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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't fewer grad students lead to fewer professors and less income for universities? Why would administrators accept that?

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Yes :)

I did day it depended on your point of view. As a grad student less competition is good - if you are part of those exploiting grad students then not so good.

I hope you realize that in addition to being bad for those who exploit grad students, it is also bad for the marginal grad student who is no longer going to be able to go to grad school. For a lot of us foreigners, grad school in the US is essentially our only ticket to a life in the first world. So I implore you to consider the impact of a policy that results in fewer grad students on the marginal ones - typically foreigners or minorities or females in male heavy fields.

Does grad school qualify you for a different visa? As far as I know, a bachelor's is sufficient for a TN or H1-B.

At least in science/engineering: not really. Faculty positions are saturated, only one in three PhDs will get hired as an assistant professor, let alone receive tenure. One could argue that the number of graduate students is hugely inflated, since they're such cheap labor.

That's not the mechanism I'm considering. I was under the impression that most researching professors needed lots of grad students in order to get grants, and they needed grants in order to exist?

Yes it would tend to reduce demand for professors, but if there was fewer professors the grant success rate would be higher. Less competition for grant funding should have a positive influence on the quality of science as people should feel under less pressure to rush out results.

The current academic system is a Ponzi scheme that has to end at some stage and it might as well be now.

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