Is the U.S. Brain Gain Faltering?

GRADUATE education; UNITED States education system; DOCTORAL programs; FOREIGN students; ENGINEERING; HIGHER education

Fears that U.S. graduate programs in the sciences are no longer attracting their share of the world's brightest students don't square with the facts. It was at a 1993 conference in Madison, Wisconsin, and Zhu's mentor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Genetics had thought highly enough of his student to fly him all the way from Beijing to match him with a good U.S. lab. By comparison, there are 2.5 times that number of first-year foreign students enrolled in U.S. doctoral programs in physics alone and physics represents only about 3% of the overall U.S. science and engineering doctoral pool. Vijaya Khandavilli, a microbiologist and educational adviser in the New Delhi office of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India, says students visiting her office complained of neither arbitrary visa decisions nor unduly long wait times.