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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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The NYT wants you to know that Harvard has "no way out." I'm sure Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment is going to start having trouble attracting researchers:

Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?

I suspect they're scaring their readership to rack in the clicks. The article is being embraced by Rightist influencer people eager for confirmation of their "victory." They're COOKED! Back in reality, the Democrats will likely take back the Presidency in 2028, if not then then very likely by 2032. It will eventually dawn on these people that Harvard remains massively prestigious while nobody knows or cares about Fred's Car Wash in Des Moines Iowa.

Now, I hate the NYT as much as anyone, but the first paragraph after your no way out quote says:

The Trump administration’s attempt to block international students from attending Harvard University was a sharp escalation in the showdown between the federal government and one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions.

This is the real threat, not the squabbling over federal funds. Harvard might swim in cash, but they also live of their ability to draw in the best students from half the world. For billions of people worldwide, the answer to the question "Where would you study if you were super-smart and wanted to win a Nobel?" is "Ivy league, or a few prestigious state-run universities in the US". In the future, the answer for all but 340M (plus Canadians, perhaps?) will change to "... except Harvard, which does not take international students."

My understanding of the US private universities is that their students are either very rich and smart or brilliant and on a stipend. It is a symbiotic relationship: the rich student pays for both of them getting a prestigious, excellent education, and the brilliant student makes sure that the prestige of the university is maintained.

About 27% of Harvard's students are international (a lower number than I would have expected). I think that the "rich and smart" internationals can be replaced without too much trouble, you would not have to lower standards very much to find still very smart Americans willing to pay for the privilege of studying at Harvard. I did not find what fraction of students is studying for free at Harvard, never mind how many of them are internationals, but I suspect that the overall fraction of students on a stipend is small, and that a significant fraction of them are internationals. Replacing these with US nationals will likely hurt.

Also, there are cascading effects. If you are a brilliant young American, would you rather go to a university where you can meet the best minds of your generation (or so they would claim), or one where you can only meet the best US minds of your generation who do not care about that very fact?

The obvious reaction (if the courts uphold Trump's decision) for Harvard would be to announce them opening a branch in Canada, but that is not easily done.

I feel like people are giving institutions like Harvard the benefit of the doubt in a way that they do not deserve. If we where talking about MIT or caltech (and maybe even Stanford) I believe that most of these arguments about having the best international students would be correct, and while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences, it’s there to provide the most privileged children in the world a place to mingle and make connections.

I suspect the elite truly see themselves as post national “global citizens” and removing that from Harvard will hurt their image.

More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.

This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

I have worked with plenty of brilliant people with PhDs, it may just be my particular background but it seems to me that the main trait shared by the best ones was that they had received good mentorship from their advisors. You’re less likely to get that when the advisor is able to recruit an army.

Finally I would add that giving them all green cards would just make the system even worse since it would give academics even more power over their international students than they have now and would make these positions even more attractive.

So while I don’t have a problem with some international students, I think it’s important to reco

Harvard is top tier in the life sciences , same league as MIT.

the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

Do they leave? I work with tons of very smart foreigners who got an advanced degree at an American university, so they can't all be leaving. We'd definitely be worse off if we can't brain drain the world anymore.

And let's not forget that Trump once proposed a drastic solution to retain international students:

You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. That includes junior colleges, too.

As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in. I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science. The foreign students I have interacted with are usually at around the same level as the domestic students but are more desperate because they are trying to escape from a shithole. Automatically giving green cards to people would just make the situation worse by further increasing the pool of labor available for exploitation.

As for the ones who stayed, how many of them are actually doing science? I bet the majority of them used it as a pathway into the us labor market and are now working fairly standard jobs. Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).

I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science.

What fields have you observed this in? In capital intensive STEM research, the senior grad students and postdocs do all the work and the PIs are out of touch managers who have to spend all their time grubbing for money. I could see your statement being true for like economics or something, but it is not at all what I observed in the hard sciences.

Indeed I work in industry, not academia, but I don't see it as any way bad if foreign students use American academia as a stepping stone into American industry. It's still a net benefit to the US.

Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).

It's unlikely that these jobs would have been filled at a higher cost on account of the cost already being very high. It's more likely that the job would have been not filled or filled with inferior people.

An example of the top of my head - all but one of the authors of Attention is All You Need are foreigners. I don't know if you count Google Research/Brain as a "fairly standard job" but it's pretty obvious to me that there aren't seven foreigners on this paper because they're cheap.

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