As a US citizen with a PhD, I didn't experience any clear discrimination in favor of foreign students during grad school.

I think the main reason so few US citizens get PhDs is because PhD "student" (they're actually workers) positions pay so poorly. Make PhD student positions have non-poverty wages and you'll see a lot more interest from US citizens.

On the flip side, I think foreign students experienced a lot of abusive conditions that I could more easily say no to because I didn't have a visa that required me to work at the university. I've seen some of that first hand. I don't mean to imply that there would be no cost to me saying no, just that I wouldn't have to leave the country if I said no.

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gs17 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've seen clear discrimination in favor of foreign students, but it was specifically because of those abusive conditions. I know of professors who exclusively tried to recruit specific foreign nationalities (their own, typically) because they could get away with treating them worse than American students. I wouldn't have been able to get into those labs, but I also wouldn't want to.

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stainablesteel 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

im referring to the admissions process, and this discrimination has been present for decades

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bdamm 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are you thinking of affirmative action?

Affirmative action is by design discriminatory, but not against nationality. It's discriminatory based on race and sex. So I think your grudge is not striking the right target. And in any case, affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President. Not because he did anything, but because SCOTUS declared that his election was evidence that affirmative action was no longer required and thus ruled against it in new cases.

	▲	like_any_other 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President. It was so wound down that 6 years after Obama left office, whites were 0.54x under-represented in the Ivy League, despite having SAT scores close to the groups that were ~5x over-represented: https://archive.org/details/ivy_league/ An expected outcome of still having explicit affirmative action hiring/admission criteria in 2025: https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-disc...

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handle584 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Any source? In my field US Citizens and permanent residents are actually preferred for at least two reasons, first they are eligible for graduate grants like NSF so they are not using department's money; second upon graduation they are eligible for more jobs because places like national labs do not hire foreigners.

	▲	throwaway0123_5 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree with the general sentiment of this comment, but national labs do hire foreigners/non-citizens, albeit possibly not from all countries with eligibility for all roles.

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btrettel 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think I experienced discrimination during admissions either. Off the top of my head, I don't know any US citizens who told me that they wanted to go to grad school but were unable to be admitted to a school.

	▲	mikeyouse 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, it's just nativist nonsense from completely the uninformed.

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anigbrowl 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Stop vagueposting and make a proper argument. This isn't X where you get paid for posting bait.