It is a good thing, even if quantity doesn’t necessarily equal quality.

We should be honored that PhD students come here to learn and produce research.

America should strive to keep it that way.

We should worry if people stop attending our nation’s schools, be it international students or domestic.

Of course, the quality does need to continue to rise. The papers I have reviewed from Chinese authors as well as the Chinese papers that have cited my own work or work in my field is very hit or miss. Sometimes, I’m super excited. At other times, I see work published in a Chinese journal that wouldn’t be acceptable as a term paper in an upper level grad course. So, yes, consistency needs to increase. But that will take a generation.

So, the lower quality isn’t necessarily a criticism. It is to some degree unavoidable. What we really need to evaluate is if the quality stagnates or continues to rise.

Oh, and so what if China some day produces 4x as many well-qualified scientists as the U.S. does? They have a huge population. This is the democratization of science. One of the things that was frustrating about Unscientific America is how it wasn’t centered on the virtues of science and critical thinking, but how it was often (not always, but often) centered on how the U.S. stood up to others. If China ever became “infested” with highly trained critical thinkers who are very well-versed in science, that can only be good news. Those sorts of people are good for the world in general and the U.S. right now has more than its fair share. There is nowhere to go but down. Granted, we should fight that and our education at lower level totally sucks, and we rely too much on brain-drain dynamics. All good points. But China’s improvement is good news, not some “warning shot”.

Every year, there are over 1500-1800 Chinese students got their phd in US.

It’s not just the quantity, it’s the quality that matters.

It’s not a secret, for example, that many people in the US are awarded PhDs without deserving it, because funding ran out or they were already in the program for too long and keeping them there longer or cutting them off would look bad on the stat sheet of the institution, or some other reason of that sort. That on its own wouldn’t be such a problem if they were at least taught to think like scientists, and many of them may well have been, but my feeling is that there is a huge number of PhDs, both the ones that truly fulfilled the requirements and the ones that just got out of the program, that haven’t acquired that.

And that is probably even more true in China where, again, based on personal observations (that’s all there is available, unfortunately), it seems like the emphasis sin’t on creating a “reality-based” culture but on producing as many technically competent experts as possible. Some portions of them will have also adopted the “reality-based” worldview, and the total number of such people will be greater than if there were not so many PhDs, but overall this is not at all a positive development, because technically-savvy but scientifically illiterate (in the methodological sense) people are actually more harmful than helpful. And they tend to propagate these characteristics into the next generations of scientists that they train

The increased number of PhDs in the US is a result of the funding boom in the late 90s/early 00s. It takes several years to expand laboratories and PhD programs, then it takes another 5 or 6 years for those students to graduate, and that’s what your seeing in the chart. It is not at all an indication of the current state of affairs

In all honesty though, I second Walker’s quip about the quality of papers and research coming out of China. Now contrast that with research produced by Chinese graduate students and postdocs working in this country which is of much higher quality.

I think quality definitely matters; to me China always seems to be in a rather mindless race to compete with the US in terms of quantity, a tactic that is not going to achieve much in the long term.