As a non-US resident that doesn’t much read the news, is there any particular reason for the comparison of ‘now’ vs ‘6 months ago’? Has there been a particular change in policy or some other big event in the US that’s motivated the sudden change in attitude?
TRUMP and WH have been attacking defunding science/education grants all over the country. a small percentage of researchers already fled the US, in case violence picks up, and intellectuals are usually the first targets.
this in combination of the ongoing problem with stem, low job prospects.
US federal budgeting this year have pushed hard to gut science. I’ve heard talking points regurgitated by college educated folks that businesses will pay for it instead, but when pressed for examples or how it would work they are only able to point to engineering projects, they can’t differentiate between basic scientific research producing testable, accurate models and the products and services built using this models.
Businesses will pay for studies that help businesses or had a profit incentive. When you hear the govt spent a large sum of money studying how ocelots react to opium or somelike that, people usually say that’s a waste of money, rather than finding out why.
Not that things weren’t kind of shitty before, he just accelerated the problems by defunding science and preventing foreigners from coming here to study, which sadly make up many 1/3 of the students of our PhD programs, especially hard sciences.
higher education in the USA needs systematically reform, but I don’t think anything Trump has done has improved anything, just accelerated the issues by turning off the money/labor spigot so many research programs were overly-reliant on.
a lot of this talented foreign labor is now going to study in other countries rather than the USA and that will impact things for decades, reducing USA’s lead in many scientific fields.
academia is fat and lazy. they are not lean and mean.
our entire education system needs to be leaner and meaner. but that’s hard work, so we won’t do it. we’d rather pay 50% of the grant money to the PI and then pay everyone else peanuts and wonder why none of our own citizens want to do research…
I don’t think you’ve spent much time in academia. It’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s a trek through the desert where every drop of water counts. One of the big reasons why the whole thing is falling apart is that postdocs and undergrad researchers, who do all the actual work, have been tragically underpaid for years. Add in a tiny chance to be arrested and deported on top of that and it’s instantly not worth it to tons of foreign students who were thinking of going to college in America.
And one of the reasons I left was how blatantly corrupt and awful it was, just like everything else in our society. Everything was about money and politics. Everyone who did good work got shafted, and those who played the corruption game got rewarded.
And most of the ‘underpaid’ people were all rich people living off family money anyway. They were not living off their stipends and grants. that includes a lot of the foreign students.
As a non-US resident that doesn’t much read the news, is there any particular reason for the comparison of ‘now’ vs ‘6 months ago’? Has there been a particular change in policy or some other big event in the US that’s motivated the sudden change in attitude?
Making such profound changes to how a country functions is like turning a large ship. It can take time.
TRUMP and WH have been attacking defunding science/education grants all over the country. a small percentage of researchers already fled the US, in case violence picks up, and intellectuals are usually the first targets.
this in combination of the ongoing problem with stem, low job prospects.
US federal budgeting this year have pushed hard to gut science. I’ve heard talking points regurgitated by college educated folks that businesses will pay for it instead, but when pressed for examples or how it would work they are only able to point to engineering projects, they can’t differentiate between basic scientific research producing testable, accurate models and the products and services built using this models.
Businesses will pay for studies that help businesses or had a profit incentive. When you hear the govt spent a large sum of money studying how ocelots react to opium or somelike that, people usually say that’s a waste of money, rather than finding out why.
Businesses will probably also do them inefficiently because they only think about themselves.
Like there was one Republican complaint about studying soybeans. Beans! Useless!
Yeah well guess what one of the biggest crops in the US is. We used to export soy to Asia.
https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/23114-opinion-the-trump-administration-is-wrong-about-the-value-of-crop-research-labs-and-farmers-know-it
yeah, Trump.
Not that things weren’t kind of shitty before, he just accelerated the problems by defunding science and preventing foreigners from coming here to study, which sadly make up many 1/3 of the students of our PhD programs, especially hard sciences.
higher education in the USA needs systematically reform, but I don’t think anything Trump has done has improved anything, just accelerated the issues by turning off the money/labor spigot so many research programs were overly-reliant on.
a lot of this talented foreign labor is now going to study in other countries rather than the USA and that will impact things for decades, reducing USA’s lead in many scientific fields.
“… money / labor spigot so many research programs were overly-reliant on.”
I don’t see how research or more generally anything at all could get done without money or labor.
academia is fat and lazy. they are not lean and mean.
our entire education system needs to be leaner and meaner. but that’s hard work, so we won’t do it. we’d rather pay 50% of the grant money to the PI and then pay everyone else peanuts and wonder why none of our own citizens want to do research…
I don’t think you’ve spent much time in academia. It’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s a trek through the desert where every drop of water counts. One of the big reasons why the whole thing is falling apart is that postdocs and undergrad researchers, who do all the actual work, have been tragically underpaid for years. Add in a tiny chance to be arrested and deported on top of that and it’s instantly not worth it to tons of foreign students who were thinking of going to college in America.
I spent 10 years. It was too much time.
And one of the reasons I left was how blatantly corrupt and awful it was, just like everything else in our society. Everything was about money and politics. Everyone who did good work got shafted, and those who played the corruption game got rewarded.
And most of the ‘underpaid’ people were all rich people living off family money anyway. They were not living off their stipends and grants. that includes a lot of the foreign students.