Garber Says U.S. Risks Losing Ground to China As Talent Heads Abroad

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 warned Monday that the United States risks losing its top researchers to foreign competitors as rival nations move to recruit American-born talent amid a tense climate for higher education.

In a public conversation in Manhattan, Garber said Canada and Europe had the money to attract American scientists and that China was making an active effort to woo its scholars back across the Pacific.

“There are funds in Canada and in Europe to recruit American scientists,” he said. “And China is doing everything it can to make sure that its most promising scholars, who are in the United States, who come from mainland China, go back to China.”

The warning comes as American universities face mounting uncertainty over federal research funding and immigration policy — pressures Garber said threaten a longstanding U.S. advantage in global science.

During the Wall Street Journal interview, he pointed to a widely cited ranking of research output in which nine of the world’s top 10 universities are now located outside the United States, many of them in China — a shift he attributed to sustained government investment abroad.

“This is not because America has fallen short,” Garber said. “It’s because China has made the investments, and if we don’t make the investments, we cannot expect to stay up there and be in the forefront of what’s happening.”

Garber emphasized that American universities have historically offset China’s population advantage by attracting talent from around the world, an edge he argued may now be at risk.

“By closing our doors, we will be one-fourth the size of China, no longer welcoming the best from the entire world,” he said. “It is hard to see how we can maintain our leadership in these areas then.”

For now, Harvard has lost only “small numbers” of faculty to international institutions, Garber said. But he said the University was “keeping an eye” on potential brain drain, admitting it was “obviously a real worry.”

Harvard is not alone. The emerging exodus of top talent from high-caliber American universities has been well documented in recent months, including from peer institutions like Yale University.

Though Garber has spent the past year touting the importance of federally funded research, Monday marks the first time he has raised the geopolitical implications of the scholarly work done at the University, implicating Harvard in a U.S-China innovation race.

Those concerns come amid an escalating clash between Harvard and the Trump administration. Last year, President Trump made good on a long-standing Republican talking point — that universities are far too reliant on federal money — and slashed government funding for Harvard and its peer institutions. Harvard emerged as a particular target for Trump, and the University lost around $2.7 billion in research grants in April.

And in Harvard’s case, Trump went further. In May, he revoked the University’s ability to enroll international students in May, creating uncertainty for the more than 6,000 students and scholars at the University.

Those decisions, Garber said, had far-reaching geopolitical implications, limiting the ability of universities to fund cutting-edge research and attract necessary talent.

“In a perfect world, we would be investing as a nation very heavily so that we could take advantage of these opportunities,” he said. “Right now it looks like we’re doing the opposite.”

Harvard has since challenged both policies in court, securing rulings that restored research funding and allowed international students to remain enrolled. The Trump administration has appealed those decisions to the First Circuit, leaving the disputes resolved.

At the same time, the administration has opened new fronts in its conflict with the University. In March, the Department of Justice filed suit against Harvard, alleging failures in its response to campus antisemitism and seeking further penalties tied to federal funding.

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at hcc.35. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at elisespenner.82. Follow her on X @EliseSpenner.