Trump's Dumbing Down of America
Our looming brain drain crisis
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.... We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.” — A Nation At Risk, 1983
The crisis that “A Nation at Risk” addressed in the early 1980s was real enough; but it will be trivial in comparison to the unilateral education disarmament that is underway now:
Restrictions — and a climate of fear — aimed at international students in American higher education.
Sharp cutbacks in immigration and refugee programs.
A war on American science, “pulling grants, revoking researcher visas, and planning enormous cuts to the country’s biggest funders of research.”
An American educational system that will be unable to fill the gaps.
Scientists who are crucial for American competitiveness and security are already eyeing the exits; the hostility to international students could dry up a critical pipeline for a generation; and the balance of intellectual power could shift as other countries rush to fill the vacuum created by Trump’s nihilistic nativism.
And all of this could happen very quickly — with consequences that will reverberate for decades. As I mentioned in our Sunday podcast with Julia Zelizer, we should remember that it took only a few years in the 1930s to drive out a generation of Europe’s Jewish scientific elite.
Happy Monday.1
America’s Coming Brain Drain Crisis
The warning lights are flashing red all around us.
Foreign universities hope to lure scientists from the US after Trump research cuts | AP News
The World Is Wooing U.S. Researchers Shunned by Trump - The New York Times
International students see fewer pathways to US careers under Trump
“America’s Coming Brain Drain: Trump’s War on Universities Could Kill U.S. Innovation” — Foreign Affairs
'Major brain drain': Researchers eye exit from Trump's America; “In the halls of US universities and research labs, one question has become increasingly common as President Donald Trump tightens his grip on the field: whether to move abroad.” — AFP
“US brain drain: the scientists seeking jobs abroad amid Trump’s assault on research: Five US-based researchers tell Nature why they are exploring career opportunities overseas.” — Nature
The Economist warns: “America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain”.
Academics talk of a “war on science”…. Plenty of data suggest [that an] exodus from the world’s scientific superpower beckons.
The Economist reports:
Springer Nature publishes Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. It also runs a much-used jobs board for academics. In the first three months of the year applications by researchers based in America for jobs in other countries were up by 32% compared with the same period in 2024.
In March Nature itself conducted a poll of more than 1,200 researchers at American institutions, of whom 75% said they were thinking of leaving (though disgruntled academics were probably more likely to respond to the poll than satisfied ones).
And just as American researchers eye the exit, foreigners are becoming more reluctant to move in. Springer Nature’s data suggests applications by non-American candidates for American research jobs have fallen by around 25% compared with the same period last year.
Attitudes are souring at the bottom of the academic totem pole as well. Searches for American PhDs on FindAPhD, a website that does exactly what its name suggests, were down by 40% year on year in April. Interest from students in Europe has fallen by half.
China is eagerly stepping into the breach.
China is likely to be another beneficiary. According to the South China Morning Post, the country is redoubling its efforts to lure Chinese-born scientists from America by offering big salaries. Between 2019 and 2022 the share of non-native artificial-intelligence (AI) researchers who left America for China after their PhD doubled, from 4% to 8%. Springer Nature’s data suggest that in the first quarter of this year applications for jobs in China from scientists based in America were up by 20% compared with the same period last year.
The Ignorance. It Burns.
JD Vance sought to brush off concerns about a brain drain, and found himself floundering in the shallows of his historical ignorance.
If you go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s, the American space program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens — some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who had built an incredible space program with American talent. This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants and professors to do these things, I just reject it.
As James Surowiecki noted, NASA was an odd choice for Vance because: “The most important rocket scientist in the Apollo program [Wernher von Braun], the head of NASA's Launch Operations Center, and the guy who invented the moon rover were all immigrants.”
Vance was not only ignoring the critical contributions of foreign scientists like Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, James Franck, and Niels Bohr in developing the atomic bomb — but the hundreds of German scientists who pioneered American rocketry after WWII.
But this only begins to hint at the impact of foreign scientists, researchers, and entrepreneurs in building up actual American Greatness (as opposed to the masturbatory MAGA version).
Consider these data points:
“Since 1901, researchers based in America have won 55% of academic Nobel prizes, and more than a third of these scientists were foreign-born.
“The Paulson Institute, a think-tank, reckons that in 2022 almost two-thirds of top-tier AI researchers working in America hailed from overseas. Losing even some of those would be a blow to American innovation.
In 2019, temporary visa holders earned 62% of doctorates in economics. They also earned more than half of doctorates in computer sciences (59%), engineering (58%), and mathematics and statistics (51%).
A 2024 study found that nearly half — 230 — of Fortune 500 companies were either founded by immigrants or their children.
Vance would have us believe that Americans can step into the breach. But this is unlikely for a simple but grim reason: Our educational system simply does not produce enough young scientists and mathematicians to fill the slots.
In 2022, the National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering report …showed that the United States is falling behind in science, technology, engineering and math, the STEM fields. According to the foundation, America no longer produces the most science and engineering research publications — that’s China. We no longer produce the most patents — that’s China. Now that we no longer graduate the most natural-science Ph.D.s — that’s also China — these trends are unlikely to change anytime soon.
**
As many of you know, I’ve been railing about this for…. decades. From 1994:
And I’m still at it. Last year, I wrote this in The Atlantic:
America is again facing an educational crisis. Last week, The New York Times reported that American students “turned in grim results on the latest international test of math skills.” That test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), found that fourth graders have dropped 18 points in math since 2019, while eighth graders have dropped 27 points. The math scores of both high-performing and low-performing eighth graders fell. …
In math, Americans now lag behind their counterparts in places such as Singapore, South Korea, Britain, and Poland. Only 7 percent of American students scored at the highest levels in math—far behind the 23 percent in South Korea and Japan, and 41 percent in Singapore, who scored at that level. The decline in math scores is part of a much larger decline in educational performance overall—and an exacerbation of the achievement gap between rich and poor students. But despite the appalling numbers, the educational crisis was barely mentioned during the presidential debates, and there is scant evidence of the political will necessary to address it….
For decades, the consequences of underperformance have also been masked by the influx of international students into American higher education. A 2022 study found that foreign students made up a majority—sometimes as much as 80 percent—of students in U.S. graduate programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Meanwhile, immigrants make up about a quarter of all workers in STEM fields. It’s not yet clear how Trump’s massive crackdown on immigrants could affect opportunities for foreign students, or their willingness to come to the United States.
Needless to say, there is scant prospect that Trump or his MAGA allies will lead a revival of American education.
Exit take: If an unfriendly foreign power was attempting to dismantle American science — and put a generational brain drain on fast-forward —we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, our government is doing this to us.... We are, in effect, committing an act of unilateral intellectual and scientific disarmament.2
Monday dogs
Weekend at the lake for the boys.
Three stories you really need to keep on eye on this morning:
(1) We have seen the future of war. And it looks like a Ukrainian drone. This story dos not overstate the magnitude of Ukraine’s massive success this weekend: “Ukraine just rewrote the rules of war” — Wapo
The Russian high command must have been as shocked as the Americans were in 1941 when the Ukrainians carried out a surprise attack against five Russian air bases located far from the front — two of them thousands of miles away in the Russian Far North and Siberia. The Ukrainian intelligence service, known as the SBU, managed to sneak large numbers of drones deep inside Russia in wooden cabins transported by truck, then launch them by remote control.
(2) “George Stephanopoulos, Unfazed by $16 Million ABC Settlement, Accuses Trump of Corruption”
Stephanopoulos cracked the seal on “This Week” connecting the dots between Trump’s pardons and presidential fundraisers, suggesting Trump and his family were making millions through various pay-to-play schemes.
“The scale is staggering,” Stephanopoulos said. “Donald Trump and his family are making hundreds of millions, potentially billions of dollars, as Trump and his administration are taking official actions that benefit contributors and investors. Just this week, we learned of pardons to tax cheats, including a man whose mother was pardoned just weeks after she attended a million-dollar-a-head fundraiser for the president, the Trump media and technology group, raising $2.5 billion dollars from 50 institutional investors whose identities have not been disclosed.”
(3) “A Man Attacked a March for Israeli Hostages in Colorado. Here’s What to Know”. - The New York Times
The authorities said they were investigating an attack in Boulder, Colo., on Sunday as an act of terrorism, after a man used a “makeshift flamethrower” to attack demonstrators marching peacefully in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Eight people were hospitalized with burns and other injuries, and two of them were in serious condition, officials said. The suspect was arrested.
The attack may intensify deep unease in the Jewish community in the United States. In recent months, two Israeli embassy aides were murdered in Washington, and a man set fire to the residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who is Jewish.
With apologies to the Cassandras of 1983, whose warning was also ignored.
Trump has found a great way to stop immigration: Make America a lousy place to live.
I reject the idea that JD Vance knows anything other than his unquenched thirst for power. He will do or say anything to become Trump’s heir. If he doesn’t get there, he probably prefers blowing up the country.