By better educating our own kids. We have tons of kids in “inner cities” and “rural areas” who are underserved. We could do better for them. We’re to damned lazy to give a shit so we trade them for overseas shinies with money.
This is reductionist. The academic jobs OminousWeapons is talking about are not likely to be filled by domestic workers because they're severely underpaid.
NIH annual stipends are ~$25k for graduate students and $52-65k for postdocs [1]. There is a massive opportunity cost associated with these positions, _particularly_ for people coming from less affluent backgrounds. It's really hard to accept a 50-70% pay cut (assuming you could otherwise take a tech role) if you have an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to your and your family's financial stability.
Markets work. Cutting off the vast supply of minimum wage international workers will incentivize Universities to treat and pay their junior researchers better.
As the parent insinuated, stipends are set by the NIH and congress, not the university. They are largely paid out with grant funding from the government. If an entity wanted to pay a researcher more, it can't come from federal funds which is how most labs (outside of big ones that have industry collaboration) primarily fund themselves. So while markets work, this isn't a competitive market, it is a regulated one where a ceiling is being set.
Improving education for underserved populations does not necessitate removing competition from PhD programs and post docs, or really even from colleges. Many of the people you are talking about don't even finish high school. It would take at least a decade of concerted effort to improve education in underserved communities to the point where denizens could legitimately be successful in advanced degree programs en masse. Also notice that this announcement did not come on the heels of any such announcement of an investment in education, and that none has been planned. I would be completely behind any effort to fix education here and I agree with you that one is needed, but this policy doesn't address the problem of poor education in underserved communities, it simply creates a new brain drain problem.
Foreign students and better educated domestic students aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, things work better when we have both. Even in the small and non-elite college I went to, there were foreign-born professors. My one math professor came from China and was very willing to run special courses for the senior undergrad math majors. So a foreign student came here for his doctorate, graduated, and went on to educate Americans. Win win.
