Live data from Hacker News

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

science.org

41–50 of 459 posts

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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American is built on immigration, and nearly all of us are immigrants or very recent descendants of immigrants. How in the world has immigration harmed Americans?

Ask the indigenous Americans.

If you go back far enough everyone comes from a line of invaders, so I fail to see how this contributes to anything.

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

#42
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between cutting off all foreign-born talent—and addressing the serious issue of graduate school turning into an immigration racket; the current issue with graduate degrees is a very close mirror to the issue with H1b worker visas. The abuse of both systems has harmed Americans—and to some extent the long-term health of the tech industry and the academy.

Who cares if it's an easy path if the person graduates with the degree. It should be easy to immigrate here if you get an advanced degree. If you get a degree not in demand then you should be just as unhireable

A degree from Bullshit University in bullshitting should not grant any extra immigration rights because it doesn't mean anything. Although... the current administration must have high demand for bullshitters.

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

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, so that we can loose our innovation edge and loose the next Apple, Google or Nvidia. Amazing plan.

A simple house in the South Bay is $2 million or more. Is this a win for humanity?

What's the relationship between this comment and the topic of discussion?

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

#45
post #35

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…

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?

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

#46
post #26

The scarier part is that a lot of people will see this as good news.

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.

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

#47

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…

Academia may be broken, but a lot of bright students still pursue PhDs and it's better to have them in your pool of candidates rather than not.

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

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if it's an easy path if the person graduates with the degree. It should be easy to immigrate here if you get an advanced degree. If you get a degree not in demand then you should be just as unhireable

A degree from Bullshit University in bullshitting should not grant any extra immigration rights because it doesn't mean anything. Although... the current administration must have high demand for bullshitters.

Bullshit university should not be accredited and BSU should be shut down. An unaccredited school should have no effect on immigration policy

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

#49
post #35

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…

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.

What's the correct level of STEM PhD employment in the government? Maybe those levels were way too high. But on a different note, we can't tell from the article what normal fluctuations look like. It only shows 2024 as the baseline, but ideally we'd look at a larger window than that as well as look at the percentage rather than nominal figures.

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

#50

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…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN