The Business Cost of the Shrinking STEM Research Pipeline
As immigration barriers mount and global competition for researchers intensifies, U.S. businesses face a critical talent shortage that threatens technological competitiveness. Here’s what companies need to do now.
Alex Nabaum/theispot.com
International doctoral talent has historically powered university research and science and technology innovation in the U.S. But with global competition for top researchers intensifying as federal support and funding for doctoral research programs is waning, the country’s competitive edge in STEM research is under threat. Learn how recent policy changes and demographic shifts are affecting businesses, along with five strategic steps companies can take to protect their access to STEM talent.
The United States’ dominance in STEM research and innovation is at a critical crossroads as the country’s STEM research industry faces unprecedented erosion that will be difficult to reverse. At the heart of this challenge lies a growing crisis in human capital: the weakening pipeline of international doctoral talent that has historically powered both university research graduate programs and U.S. technological innovation. While U.S. businesses have long relied on immigrants with doctorate degrees to drive breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence and pharmaceuticals, this vital talent flow is now drying up in the face of growing challenges. Global competition for top researchers is intensifying just as U.S. immigration barriers are mounting, creating a perfect storm that threatens the country’s competitive edge and the ability of U.S. businesses to remain at the cutting edge of technology. Although the drivers of this decline are primarily in the realm of public policy, swift action from the business community can help protect and strengthen this talent pipeline.
In this article, we outline five concrete steps U.S. businesses can take to protect their access to critical science, technology, engineering, and math talent. But first, it helps to understand the causes of the current decline.
Factors Affecting the STEM Talent Shortage
There are two key issues affecting U.S. universities’ access to graduate students from abroad and, in turn, industry’s access to innovative ideas and R&D talent.
The talent pool of STEM doctoral graduates in the U.S. is shifting. The transformation in America’s graduate school STEM demographics over the past four decades tells a compelling story about the role of immigrant talent in the country’s R&D success. Since 1977, the total number of people who have earned doctorates in science and engineering in the U.S. has nearly tripled. (See “Total STEM Doctorates in the U.S.”) During this same period, the proportion of non-U.S. citizens in these programs has doubled from 20% to 40%. In recent decades, the role of Chinese nationals has become especially significant, accounting for 35% of that international pool of STEM doctoral candidates and 16% of all of the 36,000 foreign and domestic STEM Ph.D. seekers.1 In AI fields, Chinese nationals’ share of this pie is an even more striking 27%.
References
1. Data is from the authors’ backup files of archived tables from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics’ “Survey of Earned Doctorates Data on Ph.D. Students From China, India, South Korea, Taiwan and Other International Students,” 1977-2022. See also “The Global AI Talent Tracker,” Macro Polo, accessed March 21, 2025, https://archivemacropolo.org.
2. “The Global AI Talent Tracker.”
3. N. Wingfield, “The Disappearing American Grad Student,” The New York Times, Nov. 3, 2017, www.nytimes.com.
4. R. Zwetsloot, J. Dunham, Z. Arnold, et al., “Keeping Top AI Talent in the United States: Findings and Policy Options for International Graduate Student Retention,” PDF file (Washington, D.C.: Center for Security and Emerging Technology, December 2019), https://cset.georgetown.edu; J. Feldgoise and R. Zwetsloot, “Estimating the Number of Chinese STEM Students in the United States,” PDF file (Washington, D.C.: Center for Security and Emerging Technology, October 2020), https://cset.georgetown .edu; R. Zwetsloot, J. Feldgoise, and J. Dunham, “Trends in U.S. Intention-to-Stay Rates of International Ph.D. Graduates Across Nationality and STEM Fields,” PDF file (Washington, D.C.: Center for Security and Emerging Technology, April 2020), https://cset .georgetown.edu; J. Corrigan, J. Dunham, and R. Zwetsloot, “The Long-Term Stay Rates of International STEM Graduates,” PDF file (Washington, D.C.: Center for Security and Emerging Technology, April 2022), https://cset.georgetown.edu; and A. Okrent and A. Burke, “Where Are They Now? Most Early Career U.S.-Trained S&E Doctorate Recipients With Temporary Visas at Graduation Stay and Work in the United States After Graduation,” fig. 5, InfoBrief NSF 21-336, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Washington, D.C., 2021.
5. “Survey of Earned Doctorates,” table 2-8, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, accessed March 21, 2025, https://ncses.nsf.gov; and the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics’ archived 2010-2016 and 2005-2011 country or economy of citizenship tables, for which the authors have backups on file.
6. “China Has Become a Scientific Superpower,” The Economist, June 12, 2024, www.economist.com; and “How Worrying Is the Rapid Rise of Chinese Science?” The Economist, June 13, 2024, www.economist.com.
7. Zwetsloot, Feldgoise, and Dunham, “Trends in U.S. Intention-to-Stay Rates”; and Corrigan, Dunham, and Zwetsloot, “The Long-Term Stay Rates of International STEM Graduates.”
8. M.T. Zuber, “A Primer on Indirect Costs and Why They Are Important to MIT,” MIT Faculty Newsletter 29, no. 5 (May/June 2017).
9. D. Garisto, “U.S. Universities Curtail Ph.D. Admissions Amid Trump Science Funding Cuts,” Nature, Feb. 27, 2025, www.nature .com.
10. A. Arora, S. Belenzon, A. Patacconi, et al., “The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic Growth,” working paper 25893, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 2019.
11. Okrent and Burke, “Where Are They Now?” fig. 5.
12. P. Vandor, “Research: Why Immigrants Are More Likely to Become Entrepreneurs,” Harvard Business Review, Aug. 4, 2021, https://hbr.org; and S. Anderson, “Immigrant Entrepreneurs and U.S. Billion-Dollar Companies,” PDF file (Arlington, Virginia: National Foundation for American Policy, July 2022), https://nfap .com.
13. Anderson, “Immigrant Entrepreneurs.”
14. J. Batalova, “Immigrant Health-Care Workers in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, May 14, 2020, www .migrationpolicy.org.
15. E. Rosenblum, “The Wave We’re Riding: Chinese Ph.D.s in the U.S.,” Medium, March 5, 2020, https://medium.com.
16. A. Gupta, B. Thomas, F. Alsoubaie, et al., “Internationalizing Google AI Research Google AI,” chap. 4 in “Innovation Management in the Intelligent World: Cases and Tools,” eds. T.U. Daim and D. Meissner (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020).
17. P. Krugman, “How Hostility to Immigrants Will Hurt America’s Tech Sector,” The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2024, www.nytimes.com; and T. Higgins, “MAGA vs. Musk: Immigration Fight Cracks Populist-Tech Bro Alliance,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27, 2024, www.wsj.com.
