The US is destroying it's own advantage. For decades the US was pulling the best and brightest from all over the world into its Universities and companies. Why would anybody think stopping that would lead to a 'Golden Age'.
Seems like an arrogant American take. The United States primary and secondary schools are middling at best, and that has been showing through to its universities. Foreigners were already choosing Chinese universities. It's not like the recent administration could just "keep pulling", what do they have to appeal with? Obviously shutting off the flow of any and all talent is stupid, but it's a little arrogant to pretend it was not already diverting to better systems.
Most schools are middling - but the US was willing to give generous scholarships and post-graduation grants to smart immigrants to build it here. There was a long entrenched culture that in the US you could turn your intelligence into positive change and get rich doing it.
We've been slipping into rent seeking at least since the eighties though - so the share that actual researchers get has been shrinking while the culture has become much more hostile to immigration. It is a situation built on momentum though - so while the tools supporting it have been torn down we still do have a lot of people who moved here with the hope of leveraging it.
> There was a long entrenched culture that in the US you could turn your intelligence into positive change and get rich doing it.
Yes, this is still true, and why immigration to America maintained its previous momentum. It was often easier to get a student visa than a different immigration visa, so for the past 30 years or so that has been the primary route, and in turn has raised the prestige of American universities.
However, if you look at the American-born population, their students are not impressive. Quite the opposite, for how much funding their education gets. And—by federal interest—only ~10% of the undergraduate student body can be foreigners. Professors at American universities routinely complain about their students' low standards. Things are not the same as they were ten years ago, let alone thirty or fifty years ago.
I think international sentiment has not shifted to the point that this is common knowledge—that if people want to go international, they better attend a school in China or Switzerland—but it would have happened in a few years with or without Trump, and the decline would be as apparent as the primary and secondary school decline has been.
American universities led the world, without competition as a whole (there were a few individual universities elsewhere). Look at any ranking of universities worldwide, such as Times Higher Education.
That is true. It is also true that their primary and secondary schools were quickly dropping in rank relative to other countries in the 2010s, and their universities were following in the COVID/post-COVID era.
My experience at an American university (in the early 2020s) was that the native Americans were much less impressive than the international students, and the professors were mildly annoyed at them compared to previous generations of students they had taught. I think this is a common experience at American universities nowadays—I mean, what else would you expect with the primary/secondary school decline?—but I do not have any hard data to show you. I think you can find a lot of similar anecodotes on r/professors, though it seems to be more of a complain-subreddit than representative of all professors.
I think it is difficult to find data on this, as there are not many international assessments at the university level. You can look at research output, but research is kind of bullshit these days, and even if it weren't, it would be skewed by the older generations. You can look at international competitions, but does America do poorly in the ICPC because they're worse, or because they don't care? Brigham Young University (a small-fry religious school in Utah, USA) got a bronze medal a decade ago, significantly better than their other universities. If you investigate a little further, you'll find this university did decent at the Putnam around the same time, so they probably just had a few students who really tried hard. It's known that MIT dominates the Putnam, but that is now literally a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know many math people who chose MIT above other schools because it is the place Putnam winners go.
One thing you can look at is the graduate body composition. At elite universities, around 40% of graduate students are foreigners (compared to 30% 50 years ago). Across all universities, nearly half of PhDs are awarded to foreigners. However, this does not really prove American undergraduate students are falling behind, and it mildly supports the case that American universities maintain their prestige. I actually believe American universities do still maintain their prestige, just that they are more of a paper tiger than Americans like to believe. Almost like MIT with the Putnam, everyone goes to America because everyone goes to America.
Well, that plus a ton of investor money floating around. The dollar hegemony is still going strong, and while the invasion of Venezuela shows it might be a little weaker than the average American hopes, they're not going to let it go away without a fight.
They say Chinese elite universities are surpassing American ones in research and funding, and that 20% fewer international students enrolled in American universities in 2025. Though, of course, that was right after Trump took away Harvard student visas.
When was it ever substantially not "whoever could make it over the border"?
That only stopped being (mostly—see the Chinese Exclusion Act) our actual policy in what, the 1950s? And after that, much to the relief of the agriculture industry that sharply opposed the change, we de facto barely enforced the new policy.
