Some foreign national graduate students from Iran and China, purportedly, are paid and receive tuition waivers through grants from United States granting agencies like the NSF, NIH, DOE and NASA.
Getting Paid to Earn a Graduate Degree
Undergraduate degrees can famously cost big bucks.
Not so with some graduate degrees.
Even undergraduate science and engineering students are sometimes surprised to hear that many graduate students no longer pay tuition. In fact, many science and engineering students are paid to get their graduate degrees. In addition to a tuition waiver, a modest monthly stipend is provided, sufficient to cover living expenses.
Top S&E students can be enticed to come to graduate school with an offer of a teaching assistantship or a research assistantship.
Both pay a stipend for typically 20 hours of work a week.
Teaching assistants have jobs like running labs and grading papers.
Teaching assistantships are paid by the host university.
A research assistantship is more favorable and is usually paid by a grant. To obtain their degree, research graduate students must publish an MS thesis or PhD dissertation, and their research assistantship compensates them for conducting the research that forms the material for these degree-required documents.
Following the Money
The majority of university research funding comes from government agencies like the NSF, NIH, DOE, NASA, and the DOD. They are awarded in response to professors submitting proposals to government funding agencies.
At research universities, professors are primarily rewarded for:
- The amount of grant money they attract, and
- The number of papers they publish.
Teaching and scholarship are given lip service but typically have a minor weight in the final assessment of a professor’s merit.
Professors dedicate significant time to crafting proposals to secure funding for their research, which ultimately supports the work published in their papers.
Once funding is awarded, the professor hires graduate students as research assistants. The graduate students get their tuition waiver and stipend from the grant.
Foreign nationals, if awarded a U.S. visa, are eligible for many of these positions. (One exception is some DOD grants with a national security component that require graduate students to be U.S. citizens.) This writer has been advised, that to obtain a visa, foreign national students are closely vetted.
Watching Graduate Student Enrollments
The NSF reports that S&E international graduate student enrollment at U.S. institutions has "rapidly increased from approximately 200,000 in 2020, a pandemic-era low point, to nearly 310,000 in 2022."
During 2022/23 Iran has over 8,000 graduate students studying in the United States.
Almost 95% of them are at Doctoral Universities.
Personally, I receive about an email request a month from Iranian students wanting to study AI under me.
China Has Over 125,000 graduate students in the US.
Defining the Issue
If the U.S. is currently concerned that our adversaries are influencing our universities, should we be concerned that our government agencies are financially supporting foreign national graduate students from these same adversarial countries?
Please.
This question must be kept in tight context.
Many students who get graduate degrees from the U.S. decide to stay here.
This writer has worked and published papers with over 300 co-authors including naturalized U.S. Citizens born in Iran, China, Russia, Ukraine, Lebanon, Egypt, South Korea, Greece, Poland, Romania, Spain, Columbia, England, and Vietnam.
Like me, they are all proud American Citizens.
The issue here focuses solely on U.S.-supported graduate students from adversarial nations who return home with technology, the use of which remains uncertain.
Doing so is not wise in a multinational technical arms race.
Technology enhances the appearance of national strength and, if push comes to shove, wins wars.
A Real-Life Account
Let me end with a true story. I once sat on the committee for a final dissertation defense.
Once this exam is passed, the student is awarded a Ph.D.
The student, a Chinese foreign national, had a superb dissertation and passed unanimously.
I chatted with him afterwards and found out he was going home to China.
He said he had a good job there.
We were both aware of the ongoing tension between the U.S. and China.
I smiled and said half-jokingly, "Don’t develop any technology that can be used to kill me."
Shocked by my unexpected question, the student smiled and looked at the ground.
He then looked up and said, "Dr. Marks. I would never do that."
Since he left for home, we have lost contact.
Robert J. Marks Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor at Baylor University and Senior Fellow and Director of the Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence. He is author of "Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will Never Do," and "Neural Smithing." Marks is former Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. Read more Dr. Marks' reports — Here.
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