Gun violence, the high cost of living and health care, abortion bans and racial tensions raise concerns for scientists who choose to further their careers abroad.
For the past five decades, the United States has been a top destination for international early-career researchers to do their training in a PhD or postdoctoral post. Since the 1960s, post-cold-war US diplomatic policies have aimed to attract foreign scholars, especially those in then-budding democracies (M. O’Mara Soc. Sci. Hist. 36, 583–615; 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. During the 2020–21 academic year, the first of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number sank by 12.1%, to 329,272 graduate students. 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.
To continue reading, please click here.
This article was written by Virginia Gewin for Nature.
