The U.S. Is Driving Away Young Scientists

Schlagbohrer

It is driving away mid-career scientists too. France is eagerly recruiting them though and the EU as a whole. https://www.cnrs.fr/en/update/choose-cnrs-opportunities-scie... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00405-2

dozerly

It’s driving everyone away. No demographic is better off, other than obscenely rich people, under this administration. We have effectively killed what the brain “gain” we’ve been benefitting from for decades.

thibsrn

Even though I'm sure it's factually true that there is a decrease in interest from international young researchers to come to the US, articles like this are always a bit dramatic and have a political bias. More problematic are the budget cuts than the decreasing flow of talent from abroad. The country has enough domestic eager brains and the cultural capital to compensate later for this temporary dip.

ModernMech

We are at the point where AI researchers are worried about having to use the term "super intelligence" and avoiding any use of the prefix "trans-" in their terminology in order to get federal grants. So yeah, I can understand why they wouldn't want to do their research here. I was pretty astounded and heartbroken watching my colleagues pass around a list of banned words so they could scrub their proposals. Then again, what options do they have? Either you get money from the government, corporations who have a very narrow idea of what they want to research, or you move to a country that takes research seriously.

zhiyan

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are driven away equal..."

sailfast

The past two years is not a good summary of the United States. The policies that led them to leave are clearly wildly unpopular. They will be back. While government funding may not grow above previous levels I would posit this is actually a feature - I’d expect to see a better public / private blend that is more resilient.

tdb7893

I recently started a program in ecology and the worry I've heard from scientists is that going forward funding is going to be very politically uncertain. It's hard to run a lab when you might just have grants get cancelled capriciously and have funding dry up for years at a time. I know I'm going to be looking outside the US for PhD programs once I finish my master's. Four years of this is a huge blow to the field, eight would mean a wipeout of a generation of talent.

superxpro12

yes, we know. yes, this was an obvious consequence of trumps policies. The entire administration has done one thing: sell of all of the US's assets, and convert it into profits for the trump family. thats it. Every action taken since the first 40 executive actions signed, through doge, defunding USAID which murdered over a million children, or bombing Iranian schools, has been to enrich trump and his friends. Thats it. It's very simple. They traded away every piece of soft power they could find and exchanged it for cash in their pockets.

kittikitti

https://www.aip.org/fyi/nsf-adds-dei-and-israel-boycott-rest... There's no longer a point in receiving academic training in the United States because no one will trust it. A prospective scientist won't want to define their research by hedging against zionism and fascism. I don't have an extensive publication list but I would rather not publish anything if I have to give Israel and Nazi's a seat at the table for every research project.

ChrisArchitect

Related: Top Astrophysicist Leaves U.S. After Trump Policies Affect Her Work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50414524

contemporary343

These are underestimates if anything. I know of programs at Caltech and other top schools with cohorts that are 33% to 75% smaller in physical science/ engineering disciplines.