This thought has been lingering in my mind for the past couple of years and now I'm gonna come out and ask for other people's opinions.
Whenever I go back and read old publications and watch older videos produced by and or about FIRST I hear a lot of things similar to "We saw a decline in American students interest in STEM". This leads me to believe that the original purpose of FIRST was to interest and get more "American" students into STEM.
I in no way mean to say that I dont appreciate having international teams, a lot of those teams do amazing work (Simbotics, OP robotics, Thunder down under, Orbit and Panteras to name just a few) but I feel that FIRST is starting to and actually already has scaled the globe with FRC teams everywhere from Canada and Mexico to now China and Australia. I don't believe it is necessarily a bad thing but I do believe that one day FIRST will become larger than ever expected and I wonder how FIRST will adapt to it.
In this video Dean Kamen talks about how "experts saw a dramatic decline in the number of American students interested in math and science in our country":
https://youtu.be/A2L_CnaXypw?t=1m14s . I remember championships being called nationals or something before FIRST decided to go international. With the new china regional this year we are branching out into a new region which I personally believe is gonna grow extremely large over the next couple of years.
I would like to know the opinions of some other people on this.