by neom | 2025-12-27 17:30:18+00:00
It makes sense you're getting downvoted but I thought it was actually an interesting question so I spent the past hour or so doing an autistic rabbit hole (including finding the linkedins of the folks on the paper linked here to understand their backgrounds), heh.

Was somewhat surprised to learn that the pipeline wasn't built by industry demand, it was supply pressure from abroad that happened to arrive just as US universities needed the money (2009/10). In 1999, China's government massively expanded higher education, combined with a system where the state steers talent into stem via central quotas in the "gaokao", it created an overflow of CS capable graduates with nowhere to go domestically, India's 1991 liberalization created the IT services boom (TCS, Infosys, Y2K gold rush) and made engineering THE middle class ticket, so same overflow problem. US phd programs became the outlet for both countries.

In that light, the university side response probably wasn't state side industry demand for loads of PhDs, who was hiring those then? Google Brain didn't exist until 2011, FAIR until 2013. It wasn't really till 2012+ that industry in tech started to hire big research groups to actually advance the field vs specialized PhDs here and there for products... so not a huge amount of pull from there. Then, at the same time, universities were responding to a funding crisis... there was a 2008 state budget collapse, so it was backfilled with international Master's students paying $50-80k cash (we do this in Canada heavily also), that revenue cross-subsidized PhD programs (which are mostly cost centers remember). I also read some say PhD students were also better labor: visa constraints meant they couldn't easily bounce to industry, they'd accept $30k stipends, tho I saw other research contradicting this idea. The whole system was in place before "AI Researcher" was even a real hiring category. Then deep learning hit (2012), industry woke up, and they found a pre built pipeline to harvest: The authors on that Apple paper finished their PhDs around 2012-2020, meaning they entered programs 2009-2015 when CS PhDs were already 55-60% foreign born. Those students stayed, 75-85% of Chinese and Indian STEM PhDs are still here a decade later. They're now the senior researchers publishing papers you read here on HN.

This got me wondering, could the US have grown this domestically? In 2024 they produced ~3,000 CS PhDs, only ~1,100 domestic. To get 3,000 domestic you'd need 2.7x the pipeline...which traces back to needing 10.8 million 9th graders in 2018 instead of 4 million (lol), or convincing 3x more CS undergrads to take $35k stipends instead of $150k industry jobs. Neither happened. So other countries pay for K-12 and undergrad, capture the talent at PhD entry, keep 75%+ permanently.

Seems like a reasonable system emerged from a bunch of difficult constraints?

(and just to reiterate, even tho it was an interesting research project for me, you can't infer where someone is directly from based on their name)

https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/highest-exam-how...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind...

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24300/data-tables

https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-r...

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25325

https://www.science.org/content/article/flood-chinese-gradua...

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...