Nature of the U.S. Post-Cold-War years: Why international scholars in the United States are reluctant to study in the next five years
The United States has been a top destination for international early career researchers to finish their PhD training over the past five decades. Post-Cold-war USdiplomatic policies have aimed to attract foreign scholars, particularly those in democracies. S.C. Hist. 36, 583–622; 2012). After a steady increase, numbers peaked in 2016, when more than one million students — undergraduate and graduate — were enrolled to study in the United States. The number of international students then began to decline slowly: graduate-student numbers dipped by 1.3%, to 377,943, in 2018, according to the Institute of International Education, a student-exchange non-profit organization based in New York City. The number of graduate students went down by 11.9% during the 2020–21 academic year. That same year, numbers of international scholars in the United States (specifically, postdocs and visiting researchers) plummeted by 31%, from 123,508 to 85,528.
It is not clear whether those numbers will recover, or how long that will take. The Wall Street Journal reported in August that the number of visas for Chinese students who wish to attend US universities have declined in the first half of the next five years. Furthermore, a September 2021 poll for the U.S.–China Perception Monitor found that 62% of Chinese respondents had a view of the United States that was either “very unfavorable” or “unfavorable”.
The number of international students at Canadian and Australia Universities declined in 2020 because of the decline in foreign student tuition fees. Australia’s border closing caused a problem in re-establishing an international student intake. And although the number of study-permit holders in Canada increased to more than 750,000 international students for the 2022–23 academic year, applicants from Africa have complained of excessive visa-application delays. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said last year that more needs to be done to stamp out internal racism against African applicants.
Nature spoke to five researchers who shared their thoughts on why they’ve chosen not to pursue positions in the United States. The reasons ranged from legislative decisions that block a woman’s right to an abortion in many states, the frequency of mass-shooting events (586 so far in 2022), the high cost of insurance-based health care, persistent racism and the rise in hate-crime violence, spurred by COVID-19’s emergence in Asia and divisive culture wars.
The United States has always been off the table for me. The rise of white supremacy, gun violence and the cost of health care are my biggest concerns. I believe that the right of the political spectrum has adopted the stance of COVID-19 being caused by China, giving them the right to punish anyone who is associated with the country. I am worried about how the white supremacists can act with little or no repercussions. Being in one of the right-wing states in the U.S. would not appeal to a person who isn’t white.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03604-9
Immigrants in the U.S.: What are they really telling us about moving to a new country, or how to get a job in Europe?
After graduating from the University of Glasgow, UK, I did my masters degree in microbiology at the University of Chicago before moving to Europe to get my PhD. I’m now in the middle of a two-year postdoctoral contract in the United Kingdom.
As a Malaysian, immigration is also a concern. There is no easy way to become a US resident, as a student or a doctor, even when you win a lottery. If anyone wants to visit the US, they will have to apply for a visa. [Editor’s note: The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program provides up to 50,000 immigrant visas annually.] In most European countries, you apply for residency, then stay on once it’s approved.
There are other aspects of daily life to consider. Right now, I am in a relationship with a British citizen who lives in Ipswich, only a 40-minute train ride away. There are some things that anyone should consider when moving to a new country. In England, for example, I can take public transport or bicycle anywhere I need to go. In many US cities, I would need a car, which adds considerable expense.
I spent a few days at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, during PhD interviews in 2017. Although it looked like a fun and inspiring place, I did experience a sudden, odd, unsafe feeling, especially when students mentioned that it was best not to live too far from campus for safety reasons. The university provided a shuttle bus to take you from student housing to the university, but I preferred to live in a place where you can walk at night without concerns or the expense of a taxi. Students and interns in the United States typically get minimum levels of insurance coverage for health-care costs. In the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, I’ve had to pay only minimal surcharges for any health issue.
In late 2017, there was a period of time when a US Republican party plan to update taxes included a provision to heavily tax graduate-student tuition waivers. Things can change quickly in the US even though a piece of the plan was dropped. I would not go to a country with a rapidly shifting tax environment where I could be impoverished because I was not going to risk it.
Now I’m in Europe doing my PhD in Austria, and I get paid around €30,000 (US$29,800) a year, including five weeks’ paid holiday. I also receive a retirement pension plan, and the health care, which is largely publicly funded, is wonderful. I have not made a single complaint. Now I have a year left, and am looking for postdoctoral positions. I have not even thought about applying for US funding. It is not a great place for people who identify as queer to live in. From the transphobic laws to protests against drag queens to the horrific shooting that left 49 people dead at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, the United States seems to be a place where it’s dangerous to present as anything other than cisgender and straight.
The Animal Behavior Society conference in Costa Rica was very queer friendly, and I went to it in July this year. The organization had planned to have its 2023 meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee. One of the reasons I didn’t attend was because I thought the event would be held in a state that has anti-transgender laws such as banningathletes from competing in women’s sports or denying students the use of the consistent bathroom with their gender identity. I wouldn’t feel good spending money there or walking the streets. The society subsequently rescheduled the 2023 meeting to be held in Portland, Oregon.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03604-9
Postdoctoral Education in the United States: Why I’m Going There? How I’ve Been Trying to Apply to Universities and Research Organizations
I have a preference for Canada because of advice I received from my colleagues. A visa to do a postdoc in the United States is very difficult to get even if you are a PhD student, which is why I am going there. [Editor’s note: International postdocs in the United States typically use the study-based-visitor (J-1) or the specialty-occupation (H-1B) visas.] Even if you get a visa, it can be challenging to renew. And I was told that these US visas can’t easily be used to seek citizenship without a permanent position. In Canada, a visa can count towards permanent residence.
Gun violence seems to have increased in the United States. Black people are targets by police in the United States.
I didn’t apply for positions in the United States as I finished my PhD in Oxford in 2020 because of a number of reasons. For one thing, Europe is geographically closer to Thailand, which makes getting home not as arduous for me as it would have been had I moved across the Atlantic.
I started my job last year. Next year I want to look for tenure-track assistant-professor positions but if I don’t find anything I’ll look for a second postdoc. Earlier this year, after attending the Biophysical Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco, California, I thought about applying to universities in that state because the weather is amazing and it seemed like it could be a good fit. The rent isn’t in line with a Postdoc’s salary. I was not happy with the level of homelessness there. I have also considered applying to laboratories in Ithaca, New York, as well as in Chicago, Illinois, and St Louis, Missouri, large cities with notable gun violence. My family and I agree that safety is the most important factor to consider, given the recent stories of hate crimes against Asians.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03604-9
New Zealand: From New Zealand to the United States: Where are we going? What do we want to see in the next century? How will we learn from the early 20th century?
I think back to the early 20th century when people pursued science with their own money and sometimes out of a love for the subject. I think we’re going back to science being essentially a hobby pursued by people who can afford to do research. But even if you are doing science as a hobby, you don’t want to worry about your health-care or childcare costs. Those things are often subsidized or provided in many European countries.
I contemplated looking for a postdoc outside New Zealand as I was finishing up my PhD at the University of Otago. But, to be honest, I didn’t even consider the United States.
One of the biggest concerns for me, because I have a family to consider, is gun violence. I’m aware that we see only a particular media representation, but every time the United States is in the news, it seems as if it’s because of mass shootings. That is strange coming from New Zealand. We banned semi-automatic weapons and built a programme to buy them back, after a mass shooting in New Zealand. A person with a gun would be a big culture shock, and I have never seen a person with one.
Other political events are also frightening. The June 2022 US Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and a national right to abortion is terrifying to see, as is the rolling back of transgender rights. As someone who leans to the left politically, I find the US leftist parties are still pretty conservative in their social policies compared with New Zealand and the rest of the world — although I was glad to see the administration of President Joe Biden moves towards open-access science and forgiveness of student-loan debt.
Most of New Zealand’s postgraduates who head overseas go to Australia, the United Kingdom and European Union countries. Even though the United States is considered a better place to study than others here, I think others will not buy into the idea of American exceptionalism. I would consider going to a US-based conference, but I haven’t travelled much in recent years owing to the pandemic. I was troubled watching the US pandemic response from the sidelines. There was an inability to follow the science and it was the reason for the lack of measures. We had a group of people in New Zealand that were protesting against vaccine mandates but they were not the majority. The US society’s reaction, “My personal inconvenience is more important than your health,” was horrifying.
The Science Budget of the UK in 2024 – 2027: Under Hunt’s Prescription for Growth and Development during the November 2016 Economic Crisis
Jeremy Hunt, the UK finance minister, reassured researchers that the economic crisis would not affect their plans for research spending.
The UK economy was plunged into turmoil in September when Truss and the then chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a raft of controversial financial policies, which included tax cuts for the country’s highest earners. The scientists were concerned about the rising costs of running their laboratories after seeing the falling value of the pound.
Stephanie Smith, head of policy at the Russell Group, which represents 24 leading UK research universities, tweeted: “Big sigh of relief” at the news the science budget would be protected.
Anne Johnson is president of the Academy of Medical Sciences in London. But she warned that there could still be problems ahead for research. Budgets will continue to be put under pressure by inflation, and we must protect collaborations between UK researchers and partners globally.
The announcement was good in the current circumstances, says Paul Nurse, who runs the Francis Crick Institute in London.
Rishi Sunak, who served as chancellor in Johnson’s government, replaced Truss as prime minister in October. Until today, it was not clear what this change in leadership meant for the future of science spending.
The 2024–25 commitment reaffirmed by Hunt is one milestone in an earlier pledge to spend 2.4% of gross domestic product on research and development by 2027. But, according to the UK Office for National Statistics — a non-ministerial government body — the government has already met this target. This is mainly because of changes in the way that research and development spending is calculated, rather than any cash boost.
The website for the BEIS, the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, lists both of them as ‘Minister of State’, with the second listed as ‘Minister for science and investment security’. A spokesperson for BEIS could not say who has overall responsibility for science, stating that the ministerial portfolios “are not formally confirmed”.
The University-University Union Strikes Back: Pay, Living Costs, Health Benefits, and Pay Scales for PhD Students
Over 48,000 workers at the UC halted research and joined protests calling for better working conditions in what they say is the largest higher education strike in US history.
They seek a higher minimum salary that is adjusted annually on the basis of the cost of living, as well as subsidies for childcare and transport, and greater job security. The union and UC are working to get an agreement on stronger protection against harassment and on health benefits. The university and four bargaining units representing academic workers can’t agree on compensation.
The strike is a necessary course correction for science according to Wankowicz. This movement creates better science by making my scientific research more accessible.
A survey shows that salaries for PhD students in biological sciences do not match the cost of living in the United States. In recent years, this frustration has led to a wave of graduate-student unionizations at various universities, and has driven many researchers to pursue jobs outside academia.
Californian cities with high rents tend to have a wide gap between living costs and salaries. “I’m going to be graduating in my thirties with no savings to begin thinking about having a family,” says Nadia Ayad, a bioengineering graduate student at UC San Francisco who has joined the strikes. For the five years that she’s been studying, Ayad has spent more than half of her salary on rent.
The university has offered a more modest salary bump of less than 10% for the first year and a fixed 3% increase in each subsequent year, not directly tied to cost of living and with no set minimum salary.
Part of the pay discrepancy is that graduate students are classified as part-time workers, meaning they only work 20 hours per week, with the rest of the time devoted to their studies. But for many, this does not reflect reality. She says she did research full time for the past three years, and only had classes for the first two years. Ro Sandoval, a neuroscience graduate student at UC San Diego, says that every single graduate student they know works more than 40 hours per week.
Research Student Strikes: The Need for More Support in the Era of Global Inflation, Labour Shortfalls and Global Politics
Miranda started breeding a cohort of laboratory mice a few weeks before the strikes began. “If the strike goes on for much longer, I will have to not use all those animals I’ve prepared, and that probably sets me back around two months,” he says. People are striking because they feel important, and we have to make adjustments to our timelines.
Cost-of-living crises, labour shortages and the impact of global politics are some of the challenges faced by working scientists.
Students and scientists were calling for action as global inflation rates continued to soar. Two PhD students in the United States took the initiative of creating a database showing that almost no universities in the nation supported graduate students with a living wage. Students across the world — including in the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom — demanded stipend raises. The protests yielded some results: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the country’s largest public research funder, boosted the minimum PhD stipend to £17,668 (US$21,700), a rise of around £2,000, starting on 1 October. PhD students say they need more support.
Science-career paths are clearly taking some noteworthy turns. The study found that over the past two decades the opportunities to become aPI have dwindled, despite the fact that people still want to bePIs. Against that backdrop, a growing number of PhD recipients are forgoing postdoctoral positions, leaving PIs to scramble for postdoc talent.
Science is asking what is the best way to measure researcher performance. Universities and scientific academies signed up to the Agreement on Reforming Researcher Assessment in order to scrap conventional metrics such as impact factors or h-factors in favor of criteria that reward research integrity. In November, there were more than 300 signatures on the document.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) shook up the system with a February announcement that, starting in January 2023, most NIH-funded researchers will be required to eventually make all of their data public. Starting at the same time, the journal Science will allow authors to publish near-final versions of their papers in a repository of their choice without paywalls or fees.
In August, Crossref, a non-profit organization that registers DOIs, or digital object identifiers, for many academic publications worldwide, announced that the reference lists of the more than 60 million articles in its database would be open and freely available to the public, a move hailed by advocates of open access. In that same month, US President Joe Biden made public his commitment to make federal research results available to the public.
Several developments over the year have highlighted shortcomings and challenges in the publishing field. As reported in February, researchers from the global south have been significantly under-represented in open-access journals, largely because of publication fees. One in four Australian researchers who receive financial support from pharmaceutical companies failed to note the connection when submitting manuscripts, according to a March study. And questions about image integrity swirled around Nobel laureate and geneticist Gregg Semenza at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, leading to 17 corrections, retractions or editorial notes of concern.
The database was created to protect researchers from fake journal sites.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04451-4
Research funding for low- and middle-income countries continues to be bullied in science, with consequences for Australian scientists and the Australian government in the wake of Brexit
Efforts were made to improve diversity and inclusion in science, as well as reminders that work still has to be done. Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, one of the country’s leading research funding organizations, announced that, starting in 2023, it will award half of its grants for mid-career and senior researchers — fixed at Aus$400,000 (US$252,000) each year for five years — to women or non-binary applicants. The Snow Medical Research Foundation ruled to exclude researchers from the University of Melbourne from consideration for a prestigious fellowship because of a photograph of white men receiving their degrees. And, Wellcome, a UK biomedical funding charity, acknowledged in a report that some of its own actions and funding decisions over the years have perpetuated systemic racism in science.
It has been found that men and women are less likely to be listed as authors on papers or inventors on patents.
The number of researchers with both Chinese and US affiliations is on the decline, a consequence of ongoing economic tensions between the two science superpowers. At a conference in South Africa, African researchers called for more inclusion of researchers from low- and middle-income countries in global collaborations.
As a consequence of Brexit, which took effect in 2021, many researchers in the United Kingdom lost access to grants from Horizon Europe, the European Union’s main research funding programme. Some researchers had to leave the country to hold on to their hard-won funding, despite the UKRI stepping in to replace lost grants. The United Kingdom’s departure from the EU left researchers feeling sad and short of patience.
President Biden attempted to support science through ambitious budget plans and the formation of a federal body in the United States to protect scientists from political interference. In another move to prevent political meddling, researchers in Australia took steps to bar the prime minister from vetoing any grants that have been approved by scientific committees.
A decision by the US Supreme Court in July to remove the constitutional right to abortion roiled scientists in the country, and left them wondering about the implications for public health. And some made calls to boycott conferences held in states with laws against pregnancy terminations.
Despite efforts over the years to address bullying in science, the problem remains. A nationwide survey of Swedish scientists found alarmingly high levels of bullyy. Eighteen per cent of respondents to Nature’s 2022 survey of graduate students reported experiences of bullying. 26% said they felt free to speak about their experience without fear of repercussions.
Worldwide, much of the abuse targeted at scientists happens online, but social-media platforms aren’t doing much to shield researchers from attack. At a time of COVID-19 denial, high-profile scientists working on the virus and pandemic are especially prone to online attacks.