Regarding PhDs, grad international enrollment is declining.
Regarding the full-paying foreign undergrads, their tuition contributes towards the costs of the university that are shared. American students, especially at middle-ranking public schools, are hurt when schools lose their funding.
Regarding the "racism against Americans," there is no such race, and if there were one it would not explain research productivity. What would is the self-selection of who will go across the world to study something technical, the much better high schools in other countries, and in the mere fact that the rest of the world is a larger talent pool than the US. It is easy to think of reasons.
> Regarding PhDs, grad international enrollment is declining.
Your source on that? All the schools I’m in contact with are still as international as ever in their CS PhD departments. I’m not sure what the trends are outside of CS, but I can’t imagine they would be very different. I think you are just pulling this number out of thin air.
Research is funded quite differently from undergrad programs. Sure, fewer TAships are available, but your research funding is much more detached. DARPA and NSF aren’t going to become stingy all of a sudden.
> Regarding the "racism against Americans," there is no such race, and if there were one it would not explain research productivity.
If I claimed (without any evidence in fact) that “Indians or Chinese are less productive than Americans” I would totally be accused of racism even though both India and China are multi-ethnic. It is especially a stupid thing to say as foreign and domestic students are pretty diverse, with slackers (or dreamers) and very focused students on both sides.
> Your source on that? All the schools I’m in contact with are still as international as ever in their CS PhD departments. I’m not sure what the trends are outside of CS, but I can’t imagine they would be very different. I think you are just pulling this number out of thin air.
So you're asking for a source when your own view is based on anecdotes? Great.
Both of those state there is a slowdown in enrollment percentage (and only .9% at that), not absolute numbers. There are still more international graduate students in 2017 than in any previous year.
It's unproductive to dismiss a factual claim as racist. You can simply show data that disproves the parent's claim and implicitly confirm their racist tendencies towards Americans rather than screeching "racism".
> In my own PhD program, the productivity of the Americans was much lower than the foreigners. That productivity led to discoveries that benefit everyone.
The original claim was an anecdote generalized to everyone. They are stereotyping millions of people based off a handful they have met.
It could be true. The reverse could be true. We don't have good data. Why assume that there are differences based on background?
The claim wasn’t factual, it was blatantly racist. How do you fight an unfactual claim with data? How would you prove that Americans were less or more productive than foreigners? These kinds of claims are not designed to be argued with data, they are simply designed to be decisive and hurtful.
Yes, it was. That is, it was a claim about a matter of fact.
> How would you prove that Americans were less or more productive than foreigners?
There's a number of possible operationalizations of productivity applicable to a Ph.D. program that are measurable and by which the issue could be addressed. Usually, the first thing to do would be to challenge the party making the dubious claim to both provide their operationalization and show data supporting the characterization.
It's quite possible that after that, the result would be that it would be fair to dismiss the claim as inadequately supported (although the mere fact that a single claim asserting a difference in performance based on nationality is inadequately supported does not, in and of itself, provide more than extremely weak evidence that the claim comes from racism.)
The party making the claim is using anecdotal evidence. They have no data. I do not think anecdotal evidence is good evidence for such a strong claim. This makes the claim an opinion and not factual. This is only my opinion.
> The party making the claim is using anecdotal evidence.
No, the party making the fact claim made a fact claim limited to a particular program they had been in, and has, as yet, neither provided evidence (or even an operationalization) for that claim not been challenged to do so.
> They have no data.
That may or may not be the case; it's perfectly fine to dismiss the claim due to lack of data, better to challenge the claimant to provide support for the claim. Calling it racism is as unsupported as the claim itself.
> I do not think anecdotal evidence is good evidence for such a strong claim.
The fact claim made was particularly limited (about productivity in one Ph.D. program—from which no further generalization was claimed), it wasn't a particularly strong claim. That said, sure, anecdotal evidence is inadequate to support it, but then, not even anecdotal evidence was provided, only the bare claim.
> This makes the claim an opinion and not factual.
A claim on a matter of fact doesn't become anything other than a fact claim because it isn't offered with adequate support.
I read it more like selectivity is higher for foreign students then for Americans, which would inevitably lead to such a skweed outcome. That said, I will agree with [citation needed].
"Americans" is now a race? How about Texans or Australians? If I say that I hate Australians because of their silly accents, am I now a racist? Race and national citizenship are very different concepts.
It’s illogical to claim you can be racist against diverse countries like the USA or Australia. Pretty sure the OP is more referring to xenophobia than racism.
Americans do not share a common culture or history. We share a political system that is at least in theoretically based on guaranteeing the freedom to participate in whatever culture you want, that isn't limited to people of a specific historical association (either by genetics or citizenship).
> the English race
While England does have a history and culture that traditionally was officially established by the king, Merriam-Webster's use in
this example can apply when referring to historic England, the term isn't really appropriate for modern England.
However, in Merriam-Webster's defense, this mildly misleading definition might be an attrempt to keep explanations simple with references young people would know. The definition that you copied was from the "RACE Defined for Kids" section of the page. Their recommended definition at the top of the page doesn't have the same issues:
1 : a breeding stock of animals
2 a : a family, tribe, people, or nation
belonging to the same stock
b : a class or kind of people unified by shared interests,
habits, or characteristics
3 a : an actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species;
also : a taxonomic category (such as a subspecies) representing
such a group
b : breed
c : a category of humankind that shares certain
distinctive physical traits
Most of these variations refer to what we now know is genetics. Isolated groujps of a species experience genetic drift (and other effects) that create genetic features unique to each group. Eventually the differences are large enough and we call them separate species (see: Darwin and the entire field of study that followed we call modern biology).
None of that applies to "Americans" as a group of people. We are famously a "melting pot" where people from very different races (again in theory) are supposed to have the freedom to "melt" together however they desire.
For a different but useful definition, from the Crown Prosecution Service in the UK:
> The Act says a "racial group" means a "group of persons defined by reference to race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins."
You have to be crazy (e.g. addicted to the process of a research career) or clueless to start a PhD unless it figures your path to citizenship, so yeah most american PhD students are probably not the best and brightest assuming the talented crazies are a minority.
Eh. Also, Chinese are in it for the green card and Americans are in it because they just love the subject. What other gross generalizations can we come up with?
I don’t know a why you’re getting downvoted. I find, at least in my department, international students don’t get the same opportunities Canadians do. There’s definitely an archetype of a CS professor who does “interdisciplinary research” with a stable of international students doing software development projects for the bio and medicine departments.
I think the bias has swung way too far the other way. Racism against Americans is still racism.
Also, this applies mainly to undergrads (full paying students), not PhD students who are generally fully funded.