This was the week when my university’s science professors started feeling the sting from the laws the Florida Legislature passed last spring to restrict the activities of Chinese scholars, including graduate students. The journal Science, the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education all published articles on the restrictions, and students in China noticed and started emailing questions to professors and others involved in the admissions process. Many strong Chinese undergraduates who would have applied to FSU or other Florida public universities will now not do so. In addition, Chinese postdocs who are already at Florida’s public universities have gotten caught in the crossfire.
Each year, my physics department admits two or three Chinese students to its graduate program, and they are generally the best prepared of the students we bring in. During most years, between twenty and thirty students start out in our graduate program, and so Chinese students are a tenth or less of most incoming classes. During the decades I’ve been a professor here, my physics colleagues have worked hard to make sure that half the students in each incoming graduate student class are American; the remainder are from other nations. Nevertheless, it will certainly hurt if the new laws cut off the flow of Chinese students to our department altogether.
But the chair of another science department at my university told me this week that most of our university’s natural and mathematical science departments are much more dependent on Chinese students than our physics department is. He said that about half of all of the graduate students in these departments are Chinese. If the supply of Chinese students is cut off, it will be a devastating blow for the departments that rely so heavily on those students. That will be true at other State University System institutions as well.
The scientific productivity of university departments depends heavily on graduate students. Florida’s educational leaders take great pride in the amount of federal grant funding that the State University System attracts. But if the shutoff of the Chinese graduate student pipeline negatively impacts the productivity of research laboratories at Florida’s public universities, that will eventually hit the state’s grant tally as well. It’s just a matter of time.
None of this can be considered an unintended consequence of the new laws. In fact, this is exactly what the law’s authors had in mind – not allowing Chinese students to bring research results and expertise back to China, which is indeed our primary geopolitical rival. Nevertheless, Florida’s academic research enterprise depends so heavily on Chinese students that the state’s legislators – or at least the bill’s authors – should have known that these new laws could make the state’s universities less competitive for federal funding.
Of course, so far I’ve danced around the question of how research at Florida’s public universities became so dependent on Chinese graduate students. Can’t we find more American students – or better yet Florida students – to replace them? The painful answer is no for American students and doubly no for Florida students. Like it or not, physics is a core scientific discipline that is important in many STEM fields. According to Lei Bao, a physics professor and physics education researcher at Ohio State, Chinese students study physics every year from 8th to 12th grades. “All students must perform well on a national exam if they hope to enter college, and the exam contains advanced physics problems,” he told Science Daily in 2009.
In contrast, only about 20% of Florida high school graduates have taken any physics at all. The rates at which the state’s students take physics and calculus in high school are well below the national rates. Some of the Florida high school graduates who haven’t taken physics or calculus choose college majors in engineering, computer science or the life, health and physical sciences at one of the state’s public universities and end up in classrooms like mine, in which I am constantly pulled between the high expectations that colleagues in engineering and my own physics department have for my students and the poor preparation they have when they arrive. About one-third of the students in my first-semester course for students majoring in engineering, physics and other math-intensive STEM fields did not take physics at all in high school. Those no-high-school-physics students are at significantly higher risk for failure than students who took physics in high school.
This tension between expectations and preparation doesn’t just occur at the college level. Several high school physics and math teachers have recently told me that the students arriving in their classrooms now have worse math skills and work habits than in the past, and that the decline in math and work habits began even before the pandemic, even though the pandemic has accelerated these woeful trends. These teachers are fighting the same battle I am, except that they are directly exposed to parents and administrators who have convinced themselves that the students are fine and there is something wrong with the teachers.
To believe that Florida should cut off access to Chinese scholars (including prospective graduate students) and to simultaneously ignore the issue of the poor preparation of Florida’s high school students for college STEM majors is a form of hypocrisy. And it’s a hypocrisy of which the majority of Florida’s educational leaders are guilty.
Bridge to Tomorrow 