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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what to tell you. You're just wrong if you think that the US doesn't pay for the graduate education of foreign nationals. I can name at least a half-dozen foreign doctoral students and post-docs, whom I know personally, who are/were on NIH and NSF funding. It's not a "notion" -- it's a real phenomenon.

Now, granted, maybe these people will contribute to the GDP someday, indirectly, through their current research. But that's an argument to encourage them to stay here, not to fund their education and force them to go back home when it's time to get a job.

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Yeah, as the two previous posts from filipe and cconstantine point out, we're talking about net contribution.

This is why I mentioned the MBA, Law, Medicine, and Undergrad degrees as something apart from Ph.D programs in science and/or engineering. Since most people experience college as an undergrad, or maybe as a professional student, they think of a degree program as a situation where you get an education in exchange for money. So scholarships and stipends are a privilege, maybe even a kind of gift.

PhD programs are completely different. Universities use grad students to provide labor that at a fraction of the market rate - maybe 10%-20%.

By the way, it doesn't bother me that a person would be willing to apprentice to a professor in order to get a PhD and experience. That's the student's decision. But it irritates me enormously when I see a visa or green card used to force the worker to accept employment at severely below market rates.

The first is choice, the second is government sponsored indentured servitude, an egregious violation of everything I believe is good about free markets, democracy, and at-will employment (this is no exaggeration, I really do think when an employer controls the employee's right to reside in the US and hopes for getting a green card, it severely undermines personal freedom in a way that has no place in a capitalist democracy).

I just spent a big chunk of my life getting a PhD, so you don't really need to lecture me on the economics of graduate education. I'm under no illusions that grad school is anything like professional school. Also, I know that you're making the argument that grad student research leads to gains in long-term GDP and new industries and blah, blah, blah. Yes. I get it.

What you're missing -- the important part of my argument -- is that these gains are hypothetical and long-term. In the short term, we're paying real, present-value dollars for foreign students to get their degrees. If we then throw them out after they graduate, we are also throwing away the bulk of their productivity. We train them, then we cast them aside.

Your comments about "indentured servitude" are a straw man, and I'm not going to address them here. Also, I don't necessarily support the way that universities use foreign students to conduct research at below-market rates (it's a big part of why I no longer work in the field in which I was trained). My argument is narrow: if we're going to pay for these folks to get trained here, it makes no sense to kick them out of the country when they're done.

I could be wrong, but I don' think the "indentured servitude" bit is a straw man. Employers really do have the power to have someone deported via not letting them work. Deportation isn't something companies should have control over.

But, overall, I think everyone in this tree is arguing the same basic thing; it's a bad idea to throw workers out of the country.

It's a straw man, because true or not, it's irrelevant to my argument (and possibly a mis-characterization of the same). I'm not suggesting that the US should enforce immigration policy that treats people like slaves; only that we should allow people to stay when we've paid for their education.

I do think we all agree...I'm just really puzzled why my comment has been received with such hostility, when we're all saying variants of the same thing!

C'mon, dude. You wrote "You're just wrong if you think that the US doesn't pay for the graduate education of foreign nationals". Of course the thread got a little testy.

And I stand by my claim that these research-oriented grad students contribute more than they cost even in the short term. They teach classes, write code, and sign away rights to patents the moment they start their programs. These contributions pale in comparison to the long-term gains you mentioned, and the opportunity cost of losing a researcher who would have stayed in the US is very real, but it's pretty easy to produce enough to justify a research stipend even without considering those long term gains

> I can name at least a half-dozen foreign doctoral students and post-docs, whom I know personally, who are/were on NIH and NSF funding

Those grants are research-based, so NIH and NSF are paying them in exchange of research work. In your argument, you sound like they are giving money to foreigners who get the money, say good bye and run away with a degree.

No, I said that the US is paying graduate students, and that if we're investing in them, we ought to encourage them to stay.

I think the point of your post's parent is that they are paid, but compared to how much they could be making in the private sector they are working slave-wages.

Unless you think the work they are doing as grad students is worth less than what they're payed (slave-wages) the balance works out that we are getting more from them than they get from us.

That's his point, but it's an irrelevant one to my argument.

The gains we get from paying for research are hypothetical. Research is an investment. Nobody expects it to turn an immediate profit, or even generate a revenue of any significance -- which is great, because it usually doesn't, and most academic research isn't commercially viable anyway.

When we pay for foreign students to earn advanced degrees, only to kick them out of the country once they've graduated, we're cutting off our nose to spite our face. Why are people having such a difficult time understanding this?

ah, reading comprehension... I can has some?

You are more correct than I am :)

I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but there must have been something about the way I wrote my original comment that was particularly obtuse, since I seem to be attracting quite the backlash....

No sarcasm. I'm not sure what it was for other people, but I decided I disagreed with you before I got to that critical last sentence in your root post.

Ah. Must've buried the lede. :-)

> When we pay for foreign students to earn advanced degrees, only to kick them out of the country once they've graduated, we're cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Right, I agree with you, and I understand your argument (though I don't agree with it per se) that the return is questionable. I was just asking about your claim of "a huge number of foreign grad students and post-docs are being paid off", especially grads in high-tech industry (which is the focus of the article)

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