Executive summary
The NIH and NSF invest billions each year to train scientists — graduate students and postdocs — through fellowships and grants. However, the effectiveness of these funds is not fully realized. First, many postdocs are forced to leave the United States because the J-1 visa, held by most postdocs, typically has a return-home requirement. Furthermore, most graduate and postdoc research funding is only available to US citizens and permanent residents. These nationality requirements cut off much of the potential US talent pool. While it’s reasonable to have some programs intended to support native-born scientists, agencies funding science have not struck the right balance. At the NIH, for example, over 90% of scientific grants for postdocs were awarded through programs restricted to citizens and permanent residents. As a result, these programs fall short of reaching their full potential in advancing American science.
Currently, international postdocs in fields funded primarily through these restricted programs must choose between either having their research tied to an eligible principal investigator (limiting their ability to pursue their research interests) or going abroad to pursue careers where they can receive more flexible funding. In effect, international students are poached and pursue research careers abroad, where their productivity is thwarted.
Fellowships and postdocs are investments in the future of American R&D. Funding agencies like NIH and NSF could increase their return on investment by expanding grant eligibility for all qualified postdoctoral researchers and graduate students.
Key takeaways:
- As of 2022, US institutions graduate almost 15,000 international STEM PhDs yearly. However, those graduates are locked out of critical US scientific institutions through immigration requirements tied to fellowship and grant programs.
- Temporary visa holders—even when they have approved petitions for lawful permanent residence—are often ineligible for funding for graduate and postdoc research, including through the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) and NIH Kirschstein-NRSA Fellowships, which require applicants to be US citizens or permanent residents.
- At the NIH, from 2012 to 2021, 91% of scientific grants for postdocs were awarded through programs restricted to citizens and permanent residents.
- Grants awarded to J-1 visa holders could be accompanied by an Interested Government Agency statement, which would help recipients stay in the country after their J-1 visa expires.
Introduction
STEM doctoral graduates are a key input into a country’s STEM R&D. As a recent consensus study from the National Academies of Sciences concluded, “foreign STEM talent is a direct contributor to domestic innovation, economic growth, and leadership in science and technology.” According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 46% of STEM PhDs graduating from American institutions in 2021 were foreign-born. International students not only perform at the level of domestic students; they often become the strongest in their cohorts. For example, Gaulé and Piacentini find that Chinese international Chemistry PhD graduates published at a rate 25-30% more than their group of comparison — awardees of the NSF doctoral fellowship. Fortunately, for the US, most of them (at least 70%) intend to stay in the United States.
But many of these top minds are stopped from fully contributing their newly developed skills to the US scientific enterprise through two self-imposed handicaps:
- International postdocs and many other recent graduates hold J-1 visas, which often require the recipient to return home for two years before they can get another US visa. In short, we train top talent and then require them to leave.
- Even when they can stay, red tape blocking grant and fellowship eligibility because of their immigration status prevents many from developing research careers as productively as others. Both the NSF and NIH condition some of their grants on citizenship or lawful permanent residence (LPR) status. For most international graduates, LPR status can take years, especially for graduates from India and China where wait times have skyrocketed. In short, top talent coming out of top US institutions is being wasted because federal scientific agencies are awarding some grants and fellowships on nationality at least as much as merit.
Programs like the NIH’s Career Development Program K-series and NSF’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Programs offer financial support in the form of stipends and research allowances to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. This funding empowers graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to pursue their research ideas and further their career development.
Although these opportunities are intended to buttress the US STEM workforce by supporting promising talent early in their careers, a significant share of top early-career talent in the US is barred from these opportunities through nationality requirements. Restrictive nationality requirements lead to applicant pools that are unrepresentative of the diverse, increasingly international population of STEM graduates in the US Internationals make up a large number of STEM students, researchers, and academic faculty. As of 2020, the majority (72%) of postdoctoral researchers at federally funded R&D centers are temporary visa holders. Therefore, by not opening applications for federally-funded fellowship programs to temporary visa holders, valuable intellectual contributions are being overlooked.
These requirements have knock-on effects on scientific labs. When those on temporary visas are not eligible for grants, hiring those candidates means fewer resources for the lab. With a hypothetically even tighter budget, a PI’s hiring decisions may become skewed. In response, instead of selecting students whose research interests most align with their lab, they prioritize students with external funding.
In a 2020 Nature survey, international researchers were much less likely to have their own funding and rely on the funding of their supervisor or PI. 15% of international researchers have over half of their funding from their own grants, compared to 38% of native-born researchers. A corollary to this is that international students feel confined to their labs. After all, their stipends depend on them. The downside to this, however, is that international students may pursue less promising research directions than they might have otherwise. They may collaborate less and, overall, have less productive (early) research careers because of the flexibility they cannot afford.
As the forum for the American Society for Cell Biology puts it: “The lack of NIH opportunities for international students/postdocs decreases the chances of getting other grants, and some international graduate students and postdocs have a hard time joining labs because many PIs are looking to hire people with actual, rather than practically non-existent, funding potential.”
Moreover, research indicates that receiving an NIH postdoctoral fellowship increases the likelihood of later NIH grants. In short, restrictions are likely to handicap the research productivity of young scientists today and influence their entire career trajectory, handicapping their future.
Overview of funding programs and expanding international eligibility
Expanding international eligibility for these programs is crucial to leveraging the full potential of the scientific workforce. The NIH and the NSF are the largest science research funders in the US and the largest funders of the country’s graduate and postdoctoral fellowship programs. The United States is the center of the world’s global scientific research enterprise. Therefore, the funding decisions of the NIH and NSF, its largest science funders, are disproportionately responsible for its trajectory.
Looking at the NIH RePORTER data for postdoc grant codes by eligibility in Table 2, we see that there is significantly more funding available for US citizens and legal permanent residents than for temporary visa holders. Between 2012 and 2021, there were 42,758 projects funded at $5,256,990,391 via activity codes that were only open to US citizens and legal permanent residents (K01, K22, K08, K23, F32). In the same time frame, there was an order of magnitude fewer projects and funding (4,896, $527,209,604) via activity codes that are open to temporary visa holders as well as US citizens and legal permanent residents (K43, K99).
Funding opportunities are limited to US citizens and LPRs
Many of NSF’s largest funding opportunities for research trainees are limited to US citizens and permanent residents.
At the NSF:
- The Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) exclusively accepts applications from US citizens and permanent residents. As the name suggests, the CAREER program is for early-career faculty. Approximately 500 awards are distributed annually, with a minimum expected award of around $400,000. For new professors, receiving the fellowship enables them to focus more on research. While new faculty are typically responsible for securing funds to establish their labs and recruit lab members, fellowships like CAREER mean that they can reprioritize and start their research sooner.
- Likewise, only US citizens and permanent residents can apply for the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP). The GFRP is a five-year fellowship where awardees receive an annual stipend for three years and tuition support for the length of their program. The GRFP stipend means students do not have to take on time-intensive TAships out of financial necessity, allowing them to freely access labs, collaborate with researchers, and of course, benefit from the prestige of the award itself.
- The NSF Research Traineeship Program (NRT) does accept applications from international students, but admitted internationals are responsible for finding their own funding. As an international, finding external funding is non-trivial. The lack of direct funding likely stops many qualified candidates from applying, and those who do apply might not be able to attend if they are admitted.
At the NIH:
- Career Development Program K series awards are open to senior postdocs and academic faculty. The goal of the program is to support students doing clinical, behavioral, and biomedical research until they are competitive for larger grants to, for example, start their own lab. Awards are restricted to US citizens, nationals, and permanent residents.
- Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards fund predoctoral students pursuing careers as clinician-scientists and starting dual-doctoral degree programs like an MD/PhD, DO/PhD, DDS/PhD, AuD/PhD, DVM/PhD. Recipients of the fellowship receive funding and mentorship as they learn to autonomously conduct clinical research before starting their degree programs. To be considered for a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Awards, applicants must be US citizens, nationals, or permanent residents.
- The NIH’s postdoctoral funding opportunities like its Postdoctoral Intramural Research Training Awards are also restricted to domestic students. The award funds a one to two-year postdoctoral term at NIH-affiliated labs. The program focuses on providing its fellows with non-service biomedical research experience, differentiating the program from other NIH training opportunities.
Recommendations
Making the most of our advanced STEM talent graduating from US institutions takes two steps: 1) making sure our scientific spending goes to those who can use it best to advance US science, regardless of their visa category and 2) making sure that critical international STEM talent can stay here in the first place.
Recommendation 1: Expand postdoc and fellowship eligibility to include temporary visa holders.
Opening eligibility to international researchers would unlock America’s latent scientific capacity. Doing so isn’t unprecedented; some programs have been open to international students from the start, while others later expanded their eligibility after they began.
As an example, Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (DDRI/DDRG) have been open to international students from the start. The DDRI program funds the research of some eligible doctoral students and US citizenship or permanent residence is not required.
When it comes to implementing these recommendations, it is relevant to note that nationality restrictions are discretionary agency policies and are not required by statute for any of the awards we have discussed here.
If the US expanded its fellowship programs to students from overseas, it would not be the first to do so. Australia’s Research Training Program (RTP) supports both domestic and international students pursuing Australian graduate degrees. The National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia’s analog to the NIH, makes grants to postdocs and other early-career researchers through four main programs, only one of which, the Investigator Grants, has a citizenship and permanent residency requirement. This leaves 48% of grants made to early-career researchers free to non-permanent residents, significantly above the 9% through NIH.
Germany also has a number of federal funding programs for international PhD students. In the UK international students can apply for studentships funded by UK Research and Innovation. Canada sponsors the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship which is open to students worldwide pursuing doctoral degrees at Canadian Institutions. Likewise, Switzerland’s Postdoc.Mobility fellowships are available to foreign nationals who have spent at least two years conducting research in the country.
Recommendation 2: Waive the home residency requirement for J-1 holders with research funded by a federal agency.
International students who come to the US for graduate school and postdoctoral fellowships typically enter on a J-1 Research Scholar Status, which allows them to stay for up to five years. Currently, the J-1 Research Scholar Status imposes a mandatory Exchange Visitor Two-Year Home-Country Physical Presence Requirement 212(e) after completing their exchange visitor program on many visa holders. It can be waived, but when it can’t be—often the case for Chinese and Indian graduates—the result is mandatory emigration.
The US government can make sure these waivers are not at the whims of foreign countries when the international graduate is working on research deemed worthy of funding by a federal agency. Whenever an international graduate wins an award from a federal funding agency, that agency should automatically file a statement as an “interested government agency” to USCIS requesting a waiver.
