re: #153 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

The counter-argument is that these students were taking places away from deserving, hard-working Americans.

Well yes, that’s what a xenophobe would say.

But that is not how graduate studies work.

Graduate students are low-paid trainees, who exchange their work (teaching assistant, research assistant, or admin assistant) for being trained in their specialty.

A graduate program has a budget but it doesn’t really cost more to teach a grad class of 8 students compared to 7 students. So admission limits are really down to how the university wants to charge for graduate tuition. For many programs in technical fields, a student working for her department will often get that tuition covered by their department.

The big question is always the quality of the student. Many people get B.S./B.A. degrees - it’s not that difficult today, other than cost - but not everyone is interested in doing what it takes to get a Doctorate (or whatever the final degree is in the profession.)

Back (long ago) in my senior year of college I was pretty burnt out (double major plus a minor, no breaks over 45 months straight), but still applied to a couple of grad schools and was accepted, with the usual assistance offers. I decided instead to go to work for money, a decision I still wonder about to this day. How different would my life had been if I did go to UCSB or Rochester, instead of going to work for the military-industrial complex?

So, there are likely many promising future scholars who, because they are no longer welcome in this country courtesy of Trumpian policies, who either will not go forward in their field, or just go elsewhere.

The long term impact details of that is unknown, but I don’t see how it can be anything but negative for the US.