re: WH pulling visas from Chinese grad students

Sounds like he played his role well.

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No, what he is saying is that UT’s admissions preferences are, in order 1) Asians, 2) Illegal residents of Texas, and 3) legal residents of Texas.

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I initially scoffed at this because I assumed it would be impossible to even get into college without a valid SSN, but sure enough, UT has a resources page for undocumented Longhorn students.

Wow.

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This will probably kill a large portion of our higher ed system, which has become dependent on foreign, especially Chinese, students who don't need to take out loans to pay exorbitant tuitions. What I'm saying is, this is a good thing.

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If this was undergraduates, yes, absolutely. A ridiculous percentage of undergraduates are foreign, especially Chinese.

Grad student tuition is negligible in university budgets and almost all of it is paid by exterior grants anyway, grants that already existed and would have funded the student no matter who they were.

This distinction is important. Graduate students are very, very difference from undergraduates.

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initially scoffed at this because I assumed it would be impossible to even get into college without a valid SSN,

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Doesn’t CA do the same thing? I’m sure most of the prog states do.

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How many LSU Grad. students in STEM fields are from China? over 1/3?

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It's not broken down in STEM vs Humanities, but here's the most recent data for LSU grad students.

Notice the "nonresident alien" category - this would include almost all foreign graduate students.



SOURCE

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We don't have enough American grad students to fill all positions and the ones we do have are often outcompeted by foreigners. It's rare to have even half of the grad students in departments of some fields be Americans

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I hear ya man, but don’t we have a glut of PhD holders in the US? I’m not talking about worthless PhDs, I’m talking about those in STEM. Hire a postdoc or a research associate.

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Doesn’t CA do the same thing? I’m sure most of the prog states do.

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Apparently in 2016, only three states (Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia) banned undocumented students altogether ( source).

As of last year, several states (New York, Maryland, California, Delaware, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington) provide scholarships and other funding to undocumented students ( source).

Honestly, this is wild to me. What the hell.

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I hear ya man, but don’t we have a glut of PhD holders in the US? I’m not talking about worthless PhDs, I’m talking about those in STEM. Hire a postdoc or a research associate.

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I'm a STEM postdoc right now, so I have some insight into this.

We have a massive glut of PhD holders right now, even in STEM. It's a large problem. But that problem is separate from the demand for PhD students. PhD students are cheap labor and there is a higher demand for that labor than there is demand for the degrees they earn by doing that labor. This is basically the root of the problem of too many PhDs.

PhDs are exploited for their cheap labor and thrown into a flooded market, and many American students realize this in time to choose other career paths (not me!). Foreign students kind of get sucked in to it without realizing the situation. This is another reason, I think, that foreigners dominate many grad programs.

Postdocs and research associates are much more expensive than grad students; a grad student's stipend+tuition+benefits (and foreign grad students on assistantships are charged in-state, not out-of-state tuition) is still cheaper than a postdoc's stipend+benefits (my postdoc stipend alone is ~3x my PhD stipend, blowing past tuition costs, and your boss doesn't get to pay subsidized grad student healthcare rates) and MUCH cheaper than a research associate.

Grants are tight and you squeeze as much out of it as you can. That's just how it works. It doesn't really matter to the professor or the department if more than half of the PhD graduates don't find meaningful jobs - they have already served their purpose.

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We don't have enough American grad students to fill all positions and the ones we do have are often outcompeted by foreigners.

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bullshite. They pay more and are willing to cheat shamelessly

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I love Trump, but I hope this doesn't affect my favorite Chinese buffet.

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Covid already took care of that! No buffets anywhere.