If my kids excel, will they move away?
jeffreybigham.com
jeffreybigham.com
Also, I agree 100%. Some people don’t like foreigners at US schools, thinking that those foreigners are taking spots away from worthy Americans. I think the only thing worse is if the foreigners stop wanting to come to US schools because of the implications about how far the American education system has fallen.
Countries like India, Vietnam, and South Korea have begun replicating the Chinese Thousand Talents program to attract their diasporas back to domestic academia.
Significant domains of CS such as HPC/Systems, Networking, OS internals, etc are heavily dependent on faculty, graduate students, and post-docs who are all on some sort of visa. And increasingly, at least amongst Indians, becuase the backlogs for US citizenship are insane, a number of those people have been taking sweetheart positions at INIs like the new IITs with almost US$100k in public-private lab startup grants on top of a $20k salary (tax free due to the income tax changes) with free housing and car and complete autonomy to consult with private sector players without IP entanglement (one of the biggest headaches for public private STEM R&D partnerships in the US).
Vietnam is doing something similar as well to attract Vietnamese diaspora in SK and Japan, along with Viet Kieu in America and Australia.
A nativist academic culture in STEM in the US would completely destroy any R&D capacity that even exists today.
The obvious overlap with military technology aside, it's a way to retain and increase the institutional knowledge within India across a lot of areas.
The bulk of recruitment at ISRO has always been happening at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) and the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) - not IITs.
Even getting into an IIST or IISc is almost as difficult as getting into an old IIT based on the JEE cutoffs.
Both India and China have specialized institutions dedicated to subfields that end up getting the bulk of R&D funding in said subfields, for example, Petroleum Engineering and the China University of Petroleum and the Indian Institute of Petroleum Engineering, or in mining enigneeing, the China University of Mining and Technology and the Indian School of Mines (now IIT Dhanbad).
> Unlike china Indian colleges are really backward due to lack of research funding and a coaching industry which have gamified the entrance exams
China also bases acceptance on entrance exams - the Gaokao is equally as competitive as the JEE Advanced. The exact same gamification of entrance exams and coaching centers is sadly the norm in China as well, despite the Xi admin's initial attempts to crack down on it.
Additonally, Chinese R&D funding is also stratified the same way Indian R&D funding is.
The equivalent of a government engineering college in both China and India would be receiving relatively limited funding or autonomy, but a Double First Class University in China or an INI in India well get the first pick of research grants and subsidizes.
If there is a promising professor at a mid-tier program, they are likely affiliated and getting their funding via affiliation to a national academy like the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
https://www.youngpostclub.com/yp/discover/news/asia/article/...
China banned the private tuition for Gaokao. Even before, it was not open to gamification like rote learning a few physics, chemistry, mathematics questions are(in the case of JEE). There are rounds to the exam which deals with latent intelligence rather than rote learning of problems for patterns. JEE has multiple choice questions and other pattern matching questions while Gaokao emphasise on subjective understanding.
Chinese professors are well paid and there are various perks to being a professor in China. Its a lucrative job and was one of the most well sought job before the private sector gained over it. IIRC the cafetaria for professors were said to be one of the biggest perks over working in private sector(jokingly mentioned by a chinese friend). I am not sure how true that is now.
It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries. However, what matters to the private sector is sources of capital. Tech investors in india usually went to IITs themselves, and so the ecosystem always remains close to IITs, allowing professors easy access. Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes. Similar to Rajeev Motwani holding a stake in Google, they get really rich sometimes.
Yep! The University of Waterloo back in Ontario did the same thing in the 1960s, which helped catapult the program into a Tier 1 CSE program comparable to older more established programs like UToronto and UMich.
> Lot of the startups (even YC ones!) by IIT students actually involved one of their professors in the ideation stage, and they even have equity % sometimes
Yep! There are also some NIT, BITS Pilani, IIT, and other program specific networks made by their alumnis in academia and VC. I think Foundation Capital (Netflix, Cerebras, Fortanix) is running one such program.
> It is true that the govt institutions themselves have less IIT representation, mostly due to low salaries
Ministry affiliated universities are a major reason why. For example, ISRO overwhelmingly recruits from IIST, ONGC from IIPE, and other SOEs or R&D programs will recruit from universities specialized in that specific disciple instead of an IIT or NIT now.
Ooh, didn't know that. Interesting.
Well, considering all other countries mentioned here are just hiring native people who worked in US. Indians are not hiring Chinese, or Europeans or any other than natively Indians. Same for Chinese or others. So nativist policy can for those countries but not US is strange.
If one sees crowd at US embassy or consulates in India, US has nothing to worry about talent not trying hard to come to US.
All this analysis about US downfall seems kind of assuming that rest of the world is doing lot better. Traveling to India in last few years and experiencing first hand tells me believing even 1% of these hype generators of India is believing too much.
Since tech wages in the US are the highest anywhere in the world, with the possible exception of Monaco or something, I would imagine Americans don't see a lot of recruiters from elsewhere in the world. I would also imagine that's because it's harder to recruit someone who's earning American wages.
The cost of living in the Bay Area creeps ever upward and absorbs just enough salary to keep the worker bees coming back to the office the next day. It's really not that different of a life than elsewhere in materialistic terms. Except there is also nothing to do other than work or go hiking. More and more people are cluing in.
It’s not like McDonald’s or Target don’t exist in SF. Those workers get paid way less than big tech and somehow they make rent every month. Yea, you might have to commute instead living within walking distance of the campus where you work, but that’s just being a responsible adult imo.
Yeah, I get it. The multiplier on the salary has gone down from 3.6x to 2.6x. A studio is ridiculously expensive, I once paid $2300/month to live in one room in the piss-soaked Tenderloin, I understand your pain. It's not as good as it sounds. Still ... if you were sitting in Germany or Dubai and had to decide which area to try to recruit from, do you think you'd choose the more expensive one unless you had no choice?
If you're terrible with money, perhaps. Anyone making SWE wages in the bay area should be able to save a decent amount of money.
For a number of nationalities like Indians and Chinese, it takes 15-25 years to naturalize as a permanent resident/green card holder because of the backlogs and processing issues at USCIS.
That is a lot of instability, with various pitfalls at each step (eg. potentially getting deported if you cannot find a new job in 60 days after being terminated, increasingly needing to pay out of pocket to do visa processing instead of the company doing it).
More critically, if you have a kid and you as the parent do not get a green card by 21, they will be treated as a new applicant and will have to start the entire process from scratch.
If you are able to demand EU or Canada level salaries in India or China, you have no reason to deal with the kind of headaches I mentioned above. You could have put a similar amount of money purchasing real estate in Hyderabad or Hangzhou, or investing in the Chinese or Indian equities market which are both seeing an IPO boom, or founded your own startup without being scared of being the reason you and your dependents got booted out. You can't even justify buying a house or a condo because you won't even know if you'd be able to live there long term.
As a result, what you end up seeing is people from both countries increasingly viewing their stay in the US as temporary - so the American strategy of leveraging a brain drain to make more Americans is failing, becuase it is now becoming a reverse brain drain right when they are mid-career (so at their most valuable point from a human capital perspective).
This has been impacting everyone from line level IC engineers all the way up to even VPs at major companies and even a couple well know VCs I am acquaintances with.
What media didn't cover is how after couple of years of "world class" living and working in Delhi/Gurgaon or some such they quietly came back to US on first chance to escape again. Funny thing is 20-25 years back those cities had better living condition than today in my first hand experience.
To my understanding living in US/Canada/UK/Australia is lot more tough today for citizens and immigrants alike. And immigration policies in west are reflection rather then reason for it.
Furthermore, Indians in America face a 20-80 year permanent residency backlog depending on when they arrived in the US. The majority of Indians nationals in America will eventually return to India as a result.
The US is increasingly viewed as a temporary posting instead of as a naturalization destination becuase of the backlog, and most other Western countries don't provide lucrative offers for the cream of the crop compared to what they can demand in India.
For example, the average new grad salary at IIT Kanpur was around US$30K for the class of 2024 [0], and a mid-career TC of US$60k-70K is realistic for INI grads (as one of the other posters in this thread is an example of).
Most of India's R&D is overwhelmingly generated by alumni of these INIs, and the majority of investment is placed in these programs. These are also the kinds of programs that previously used to represent the bulk of the brain drain 15-20 years ago, but their grads overwhelmingly remain in India unless doing graduate school like a PhD or an MBA (these aren't the kinds of people doing an MSc in Business Analytics at Wollongong in order to get an Australian permanent residency), let alone accepting decades of indentured servitude due to the EB2 processing backlog.
[0] - https://m.economictimes.com/jobs/fresher/iit-kanpur-class-of...
I agree that Indians get fucked by the US when it comes to immigration and that the E-3 visa is awesome. What does that have to do with whether India, Europe, and China refuse to hire foreigners for nativist reasons? Did you reply to the wrong person by accident?
Ten out of thousand maybe great students, engineers, scientists etc. And no one is really stopping them from coming to US.
The only people who seem really unhappy about are those who benefit from supporting scam of bringing thousands below average in by picking examples from ten great ones.
Context is not neutral. "We want to hold onto the labor we produce" works for labor exporters in a way that it doesn't work for labor importers.
Really? I'm yet to meet a single diaspora (i.e. born/raised abroad) professor here in Korea and I interact with universities quite a bit.
Unless diaspora here includes those who did their full university education abroad though, lots of those indeed.
Yes. By definition these are diaspora members as well.
For what it's worth, I've really never seen pure international students really been included in that term, especially those that are the student equivalent of expats on a fixed-term contract - another group I've never seen included. In all discussions I've been part of, it' s about people with heritage from country A (whether born there or through family), but "settled" (or if a minor, being raised) in country B, with the above two groups not fitting into the "settled" part, planning to move back to A the second their contract(/term) ends. But I'm sure there's other valid definitions out there and it depends on the context and all.
You can deport illegal immigrants without taking away their dignity and without frightening the ever living shit out of everyone. But this isn't that. The intention is fear.
it really is a "first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist..."-esque program at this point
If the democratic party is going to win, they need to succinctly and stoically state a handful of memorable counterpoints to appeal to the common man. What we have had for the past decade is a ton of noise from the mainstream media explaining a million reasons why we should oppose Trump. The left wing does not equip it's supporters to argue against the right well.
Trump won in 2016 rattling on about Hillary's emails. Trump didn't give a million reasons for us to oppose Hillary, he had 1. He would have a single canned response and name for each of his opponents. The point is you have to agree on a couple of memorable weak points to attack.
Which 1? Building the wall? Draining the swamp? Locking her up? Making America great again? I may be missing more.
The most important thing is that these are points that are so simple even an idiot can understand them.
I can't even keep track of all of trump's controversies because they are so numerous and complex. But if I was a democrat I would just stick to one or two points that even moderates can resonate with like the "Epstein Files" or Palantir or the nuclear secrets or something.
I'm sorry, but "the left" hardly has a monopoly on that.
But I think the right generally appeals to people with a more tyrannical personality, and vice versa.
One my dad reliably latches on to is “they’re going to take your guns”. Trump used this, I’m pretty sure, all three races. Weirdly there were never even moves toward doing this the time he lost. It’s as if this was just bullshit. But, it gets voters fired up (getting people to show up for you is more important than swaying anyone to your side)
Lots of people voted for him this time for overtime and tips being tax-exempt. Some (especially on the overtime thing) have since come to regret it when the fine print didn’t include them, but it got their vote.
He ran on lots of issues. “Build the wall” echos what tons of Republican voters have been saying for decades. Their politicians wouldn’t do it—hell, Trump didn’t, he just half-assed a little bit of it and called it done—because it’s a really bad idea, but he sold people on the notion that he’d get it done, where “it” was something they’d long wanted done.
Many other issues like that, that did get him votes.
"A republic, if you can keep it" -- Ben Franklin
I believe there has long been a significant gap between what national-stage elected republicans say and do, and what Republican voters say and want them to do.
Frankly, what Republican voters say they want is often a lot meaner than anything their politicians were delivering. I’ve not only heard “why don’t they just build a wall?” from ordinary not-terminally-online R voters, I’ve heard, many times going back 20+ years, “they should just mine the border”. Kilmeade’s comment about just killing homeless people who wouldn’t accept aid (who cares why they don’t, I guess)? I’ve heard it, that’s not new, what’s new is people that prominent saying it.
R voter sentiment also veers far away from the (Republican-initiated) neoliberal (ex-)consensus on trade. (Incidentally, this also isn’t popular on the left, but both major parties agreed on it for more than 30 years, so it didn’t matter).
Dropping lots of foreign aid? Mass government worker firings? Sending the army in to cities to fight out-of-control crime or brutally quelling riots with the army (that one’s on the “we’ll see” list but if we get four full years, the smart money says we will see it)? Normal stuff to hear on a wishlist from an awful lot of R voters. They’ll just tell you this stuff.
I could go on.
Trump got where he is by exploiting a large gap between what voters want and what parties have been delivering. This gap was huge for the republicans, and there was a little overlap with own-voter dissatisfaction with Democrats. He was able to make voters believe he’d do many of the things they’d long wanted their elected officials to do, but that they weren’t doing, and often weren’t even talking about doing.
Yeah, people who think Trump is far right don't have a clue where the actual far right is. A large amount of what Trump is doing boils down to a simple "enforce the current law", he just has to use executive orders to get it done because of insane resistance from people who have been flouting the law for decades. Trump is a moderate response to the issues, not a far right one, and has attracted the disaffected middle in addition to the people on the far right who see him as finally a step in the right direction.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of democratic politicians are openly against outright bans and quite a few of them even mean it—Democrats managing to pass even some better version of the extremely-partial AWB is fantasy any time soon, and I very much doubt they’d get half their own people to vote to restrict firearms any more than that. (Setting aside that the courts have recently set perhaps the narrowest scope for allowable gun restrictions in the country’s history, so it might not matter even if they could pass any of this)
They learned that it doesn't matter if it's true, relevant, or hypocritical, as long as it feeds fear and anger in their constituents.
The left fails because the issues they support can require nuance and consideration and that's a lot to ask of a voter who just wants to be told who to vote for.
My assessment isn't meant to be tribal, there's plenty to critique on the left from DNC leadership to "overexubernt" members whose excess is used to define the left as a whole (wokism).
It's heartbreaking that the divide is now complete and is not likely to change without some unfortunate actions.
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” –Carl Sandburg
That is how democratic party loose and I suspect people who push for it know exactly that.
Trumo won by being emotional, entertainingly toxic and sucking media attention. "Stoic" calm just makes you look like a weak sucker.
The "Democratic"/"left wing" platform is not as popular as you believe; not in the US, not in England, not in Canada, not in Germany...
This all stems from backlash against those policies. You need to fix the issues, not tell people "you voted for the wrong guy".
Democracy's power is almost entirely in voting out bad rulers without destroying the entire country. That's why a great deal of people's ideas of democracy are ridiculous. For example, democracy can tolerate the existence of fake news or terrible/fake science, just go read newspapers from the interwar period. Take an alternative of the islamist gulf monarchies. They'll end in destruction and fire, war or revolution, because that's the only way to replace the government, so you can pretty much guarantee that's what will (eventually) happen.
The simple truth one hopes America, including democrats, can embrace is that Biden was bad, and allowing him to cling to power was horrible (if he'd made Ms. Harris president halfway through his presidency, THAT might have worked). What was done during the election ... seriously? Yes, Trump is worse (and he'll be voted out, or at least take the GOP down, like he did before), but that doesn't matter in most people's minds. Besides, taking the "least bad" option, what democrats generally advocate these days, is how Italy and Germany destroyed their democracy (Mussulini and Hitler were put in power, not elected, because any other choice would have resulted in civil war. How that worked? Easy: they instructed their supporters to fight until they were the least bad option, and the police couldn't keep control. Which is why I think countries like France are playing with fire since every extreme party in France and Germany, the various extreme left, right, green is trying the same playbook now: elect them or they sabotage the entire country. Why? Same reason Hitler did it: he only had maybe 20% of people really behind him. But 20% of the population can sabotage the entire country, easily. Of course, Hitler was the only one doing it, and these parties are not)
At least the Democratic platform is a platform as opposed to the other party who is being held hostage for 13 years by a single individual who cannot complete a coherent sentence without rambling and weaving (and he couldn't do it in 2015 either)
I don't think the democrats should lower themselves to messaging like trump's though. In doing so they would give up their own worth. And copying your enemy is never a good idea because nobody can be better at it than the real thing.
I don't think the democrats are great (I'm European left wing) but I do absolutely think that Trump is running a scam on foolish people. He has even said so himself in the past.
The problem is also that the republicans manufacture issues. There are no issues with trans people. Most people wouldn't even know a trans person (which is also why it's such a good group to demonize, people don't often have friends in that group to dissuade them from hating). There's no issues with immigrants as such, the issue is more that some groups are very poor and turn to crime. This is not exclusive to immigrants. The actual solution is to make sure even poor people have opportunities that don't involve crime. But hey that's 'communism'. You can call it what you want but life is a lot safer here in Europe. But they're just riling people up in order to create a platform.
The thing is, you can't fix issues that don't actually exist. So this is a very hard situation to solve.
I voted third-party.
However, if you want to allow some immigration, you can make a case PhDs in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, which is what he's talking about.
These are kids who were already world-class coming in and become even better by the time they graduate. It is paid for by taxpayers, for which they should be grateful, and it is done in a context that builds admiration for the country.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/upshot/harvard-trump-inte...
Instead we are seeing increased siloing of scientific domains. The EU is cracking down on EU-Chinese research cooperation (as recent arrests and deportations in France have shown), India still has a de facto freeze on Chinese R&D and China is still enforcing export controls on IP to India, and South Korea and Japan are still controlling any IP generated from their industrial research fusion programs.
We're instead seeing at least 6-7 different scientific and capital ecosystems forming, and with collaboration being tightly controlled by governments.
The EU continues to use English as the lingua franca for scientific communication due to the diversity within the EU.
On the India side, research done as part of the pact with Japan [0], Taiwan [1], South Korea [2], the EU [3], and the US [4] is done in English.
And on the Vietnam side (based on my SO's experience), all of her ASEAN-Japan and ASEAN-SK collaboration was done in English as well.
[0] - https://www.jst.go.jp/inter/english/project/country/india.ht...
[1] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/indo-taiwan/
[2] - https://www.ikst.res.in/ikst-en/index.do
[3] - https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-resear...
[4] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/the-us-india-...
All Japanese people learn English at school; few learn Chinese as you can verify by reading about the Japanese school system from various sources including Wikipedia.
Similarly in China, English is the only mandatory foreign language taught at school.
Frequently, Chinese or Japanese. For example companies in these countries employ translators. Are you suggesting they rely on primary school-level English to negotiate?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_education_in_...
> The following is the set of compulsory subjects currently taught in the Japanese education system from the primary to secondary levels:
> * Foreign languages: English (rarely: Korean, Spanish, Arabic, French, German, or Chinese)
That is to say, I would not be surprised if, in China, people are quiet fluent in English.
It is not.
The vast majority of English speakers do not live in the US or the UK. English is the most widely spoken language in the world. If you are at dinner with people from several countries, the "Lingua Franca" will almost certainly be English.
The popularity of Mandarin relies on the sheer mass of native speakers in China. That population is shrinking and that shrinking is expected to accelerate. The cultural export of China is inherently limited by its ideology - there's a reason we have (had, really) "Hong Kong Cinema" not "Peking Cinema".
In 1930, if you wanted access to the great science universities and literature, you learned German. Things can change. Quickly.
The bigger problem is that schools like MIT, Stanford, UCB, UCI throw (or threw?) lots of resources at students that Chinese schools didn't really do (and maybe still don't? My info is 10 years out of date). Even the lower ranked schools have ample resources and fairly well paying TA/RA-ships available. In China, you would have to work for your professor's side company to get money, and the professor might not let you graduate if you were doing a good job (again, 10 years ago, I have no idea what its like today, China is changing quickly).
India has been opening campuses abroad like IIT Madras in Tanzania [0] and IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi [1] to cater specifically to building that kind of relationship in Africa and MENA. The majority of seats allocated (66%) are for foreign nationals.
Top Indian programs like IIT Delhi have been very active giving fellowships and subsidises for students and researchers from ASEAN [2], the African Union [3], Pacific Island nations [4], and Afghanistan [5]
And Vietnam would do similar programs as well for poorer ASEAN nations and a number of African countries (notably Angola and Mozambique) as well as Cuba
Japan has been running a multi-decade long international student and R&D collaboration program that helped jumpstart South Korea and China's R&D capacity in the 1980s and 1990s, along with much of ASEAN's more recently (my SO is a product of that). Same with South Korea as well.
[0] - https://www.iitmz.ac.in/
[1] - https://abudhabi.iitd.ac.in/
[2] - https://asean.iitd.ac.in/
[3] - https://www.itecgoi.in/index
[4] - https://www.itecgoi.in/Sagaramrut
[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-14/india-off...
But China is not going to be the dominant superpower (except maybe if they manage to beat the rest of the world in AI). Their labor force is already in decline, which means they must gradually shift their focus from building the future to maintaining the society. Like Europe and Japan are already doing.
Otherwise as dual citizens it's overblown. There is a lot of hot air in Canada that doesn't match the on the boots on the ground reality of life in the USA (for citizens / green card holders) because Canada is pissed off that America caused a downturn in Canada's economy and Canadians feel the pinch because the downturn is about 25% worse in Canada as a result.
But IMO it's self inflicted wound and has been a very, very long time coming. Canada has kept on kicking the economic can down the road for decades now and it's toll is collecting interest more and more.
The political worker class in DC is also very pissed off because the administration there initiated the equivalent of extreme mass layoffs in a sector that is not used to that.
In the USA, people are kind of mopey about the downturn, but in democratic areas the level of emotion is far less than it was with trump was the first time, while in Canada, it seems like it's more intense than it was in California with trump for the first time.
The author worries about the brain drain that could affect places like Pittsburgh, but on the other hand, people is already living it, as my kids just see grandparents once per year, since we live in another country, but there is people who can't even do it on an annual base, because they live far away or in countries considered at risk.
Take this with a grain of salt because I'm very independent, individualist and progressive. I think that was already clear from the above :)
I live in a big city now and I love it so much. Excellent public transport so I don't need a car anymore (haven't driven in 7 years), always new things to do and see. New initiatives that actually go somewhere instead of dying out like in the small town.
I can imagine people that like to think outside the box and build stuff like me often like to live in bigger places. That's not even education related as such (you can also be self taught) though it does tend to correlate of course.
And no I wouldn't think of visiting the US in the current situation, let alone move there to study or work (I'm not in the studying age anymore anyway). I do agree with the author that the current politics would deter skilled people.
One of the biggest problems though is just the poverty, options are limited and wages are shit and like you mentioned innovations don't make their way into rural areas until like 10+ years later. And if you don't move away to a big city the majority of people are never going to make a lot of money and will often be ignored for most everything except as a source of revenue for podunk courts and cops. Of the highly intelligent and aspirational few that are left, most end up severely stifled by lack of financial opportunity even if they are doing great work because most of their potential customer base are poor too.
If you’re young and want to get out, get out. Don’t take my path of studying and working until a path emerges. If I could do it again I don’t think I’d even finish secondary education and just pack my bags at 17.
Although, for grandkids, I guess that when you are far you are also more intentional with making sure you spend time with their grandparents when they are far.
Just in the western countries:
Toronto, Cambridge, ENS in France, the many max Planck institutes in Germany (eg Tubingen), the two federal institutes in Switzerland.
Faculty positions in any of those are likely to be better than CMU (in terms of start up package, funding, quality of students, quality of faculty, and ability to hire people).
1. CMU needs immigration to remain a top school.
2. His children will be in the top 1% of 1% of 1% to qualify for top schools.
3. His children will move away if CMU does not remain a top school...
4. and that would be bad, so bad that it justifies perpetual rent stress for 100 million Americans, an actual impact of immigration.