[mr_toad]

> Anyone who has gone to grad school can see pretty plainly that the top schools are stuffed with Chinese and Indian nationals. They're capable and they work hard.

People in grad school tend to be hard working and smart, that’s how they got there. Hypothesis: foreign nationals have to be even smarter and harder-working to secure places in US universities, hence the stereotype.

[arghnoname]

It wasn't my experience that they were harder working or more capable than the domestic talent. Because of the immigration benefits, some had additional motivations native-born Americans didn't have, but there are easier ways to immigrate. There were some differences culturally in how certain things were approached, but I thought capability wise there was not an obvious and significant disparity in terms of capability of students by national origin.

What was noticeable is that there were a lot of these students and to the extent that the US does not retain them, we are training the workforce of our competitors. To the extent we do retain them, we are poaching the talent of our competitors. My guess is this is tough to balance and where we're at now is making total global innovation higher but lowering the proportion of the pie over which the US has dominion.