It is common for science and engineering PhD students to have their tuition, stipend, and benefits covered by government research grants awarded to professors. I’m wondering how much of this is spent educating non-US citizens. Maybe it’s worth looking at postdocs, too.
This PDF from NSF lists some stats on the numbers of foreign graduate students in various fields. However, I don’t see a funding breakdown.
I suspect NSF does have these data, but from the poking around I’ve done thus far, I can’t tell if they show up in any of their analyses.
I’m dropping this here in hopes someone may have come across these numbers before. If not, I’ll keep digging.
I would be surprised if “number of non-citizens employed” is officially collected. Grants are relatively hands off, and there is a limited amount of information that is collected on how they are administered.
Also, the research grants with which I am familiar are not no-strings-attached gifts. They are given in return for, well, research. Graduate students, even with tuition, are way cheaper than any other form of useful labor for research projects.
The only thing I dislike about this scheme is that
a. Apples to apples doesn’t follow. Foreign students may not have academic records measured on the same scale as Americans.
b. These schools are heavily funded by American tax dollars. By accepting such huge numbers of foreign students, they are de facto taking slots away from Americans. I ain’t saying they shouldn’t accept some, but, yeah, some of the grad student floors I have seen are almost all foreigners.
Not at all what I was looking for, but we can play with them:
424,508 full-time science and engineering graduate students in 2013 (includes non-doctoral students)
151,108 temporary visa holders (does not include permanent residents)
43,395 postdocs
23,138 temporary visa pdocs
Postdocs get paid more, but RA grad students have tuition. Depending on the school, the fully loaded cost can be similar. Random dudes on the internet estimate fully loaded costs all over the place here: http://www.quora.com/Are-grad-students-or-postdocs-more-expensive-to-fund
I’m not sure if we should F&A.
And I’ll add that I started this thread in GQ because I am looking for facts and have zero interest in your policy comments at this time. We can start something in GD once we have some actual facts to have a GD about.
We are attracting, cherry picking and occasionally retaining the world’s most powerful young minds for US centric research projects and US technology companies for a relative pittance. It is possibly the best cost-benefit deal in existence for the US.
I’m not sure your question makes sense. Stipends, tuition and benefits for Grad students, and particularly for post-docs aren’t paying for their education. They’re in return for services rendered. That is, for teaching courses, grading papers and assisting with research.
Nearly all universities are subsidized by taxpayers (but often mostly state taxes, not Federal). Student tuition does not cover all the expenses. For any specific school, you can figure the percentage of operating expenses that is covered by tuition payments – the rest is taxpayer covered, either direct government payments or contributions, foundations, etc. which are tax deductions thus indirect taxpayer money.
Generally foreign students pay out-of-state tuition rates, which are higher than those for in-state students. Thus many schools are happy to have foreign students. Plus their tuition is often covered by foreign governments, who pay in full, on time. You could use the same calculation as in #1, except with out-of-state tuition rates – those are less subsidized by our taxpayers.
While those students are here, they (especially grad students) are working on research projects, which might discover something very useful or profitable for this country. And they are usually paid only a pittance, compared to hiring full time researchers. I don’t know how you would calculate the value of this.
Many of those students end up staying in the USA (even in the same area where they went to school) and becoming productive employees in fields where we need trained people. Some of them even start their own company, some of which become quite successful. (Isn’t Google one example of that?) But it’d be real hard to put a calculated value on this. (But I think some would argue that this factor alone more than outweighs the cost of taxpayers subsidizing university educations for foreigners.)
There are well-established processes for translating academic qualifications across systems. U.S. universities have recruiting staff that understand the major systems. If you come from some really obscure system, there are private firms that will work through the conversion.
The research is the PhD education. And some part of it is often paid for by the federal government. I would like to determine how much of that is spent on foreign students. That is all I’m trying to determine in this thread.
I’m reasonably certain that one big pile of graduate training money (NIH and NSF fellowships and institutional training grants) can only go to citizens. Obviously that’s not the only source of money, but it can influence whether international grad students are accepted to a program even if there are plenty of professors capable of paying directly from a research grant. My current program funds all first year grad students with a training grant, so they only accept the rare and truly exceptional international grad students. (Basically someone with either a fellowship of their own, or such an impressive application that a lab is willing to fund them for the first year when they’re doing heavy coursework and rotations in other labs).
For another indirectly relevant bit of data, this report says that 22% of biomedical grad students are fully funded by fellowships and training grants. Might be more data directly relevant to the OPs question in there…
My experience is hardly comprehensive, but I’ve met many many more foreign postdocs than foreign grad students. Off the top of my head, I’m aware of more foreign grad students at public universities, where tuition is cheaper and there’s an expectation that they get half time support as a teaching assistant.
Also, FWIW a lot of foreign grad students and postdocs end up returning to their home country where the job market is a lot more favorable for them. As another anecdote, one of my former labmates was an Indian postdoc who ended up with a respectable but not amazing publication record. She probably had a decent chance at finding a faculty position in the US, eventually, after a very long and hard search, and probably with many compromises and years of adjuncting or soft money positions along the way. On the other hand, she was being actively recruited by one of the top Indian research institutes. So as a whole the US isn’t necessarily retaining all of the best and brightest people who come to the US. But I’m having a hard time articulating this point without descending into “DEY TOOK OUR JERBS!”
If we WAG fully-loaded annual costs of $50-70k, and WAG 3-4 years* of federal support per degree, that gives us $2.4-4.4B, or 4-7% of non-defense federal R&D spending (http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/DefNon_1.jpg)
Plus or minus a decimal spot
*I’m assuming for every graduate, there are 2-3 additional federally-supported students. We know what happens when we assume.
Even $50,000 sounds high for the amount paid each year to a graduate research assistant. In general, grad students are just barely scraping by. They know that they have to get the Ph.D. to continue in their chosen field, and the people paying them know that they can pay them an absolute minimum amount to live on during their grad student years.
But what we don’t know is how many are funded by their home countries (not uncommon) or by exchange situations (like Fulbright scholars) or have private scholarships (my private grad school raised funds for students from developing countries.)
Not are we likely to give how many people employed by someone holding a grant are foreigners. It’s not data that is typically collected, because the basic theory behind a government grant is that the government is putting funding toward someone else’s program. The government doesn’t usually consider the details of how the grant is administered (within very specific boundaries) to be its business. The thing that is being paid for is the result.
I believe that the attraction of obtaining college and advanced degrees in the US is that doing so serves as a back door to getting work visas and ultimately immigration status for such students of foreign origin. Their academic credentials make them highly skilled experts, something we have a shortage of. (Yeah, I know, it’s a circular relationship and argument. I have a friend who’s a professor in a STEM field at a state university, he says that the vast majority of his graduate students are from China and India).
For these then, we’re not educating “them”, we’re educating “us”. They stay.
My experience was that foreign students were measured in a more stringent scale than Americans: the American doctoral student we had, had been admitted with a GRE half the minimum required for a foreigner (the school had 25% of its graduate slots open for Americans - she was the only American to apply in 19 years, in a school ranked among the top-10 in this field); the American undergrads who’d been doing research and moved on to graduate school again had lower GREs than would have been required for a foreigner either in our school or in those to which they were accepted.
This was in a STEM field in the '90s and may have changed, but while I can see (and have encountered) accepting sub-capable foreign students when you’re going to charge them, it doesn’t make sense when you’re going to pay them.
My own research/grad school was funded partly by my local government (covering living expenses for two years), partly by a NATO fellowship (researchers exchange), partly by university funds which I have no idea where had they in turn come from (TA stipend for one year, tuition waiver for three).
Not to mention that admission does not equal graduation. Graduate students have to go through several level of tests to get into a PhD program, so even if someone slipped through they would be washed out.
Not to mention that at this point the adviser (in my field at least) has very likely gone through the same process when a grad student, and knows the quality of the schools better than most.
In further support, I’ve reviewed NSF engineering grant proposals, and nowhere are the grad assistants identified, either by name of nationality. It is very likely that the investigator does not even know this information when making the proposal.
They are not identified in the applications, but the schools must keep track of exactly how the money is spent to avoid having to give money back. Or in the worst cases, people getting locked up because they thought “the government doesn’t usually consider the details of how the grant is administered to be its business.”
The linked NSF survey queries primary funding source (e.g. RA, fellowship, etc.) and nationality. So the information is out there. Just not in NSF’s published survey results.
