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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration. Few natives would accept the low pay/high workload combination that is a postdoc, but for an immigrant from a third world country it might be an amazing opportunity. Same reason most fruit and berry pickers also are immigrants.

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> but for an immigrant from a third world country it might be an amazing opportunity.

In part, because academia is exempt from H1b quotas.

The thing is, almost all postdocs start on J1 visas, not H1b. Most schools hold out the possibility of moving you over to an H1b as an incentive after a few years. It's also complicated by many J1s come with the rider that they must return to their home country for two years and cannot shift to an H1b. There is a pathway to apply for a waiver from the State Department, but I'm told these days the process takes about 18 months to get the waiver - BEFORE you can be eligible to apply for an H1b.

Don't even know where to begin...but according to this [1] less than 5% of students in the US are international students.

1 - https://www.fwd.us/news/international-students/

"And even though they make up only 5% of the total student population, international students earned nearly half of all Master’s and Doctor’s STEM degrees awarded in 2019, a total of 117,000 degrees."

That's an interesting stat which might be the source of the parent post assertion.

That is either for undergraduates or total enrollment. The percentages for international students in graduate schools basically range from 50% upwards, depending on the field.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/08/19/inter...

We're talking about postdocs though, which is a completely different population than college students. I found this [1] which estimates that 51% of US postdocs are foreign-born as of 2018.

[1] https://elifesciences.org/articles/40189

"The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association. In comparison, only about 9 percent of undergraduates in computer science were international students (perhaps, deans posit, because families are nervous about sending offspring who are barely adults across the ocean to study)."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...

Note that the definition of "international student" excludes those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of PhDs though.

> Note that the definition of "international student" excludes those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of PhDs though.

Why are you interested in the percentage of foreign born PhD students? You realize that a lot of Americans are "foreign born". It seems like an archaic way of thinking about things.

"International student" should indeed exclude those who are permanent residents. Which means they have been living here permanently before becoming a student, likely grew up in America, or just waiting for the citizenship, etc. "International student" means someone who moved here to study.

I'm assuming good intentions, but want to make sure we're not intentionally trying to gatekeep what it means to be an American.

Because the statement that was challenged was "I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration" and almost all people not born in the US but living in the US are immigrants.

Your statistic must be for undergrads, where the situation is very different.

In STEM grad school, no more than half the people are from the US, and it could easily be as low as 25%, depending where you are.

Actually, the very source you cited agrees, roughly:

> international students earned nearly half of all Master’s and Doctor’s STEM degrees awarded in 2019

I suspect that the number "5%" is also too low even at the undergrad level, if you restrict attention to, say, the top 20 universities.

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