The Center for Security and Emerging Technology) (CSET) is one of the best policy research organizations that we track and analyze. They pursue bleeding edge subject matter, always take a fresh angle, and deliver really legible, actionable insights. The CSET Policy Brief from July of 2021 AI Accidents: An Emerging Threat influenced our thinking on the future governance and potential regulation of the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence. And their two-part AI and the Future of Disinformation Campaigns in December of last year contributed to our research and analysis of dis- misinformation, information disorder, and what we characterize as a crucial strategic need for National Cognitive Infrastructure Protection.
Amidst this coverage of exponential technologies and cognitive infrastructure, it is easy to take a purely technology-based perspective and neglect the human factor and the role of trained talent and future innovators in building the technology and platforms to solve the most pressing problems and address these ongoing threats. The human factor is also a national security issue, as access to and the training of a future generation of STEM talent is a centerpiece of our analysis of the Russian and Chinese use of human targeting to achieve security advantage in key emerging technologies by 2030 and Taiwan’s Five-year Quantum Computing and Talent Initiative.
A recent CSET Issue Brief reminds us of the national security issues surrounding the creation of innovative courses of study and the retention of STEM talent in the domestic U.S.:
“One of the United States’ greatest advantages in attracting STEM talent is the strength of its higher education system. U.S. universities remain a top destination for students around the world, particularly at the graduate level. International students accounted for more than 40 percent of the roughly 500,000 doctoral degrees awarded by U.S. universities between 2000 and 2019. Those who stay in the country after receiving their degrees strengthen the domestic STEM workforce and make valuable contributions to the economy and society.” (1)
The CSET analysis takes a very quant-based approach to create a snapshot of the international Ph.D. graduate students trained in the U.S. – and the retention rate of those obtaining permanent residency or becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. For years, the conventional wisdom has been that:
A) Domestic U.S. universities are training a disproportionate amount of international Ph.D. graduate students (relative to the amount of Americans receiving advanced degrees in foreign countries; and
B) The U.S. is impacting its strategic opportunity for advantage by training advanced STEM talent and then sending them back to their home countries (where they contribute to the innovation economy at home, at the expense of innovation in the U.S.).
The results of the CSET analysis are compelling and contradict the notion that the U.S. created our own ‘brain drain factory’ at the Ph.D. Graduate-level at U.S. universities. Quite the contrary.
The Dataset: National Science Foundations’s (NSF) Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR)
What also sets this CSET Issue Brief apart is that the “analysis relies on data from the National Science Foundations’s (NSF) Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR), a biennial panel survey that collects information on the demographics and employment trends of PhD graduates from U.S. universities. The survey includes Ph.D. graduates who hold a research doctorate in a science, engineering, or health-related field. [CSET researchers used] data from the 2017 survey, which was administered to a sample of 124,580 Ph.D. graduates who earned their degrees prior to July 1, 2015.
An interesting wrinkle surrounding this dataset is that the NSF warns researchers about the “validity” of the 2019 data, “due to higher rates of nonresponse among Ph.D. graduates who lived outside the United States.* Specifically, the NSF recommends that researchers exercise caution when conducting any small domain analysis and estimation as the potential nonresponse bias may be non-ignorable at small domain levels such as country of origin.” In other words, this bias would prevent us from obtaining reliable estimates on the stay rates of students from individual countries, such as China and India.” Why Chinese and Indian students were less responsive in 2019 is unclear. Also, the “[CSET hopes] to reexamine stay-rate trends with greater certainty using the forthcoming 2021 SDR.”
The Long-Term Stay Rates of International STEM Ph.D. Graduates
Following are the findings of the CSET Issue Brief:
Source: 2017 NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients
Long-term stay rates are high. As of February 2017, roughly 77 percent of the more than 178,000 international STEM PhD graduates from U.S. universities between 2000 and 2015 were still living in the country.
Stay rates remain high even among older graduates. Since 2000, at least 65 percent of every year’s graduating class has stayed in the United States, and since 2004, no graduating class has had a stay rate below 73 percent.
Source: 2017 NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients
Stay rates are similar across STEM fields. Though stay rates for different fields vary across individual years, no one STEM discipline has consistently higher or lower stay rates than the others.
Chinese and Indian nationals account for nearly half of all international STEM Ph.D. graduates in the United States, and most stay long after graduation. In February 2017, approximately 90 percent of Chinese nationals and 87 percent of Indian nationals who completed STEM Ph.D. programs in the United States between 2000 and 2015 were still living in the country, compared to 66 percent of graduates from other countries. Due to country caps on green cards, Indian graduates have more difficulty obtaining permanent residency than other international students.
International STEM Ph.D. graduates follow a similar path through the U.S. immigration system. The plurality of graduates who completed their degrees between 2004 and 2011 had obtained permanent residency by February 2017, and among those who graduated before 2004, nearly half had become naturalized U.S. citizens.
What Next?
How can your organization:
- Contribute to the training and retention of international Ph.D. graduate students?
- Take a local and homegrown approach to STEM talent development, with outreach and professional development opportunities at local universities -which are available to international students matriculating in your area but, as important, strengthen the training and retention of U.S. students in STEM at the university level?
- Address STEM education at the K-12 level – increased the % of U.S. students pursuing STEM disciplines at the university level?
