America's academic brain drain has begun

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‘Once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity’

The United States hosts many of the best educational and academic institutions on Earth, and this has been instrumental in securing the country’s status as a 21st century global superpower. These schools draw students, teachers and researchers from around the world to help perpetuate the very academic superiority that appealed to them in the first place.

Now, as the White House places various universities and research institutions in its ideological crosshairs, the nation’s reputation for academic excellence is in jeopardy. Prospective students and job-seekers must contend with limited funds, the risk of deportation or worse. Suddenly, the United States’ global educational appeal seems conspicuously less appealing. Meanwhile, other nations are noting the change, with some making plans to capitalize on America’s waning collegiate pull.

‘Fire sale on American academics’

“We are witnessing a new brain drain,” said Aix Marseille University President Eric Berton in early March, after announcing a new “safe space for science” initiative to help American researchers continue their work at his school in France. So far the project has attracted more than 50 American researchers who have applied to bring their expertise overseas, a university spokesperson said. Universities worldwide have “reported seeing an uptick in applications from U.S.-based researchers” wary of the “increasingly uncertain climate” of the Trump administration, Science.org said. Many institutions see an opportunity to “attract new talent and reverse the steady migration of scientists to the U.S. in recent decades.”

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“There’s a fire sale on American academics right now,” University of Washington biology professor Carl Bergstrom said at health and biomedical focused publication STAT. Anxiety over the Trump administration’s moves is “so deep” that it could ultimately “undermine the country’s enduring position as the world leader in biomedicine,” said STAT. The legally dubious detention of lawful U.S. resident students like Columbia University PhD candidate Mahmoud Khalil is “sure to have a chilling effect” not only on foreign-born academics already studying at American institutions but “on the desire of others to go there in the future,” The Guardian said.

Concern from members of the academic community is not limited to individual domestic employment prospects but includes the “long-term viability of their research” itself, The New York Times said. The prospect of losing a “generation” of both science and scientists is “something that we cannot recover from,” said Pasteur Institute president Yasmine Belkaid, a recently relocated former NIH official, to the Times. The Trump administration’s moves “call into question whole swaths of research” — not simply in America, but globally, thanks to international partnerships, French Education minister Philippe Baptiste said in the same article.

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‘Once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity’

A number of countries are considering the situation in the United States an opportunity for their own academic and research institutions. Canadian universities can be an “entry way for a flood of talent” fleeing American academia, The Hill Times said. China too has begun welcoming “Ph.D. refugees from the U.S.” by offering “new academic pathways,” Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post said. And America’s academic upheaval is a “once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity” for Australia as well, said Danielle Cave, senior analyst for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“Historically” brain drain migration has benefitted the U.S., said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, to the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. There is now a “real danger” that, as a result of the Trump administration’s policies, the “drain is going to start going in the opposite direction.”

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