US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2501

On July 15 2020 10:10 Wombat_NI wrote:

How often does that happen? I would have thought international students would want to stick around.

Our international students pay like 3-4x our tuition fees so they’re rather useful to academic institutions over here. Not sure how that works in the States though

On July 15 2020 09:53 JimmiC wrote:

What is the problem with the international students? I learned a lot from the ones I went with and im sure the government is not footing the bill. It really seems like a win for the institutions, other students and communities.

On July 15 2020 10:49 JimmiC wrote:
@serm and @nevuk

I thought that it was cost that was keeping US students out of college not competion. So I was thinking if they paid more it would help keep costs down since they pay more.

Or is it more the symbolism of them "taking a spot" then that being the case?

I would think public universities or government loans would help us students more then stopping the international students.

On July 11 2020 10:52 JimmiC wrote:

I was thinking that sounds like the crime itself is what Poison'd the tree, quite strange.


I think this was a political move to try to get his base (and opponents) excited about something else. He is losing people willing, even in republican strongholds to argue his positions on Covid. This they can argue and distract with. While I disagree with it on many levels, this seems like a "good" move politically for him.

On July 15 2020 13:14 KlaCkoN wrote:
I think there are 2 things at play regarding international students in the US:
1) They definitely do compete with Americans for jobs. Like I personally know unemployed Americans with phds whom would have been qualified for the job I have, or the jobs friends of mine have. So if you personally lost out on a job because they hired a non-citizen I think it's perfectly reasonable to be peeved.
2) They definitely do make America as a whole richer and better off. International students are people who literally pay (with resources taken from abroad) to use their intellect in the service of the US economy. Their entire education up until they came to America was paid for by foreign tax dollars. Their health care up until that point was paid for by foreign tax dollars etc etc.
International students are intellectual resources America gets for free. At the top end you have the founders of big companies like Tesla and Intel, but you also have countless scientists, engineers, and programmers that increase both the quantity and quality of smart people working in the American economy thus increasing the average wealth of the country. Both by adding sheer numbers and by out-competing less driven, less smart Americans.
So in that sense, I think if you are an American who wants America to be rich, you most definitely want international students.

I'm guessing what happened with the ICE order is that someone told Trump that foreign students at American universities is 45 billion dollars of American exports, where he gets to legally keep both the money and the product and that places like Canada, the UK, and Germany would salivate at the thought of taking that away from him.

On July 15 2020 18:42 svl3 wrote:

...
In some categories, I even wonder about them making America substantially richer in the short term. Graduate students get tuition waivers and are paid by stipends that come from the federal government and local grants, rather than an input of foreign funds.

In addition, not all of them stay in America (in my field, Bio, there are many PhD students from China and the vast majority go back). There are a lot of examples of very successful people who stayed, but I do not necessarily think it proves it offers America an advantage in the long term. I loosely feel foreign graduate students help support a very flawed and rotten graduate student system, so only if this system benefits the US more than a possible reform would would I agree it is a benefit.

In my field, there are a lot of grants paying for foreign students and collaboration with foreign research initiatives. It seems almost never to occur that other countries money comes into our programs. I work with a lot from China and India and people often ask them if they can apply for funding that can cover some of their research in the US and all responses I've seen are scoffs or laughs. In the 10 years I've been in this I've never seen any colleague have foreign funding benefits.

For grad students that stay in my field, most try to get a job as a Uni Professor. Ironically, foreigners actually have an advantage in hiring due to recent diversity initiatives. These aim at increasing minorities in STEM, even though foreign minority groups are over-represented relative to their population level. In addition, going back to graduate students, the stipend provided is not financially rewarding. You're more likely to find foreigners willing to put up with it than locals, particularly from a poorer economic background. This raises the question over whether these policies decrease STEM diversity (at least in biology) and whether they disincentivize most of the native population from wanting to pursue higher degrees.

Let's be honest here too. Whenever you see a foreign professor hired it's common to see he recruits a lot of people from his own region at almost every opportunity. If he's from Albania, he happens to find Albanians are the best candidates. I've heard a Prof. from a hiring committee say loudly he will pick the Indian candidate before going to the the meeting meant to introduce the candidates for the first time (and this was before we started having Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committees getting involved); the same guy would also try to fight to the end to make sure student awards went to the same group, every time. I'm not really saying this as a nativist or anything, this is what foreign Professors themselves say (or accuse other foreign nationalities of doing).

On July 15 2020 20:03 EnDeR_ wrote:

As the poster above mentioned, the 'input' from foreign funds is the education and healthcare they received until they got to this point, which is actually a non-trivial investment. PhD students generate knowledge and value for the University that hosts them, so it sounds only fair to me that the University actually pays for their work. The American tax payer also benefits from this generated knowledge in the form of IP, knowhow, and sometimes new startup companies are formed as a result of this which go on to employ people other than the foreign student.


Saying that America does not benefit from the knowledge generated by foreign PhD students if they return to their home countries after finishing their PhDs makes me think that you don't actually understand how a research lab works. It comes back to the same point, the new protocols they establish or whatever other outputs these foreign students generated, directly benefit their colleagues and enable new science and new projects at the American institution.



My experience has been markedly different. I work with colleagues from UESTC in Chengdu, China, and they covered research and travel expenses for my postdoctoral researchers. It is certainly competitive but no more competitive than acquiring travel/research money within America.



Do you genuinely believe that minorities have an advantage in getting jobs? I mean, seriously? Have you not seen the widespread protests not only in the US but worldwide? Perhaps the laws there are different, but here, it is unlawful to hire someone because of their race, gender, age, etc. characteristics. What is lawful is to encourage applications from underrepresented groups and other initiatives one can do increase representation at the application stage. To reiterate, it is unlawful to offer a job to someone citing their race, gender, etc. as the reason; people are hired based on if they are the best fit for the job criteria. In practice, there are some biases, but these tend to go against under-represented groups, rather than the other way around.



In that specific Albanian example, it is likely that that professor has a research network in Albania and therefore receives high-quality Albanian applications. Same with your Indian example. The composition of your research group also discourages certain applications; for instance, research groups that have no women, attract fewer female applicants than more diverse research groups.

On the whole, there are serious flaws in how science is conducted at higher education institutions, but foreign students and minorities are not the problem even in the slightest.

On July 15 2020 21:59 svl3 wrote:

And yes it is FAR easier to get a job if you're a non-white male in this job (but that was not my main point). Frankly, if you are a straight white male, you have to be a good deal more qualified and may want to consider saying you are Trans or a persecuted gay man when you write the "diversity" statement on your application. If black, I'd estimate you can be 5x less qualified in publications, or worse. Hiring committees would salivate over the chance to get a black Professor in Biology, it provides a lot of financial incentives related to funding. This is simply a fact and it has grown substantially in recent years. Your point about protests seems to be a non-sequitur. If you're alleging there is systemic racism in STEM fields, that's a huge joke IMO. We preferentially hire minorities, even foreigners. There are few black people because few actually go into graduate programs in this field, it has nothing to do with racism at the level of hiring committees. The reality is there are not enough black people that appear to want to go through the requisite training for the committees to choose even with massive favoritism. As a result - which was my earlier point - the diversity initiative ends up going towards people who do not need this benefit. Perhaps you might argue systemic disadvantages in earlier education and things leading to that point, but that's a separate topic. For this one, I said that the way foreign students provide cheap labor that lowers the market value of PhD students and that actually probably dissuades black people and anyone of lower financial background from taking it on... I believe changing this system would help local US minorities the most.

Anyways, PLEASE give evidence that there is systemic racism in hiring related to STEM professorships. Like, how about some data if you're going to claim it so hard? Like, the highest salary for any field in the US by race, IIRC, is Indian, followed by East-Asian, followed by White. Salaries are roughly the same depending on the Uni for Professors and I've never heard of a racial difference. With hiring of them, I'll eat my shoe if you can show evidence of a disproportionate selection of whites.
There was even a resignation in Princeton a year or so ago because he was told directly he was not allowed to choose a white male candidate if he was the most qualified. This is really going off topic, but this seems to be true in other sectors too. For government contracting in several states, a white male can only get a contract if it can't be filled for a long time or has been rejected by 3+ minority/female contract groups. I don't see any evidence for systemic racism in general hiring, quite the opposite. However, I brought it up in this topic because the diversity initiative appears to be misused with STEM professorships. There are tons of foreign candidates of other races that will benefit from the policy even though they are already over-represented and the actual intended target was probably supposed to be the underrepresented locals from black, hispanic, and native american communities.

among full-time professors, 54 percent were White males, 27 percent were White females, 8 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males, and 3 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females. Black males, Black females, and Hispanic males each accounted for 2 percent of full-time professors.

Abstract

We use data from 2015–2016 to document faculty representation and wage gaps by race-ethnicity and gender in six fields at selective public universities. Consistent with widely available information, Black, Hispanic, and female professors are underrepresented and White and Asian professors are overrepresented in our data. Disadvantaged minority and female underrepresentation is driven predominantly by underrepresentation in science and math intensive fields. A comparison of senior and junior faculty suggests a trend toward greater diversity, especially in science and math intensive fields, because younger faculty are more diverse. However, Black faculty are an exception. We decompose racial-ethnic and gender wage gaps and show that academic field, experience, and research productivity account for most or all of the gaps. We find no evidence of wage premiums for individuals who improve diversity, although for Black faculty we cannot rule out a modest premium.

Column (1) of Table 5 shows that unconditional wage gaps
favor White faculty and men, who are the omitted groups. In the
racial-ethnic comparisons, Black and Hispanic faculty have significantly lower wages than White faculty, on the order of
roughly $10,000 to $15,000 annually, or 8% to 12% of the
average wage ($120,195; see Table 1).

On the one hand, this result is consistent with a lack of systematic bias toward specific racial-ethnic groups in hiring and wage negotiations. On the other, it is also consistent with universities placing little value on the diversity contributions of faculty per se, at least as measured by wages, although a caveat to this interpretation is that universities may be limited in how much wage flexibility they have.

We conclude by briefly addressing the policy implication of our finding that diversity is particularly lacking in STEM fields.

On July 15 2020 20:47 Broetchenholer wrote:
I don't really understand your stance on abolishing the police GH. Other countries have crime as well, have no history of slavery and still see it necessary to police crime. The American definition of crime is mostly the same as the French or German, still their police force is not strangling minorities to death to the American extent. If the social contract is broken, you need someone to solve that. The question is how to approach the crime/criminal, not whether the crime was historically enforced more on minorities.

The German police caused a shitstorm yesterday, because they approached a person known to love guns without confrontation, so that guy suddenly pulled a gun on them. They disarmed themselves afterwards and let him escape. It's still the cops showing up with guns in Germany, they just don't shoot you. That's your goal in the states, not abolishing the whole force because 200 years ago they were catching slaves.

On July 16 2020 00:07 EnDeR_ wrote:


I feel like I'm being trolled, but anyway, 30s of Google came up with this:

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61




So 81% of full-time professors are white. I'm sure you can find the breakdown by discipline if you look.

Edit: So I had a bit more time and found some actual data on wages for STEM professors, since that's something you asked for:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X17726535



I bolded the key sentence.

If you actually read the article, it shows that in your field of Biology, only 0.7% of faculty are black, which is kind of crazy. It also shows that 83.3% of professors are white, in line with the overall racial distribution of faculty.

In terms of wages:


Another relevant point that is relevant to the points you raised:



Overall, I was actually quite surprised that the gap isn't worse, but there is still a significant gap between the diversity of the student body and the diversity of faculty .

Second edit: I just realised that you will not be able to access the article as it is not Open Access, so here's a link to the pdf.

Edit three: I'll leave here one of the key conclusions from the study:

On July 16 2020 01:53 maybenexttime wrote:
@EnDeR_

That's evidence of disparity. Where's the evidence of discrimination, though?

On July 16 2020 01:37 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Well also, modern police was invented in a context that had nothing to do whatsoever with racism or slavery; namely in London between the second half of the XVIIIth century and the beginning of the XIXth. Its institutional ancestors trace back to medieval Germany.

A police force goes hand to hand with the rule of law and the modern state. The modern state is meant to have the monopoly of violence and the means to make sure the law is applied. If the law is to prevent robberies, the police does it, if it is to catch slaves, it does it too. The problem in that case is the law, not the police.

I also have very good experiences of the police in Scandinavia where I live, although they are systemic problem of violence and racism in the french police that are reminiscent of some of the issue with american forces (minus the killing people for no reason part), which is unsurprising considering France has a very serious problem with racism in general. Imo police reflect society. The reason american police is so violent and often so racist is that america has a totally eff-ed up relationship to violence and endemic racism in segment of its population.

On July 15 2020 20:47 Broetchenholer wrote:
I don't really understand your stance on abolishing the police GH. Other countries have crime as well, have no history of slavery and still see it necessary to police crime. The American definition of crime is mostly the same as the French or German, still their police force is not strangling minorities to death to the American extent. If the social contract is broken, you need someone to solve that. The question is how to approach the crime/criminal, not whether the crime was historically enforced more on minorities.

The German police caused a shitstorm yesterday, because they approached a person known to love guns without confrontation, so that guy suddenly pulled a gun on them. They disarmed themselves afterwards and let him escape. It's still the cops showing up with guns in Germany, they just don't shoot you. That's your goal in the states, not abolishing the whole force because 200 years ago they were catching slaves.