely that they are: The cost is low, let's say $2 billion per year? For reference, Trumps Big Bill includes $300 billion in new defense spending and "over a ten-year period is estimated to add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt and to cut approximately $4.46 trillion in tax revenue".

Also, let's say there were too many, and you should get rid of 10 000 of them. I doubt the guy who keeps rambling for 1 and a half hour [1] and keeps getting "Greenland" and "Iceland" mixed up, is going to do a good job with it.

1: Seriously, I dare you to try to watch it, I tried. At least hes "draining the swamp" /s https://www.youtube.com/live/qo2-q4AFh_g?si=Hwu3MSXouOfEfJCa...

Some part of the hatred for the current academic system stems from legitimate concerns about how it operates. However, I think this hate is mostly driven by rampant anti-intellectualism. Fueled in part by pseudo scientific scammers trying to sell you supplements on TikTok and religious demagogues.

Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.

But as far as I can tell, not nearly as hard as in the US. I don't think that any PhD student in Europe has been deported by masked agents, for instance.

FWIW, I do. I don't live in the US, though.

But the “economic anxiety” angle is well debunked at this point. Grievance, stoked by the right wing takeover of the media, is the answer. And we’ll need to go a lot further along the vector of solutions you’ve started down to fix that.

Not taxes. Authoritarianism.

it's not about taxes -- that is a false narrative. Trump did not reduce the budget, he just redirected money from science to "border security" (aka an unaccountable domestic paramilitary force aka ICE) and the military. Taxes were cut yes, but primarily on the very wealthy.

but yes, you are correct that Americans from both parties support high military spending instead of investing in the wellbeing of its citizens (education, healthcare, housing, etc.), and _that_ is a significant problem that I don't see us getting away from any time soon. very sad.

There’s a reason OECD ranked the US tax system as most progressive some years back.

I know that the US has been failing to fund important things like Fusion for more than 40 years now but its sad and scary to see it halting.

Why should anyone consider this hypothetical? Are you advocating for an age limit of 70 for working for the government?

> Do you think this article was framed to cause outrage and frustration?

No.

This past year top US talent entering college left the US at 5x the rate they did before. Europe, pacific rim, china, all have massive recruiting programs to suck talent out, and it’s working.

Trumps Gift will surpass Hitlers Gift.

> But the Project 2025 changes we saw were unique.

I'm not sure what you're saying. Until the last paragraph, you seem to say that it's just the same thing continuing.

As an academic you know that such claims are irrelevant without quantifying them. For example, the US has had inflation continuously for decades; does that mean recent inflation is not significant? How about 1980 compared with 1960? If my town is washed away by a flood, I don't say, 'we've always had rain'.