Physics PhDs Are Leaving the US at a Record-high Rate

Physics and astronomy PhD graduates in 2025 left the US at the highest rate in the last 30 years, finds a new AIP report. Of these graduates, non-US citizens left the country at nearly double the rate of the previous year, the largest one-year increase since 1997.

The report also found a significant increase in the percentage of US-citizen graduates leaving the country, around 12%, compared to 9% after the 2023-24 school year and 5% after the 2022-23 school year.

The findings come amid concerns of a “brain drain” of scientific talent from US universities and businesses under the second Trump administration. The report did not include graduates’ reasons for leaving the country, but the change for non-citizens “has certainly been influenced by changes in the nation’s science funding structures and in the significant changes in visa policies,” the report states.

“US institutions of higher education work to attract some of the brightest minds in the world to be trained in our institutions, and that has been a key driver of U.S. economic vitality and source of talent to support national defense and security,” said AIP Chief Research Officer Trevor Owens, who oversees the team that wrote the report.

In 2024, then-president of the National Academy of Sciences Marcia McNutt argued that the US needs foreign-born workers to fill its STEM jobs: these workers account for nearly one-third of US workers with doctoral degrees in the physical sciences, according to data from the National Science Foundation. The Institute for Progress found in 2022 that STEM PhDs are highly employed by the defense industrial base compared to other industries, and more than half of the STEM PhDs in the defense industrial base are foreign-born.

“The PhDs we train today are going to be the scientific workforce of the future, and not just tomorrow, but really for the next 30 years,” said Dan Gross, a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “How many of them stay is important to determining and shaping the degree to which US firms, US economy, US consumers, the defense sector, and other users of science can benefit from the work that’s produced.”

Over the thirty-year period of AIP’s data, there have been times when the percentage of students who left the US was nearly as high as in 2025, Gross noted. “Realistically, I think we’ll need another year or two of data to really know,” he said. “Of course, by that point it’ll be a little bit too late to walk back whatever policy changes have triggered these changing outcomes.”

The report only captures PhDs who had left the US six months after graduation. “Given how US visa and immigration policy is developing, I think it is quite likely that we could see this percentage go higher, into truly historically significant levels, in the next few years of the survey,” Owens said.

Major disruptions to scientific funding and universities have marked the second Trump administration, alongside new threats to international students. Some have faced deportation or attempts to block them from entering the US. The administration has also made major changes to STEM student and worker visa policies, including restricting international students to four years of study in the US and placing $100,000 fees on H-1B visa applications. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is considering applying a $100,000 fee to the Optional Practical Training program for international graduates; 82% of international physics and astronomy PhD graduates in 2023 and 2024 who stayed in the US participated in OPT.

Other countries also play a role in graduates’ decisions to leave, Gross said, including reactive policies like programs to recruit US scientists.

Other recent reports have found that highly educated STEM students and workers are staying in or coming to the US less often. An NBER study published in June found a significant increase in the number of early-career biomedical researchers in academia who expected to leave the US from October 2024 to March 2025, from 7% of respondents to 28%.

A separate AIP report from June found that first-year enrollments in physics and astronomy PhD programs saw the largest declines in two decades, excluding pandemic-related disruptions in 2020. More than 40% of these programs reported both fewer applications from and fewer admission offers to international students this year, suggesting that international student enrollments are likely to decline substantially this fall, the report states.

“The evidence is pretty unambiguous that one of the United States’s superpowers is its ability to attract the top talent from essentially every other country in the world and put them to work here for a time, if not for their full careers,” Gross said. “It would be a really significant loss to give that up, and I think that’s what’s at stake right now.”