If my kids excel, will they move away?

Jeffrey P. Bigham

I grew up on a farm outside of a rural town about an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio. Like many small towns in America, my town knows “brain drain” – all of my friends from high school who went to college (~30% of my class) now live elsewhere, although most are pretty close by (e.g., several live in the suburbs of Columbus and Cincinnati).

Sometimes my hometown feels a million miles away, but it only takes two hours and fifty minutes for me to drive there from Pittsburgh, which is where I live now.

In Pittsburgh, I’m a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the top computer science school in the world. I’ve also worked in various large technology companies, who have offices in Pittsburgh to connect with and employ Carnegie Mellon faculty and students.

I may not live in my small town anymore, but the fact that the best place in the world to study and do research in computer science is in Pittsburgh means I’m really not that far away. My four kids see their grandparents often, they’re known in my parents’ church and have spent a lot of time on my dad’s farm. The photo above is of me on the farm, wearing some of my dad’s clothes, trying to help out when my dad fell ill a few years ago.

Most of my story we’ve been able to take for granted in the United States for the past few decades. If you grow up in the United States, and you’re among the best in the world in your field, you could count on the center of excellence for your field also being in the United States, oftentimes pretty close by, like Pittsburgh being close to my hometown.

As a professor, I’m able to recruit the very best students in the world to work on my research. Sometimes that means recruiting Americans and sometimes that means recruiting from elsewhere. Students come to Pittsburgh from around the world (I’ve advised PhD students and postdocs from about 10 different countries). Five or six years after they start our intensive graduation program, successful students receive their PhDs and that’s when I tend to meet their parents for the first time. Oftentimes, this is the first trip they’ve made to the United States, and they may have only seen their kids a few times during their degree. It hits home because usually these students choose to stay in the United States – after successfully completing their degree with me, they are in high demand not only in our universities but also in technology companies.

These days the students I talk to are less confident about coming to the United States to study and less confident about staying here after they’re done. They have seen a student grabbed off the street apparently because she wrote an essay expressing concern about the on-going humanitarian crisis in Gaza. They have seen graduate students jailed for what used to be minor immigration offenses. They have seen even greater uncertainty in applying or reapplying for the visas they need to study. And, they have seen their status as students arbitrarily used as leverage in attacking premier universities like Harvard^[1]. Most of these incidents have or probably will be resolved, but the message and fear it causes are real and long-lasting.

I am worried that policies that have the intention (or effect) of introducing chaos and cruelty to superstar students will make it less likely for the best of the best to come to America, and this in turn will mean centers of excellence will move elsewhere. While incumbents have an advantage, it doesn’t take much to influence group behavior and movements can be self-reinforcing. The best people in a field like to be where other amazing people are, so they can learn and build off of each other. If the centers of excellence move elsewhere, I’m worried my kids will end up feeling compelled to move away (should they become superstars, as is my hope for them).

The brain drain from our small rural communities is real, but many of us have found ways to stay close by and keep those ties. There’s a bunch of reasons to treat international students better than we have over the past months, but these concerns are not thousands of miles away as they seem to some – to me, it's incredibly close to home, and not only because I see the effect on students I work with closely.

If we cause centers of excellence to move away from Pittsburgh, and away from the United States entirely, that’s the difference between my grandkids living near or very far, and whether they’re likely to grow up visiting me and my dad’s farm often or hardly at all.