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U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

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Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#221

Post by mmooss »

lynndotpy wrote: post #91

This is a tale as old as time. Anyone who's followed AI research has seen this happen. Take Geoffrey Hinton and his students, for one example. Moved from the USA to Canada in the Regan era. Hinton (and Canada in general) saw an influx of otherwise USA-bound students from 2016 on. And it's just happening again. I was a PhD student in deep learning ("AI") in the US from 2018 through 2022. The "Muslim ban" at the time s…

> This is a tale as old as time.

> 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'.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#222

Post by lazyasciiart »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #189
rwyinuse wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now I'm not sure there is a country where young people are generally satisfied and optimistic about their future. America is a mess, Europe is generally a mess, China is struggling with too many grads who aren't able to find jobs matching their qualifications... From what I've heard things aren't exactly great in India either. Every country has its problems.

Australians will complain a lot but honestly the future is very bright. Higher exports than imports, government debt isn’t completely out of line and it’s not going exponential like some regions, it has European like public services, a median wealth 2.5x that of the USA, good employment figures. It’s not perfect but i still think it’s pretty good.

Housing is a challenge

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#223

Post by nathan_compton »

ccheney wrote: post #46
ixtli wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to see if the comments could explain to my why this obviously bad thing is actually good. Its somewhat comforting to see others worried about the implication. The fact is that governments (aka public funding) is really what drives the biggest most impactful sorts of scientific breakthroughs. Think: NASA spinoffs, the internet, rocketry, MRNA, etc. I know that the US has been failing to fund important thin…

Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector? Just on your Fusion example alone: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/31/every-fusion-startup-that-... Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from? Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al. This _is_ a good thing.

Really think about this claim: "private sector does some things better." What evidence is there of this really that isn't anecdotal? There are so many things tossed around like this which sound plausible but for which I can't think of a definitive, conclusive, account.

For example: the public sector literally send humans to the moon with technology vastly inferior to that which we currently have at our disposal. Heck, the Soviet Union put a probe on the surface of Venus and sent back images. To me, it is not at all clear that "private sector better" is a foregone conclusion. At best you could make the strong claim that contemporary economic theory predicts that private sector companies do better.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#224

Post by lazyasciiart »

retired wrote: post #138
surgical_fire wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netherlands had effectively full employment until a few years ago, last I checked. Unless things got dramatically worse in the past 3 or so years, I think you are massively overreacting. I happen to have a few personal friends that live there, for that matter.

I left mainly because of housing prices, the difficulty of being a freelancer, the 49.5% income tax after €78k, the 36% unrealized capital gains tax and just everything in life like supermarkets or public transport being so much more expensive than other European countries. I took a big pay cut moving to Southern Europe, but post-tax I earn the same and everything is just so much cheaper. I honestly have a significan…

So you’re not retired? Confusing username to pick if so.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#225

Post by jay_kyburz »

retired wrote: post #148
andriesm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On unrealized gains, wait, what??

Yes. Say you have €80k in investments. Markets go up, in one year time your investments are worth €90k. You did not sell. That means you had €10k in unrealized capital gains. Subtract the €1800 per person threshold. €8200, 36% tax is €2952 tax to be paid at the start of the year. Losses give you tax credits redeemable against future capital gains (not against income tax from employment)

Assuming you're not going to somehow avoid paying your tax when you do eventually liquidate, paying year to year is not that crazy.

Paying tax on money you make because you already have money is far better than playing tax on your time you sold for salary.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#226

Post by OGEnthusiast »

morelandjs wrote: post #70
JuniperMesos wrote: post #22

The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ, which I don't think is true. Academia is a badly broken system, and many people with formal credentials like PhDs have wasted huge amounts of time and effort on producing what is ultimately low-quality scientific work. This is a pretty uncontrov…

The tail of the distribution justifies the entire distribution. I agree that a large percentage of PhD research is inconsequential, but a small percentage is massively consequential. It’s ok to whiff on a thousand STEM PhDs if you pick up one Andrej Karpathy (for example).

Maybe, let's see if AI overall is a net positive or net negative to the US overall. If AI turns out to be a net negative (which seems likely) maybe we don't want this type of AI research being funded by taxpayers.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#227

Post by adev_ »

titzer wrote: post #163

It's harder to recruit PhD students and it's harder to fund them. NSF budget was cut 55% in the first year. The administration is doing everything possible to make it clear that no foreigners are welcome here. America is stabbing itself directly in the brain.

European researcher here.

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'.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#228

Post by layer8 »

thegreatpeter wrote: post #203

That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024 as then-President Joe Biden prepared to leave office. Would be interesting to see the age of these STEM or health fields employees. What if they were all over the age of 70? Would that still bother…

Unless a comparable number of younger PhDs were hired to compensate, it’s a reduction of PhD-level federal workers in either case.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#229

Post by Izikiel43 »

retired wrote: post #123
ixtli wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear you got priced out :( Unfortunately i am also quite pessimistic about the future of europe and the us, too.

The Netherlands is taking action against the brain drain by rapidly importing highly skilled migrants through various tax lowering schemes in the first five years of living here. However plenty of those people leave after that period. Especially with the upcoming 36% unrealized capital gains tax on all your savings and investments. Feels a bit like ISPs giving discounts to new customers only.

> 36% unrealized capital gains tax

This sounds like the Netherlands speed running their way out of investments. If a country I was living in proposed this, I would be leaving ASAP, or getting some heavy financial engineering done.

Re: U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office

#230

Post by Retric »

moduspol wrote: post #45
Retric wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a straw man argument. Losing 10 people becomes a question of their individual qualifications, losing 10,000 people and this is no longer about individuals. Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.

The number seems arbitrary. Maybe we should be subsidizing until we have 100,000 more. I'm always skeptical when something is presumed to be a universal good in a way that's unfalsifiable. What metrics would you expect to see if we had too many STEM PhDs? What metrics can we expect to improve if we had more of them?

It’s a separate question not arbitrary. How many PHD’s the government should employ is debatable, but saying we should have fewer such people says nothing about who was let go.

It’s always tempting to say ‘This was a good decision therefore all the consequences are good’ but in the real world good and bad decisions will have both positive and negative consequences. Understanding individual consequences is therefore largely separated from the overall question of should we do X. However in politics nobody wants to admit any issues with what they did so they try and smokescreen secondary effects as universally beneficial/harmful.

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