Are you serious? Do you have any ides how poorly educated are current high school graduates are? They can barely put a sentence together or find Europe on a map. What they do know is that there mother told them they were really special, they got lots of trophies for showing up, and the government will take care of them while they catch up on the Kardashians and post some selfies on facebook. Now if we could only raise more tax revenues form the filthy rich
19
Why would one invest in such a degree when the open borders crowd favors immigrants, illegal or not, and the H1-B visa program is nothing but a veiled discriminatory policy against legal, lawful, law abiding American citizens. I personally have seen these IT jobs also be offshored to India. It is leftist corporations such as Google, Facebook, etc. as well as traditional firms that follow such a policy. Given these facts, why should an American citizen obtain such a degree?
The fact that is not addressed in the article, but Mr. Trump is, betrays the ideological bias of this piece, and perhaps that of the author as well.
6
The number of H1B's available is less than 100k per year. And that is not just for computer science jobs, but for non-US citizens who want to work here in a variety of fields. While H1B could be a factor, I doubt this explains all, in the lack of native-born Americans. Just to be clear, the people here on work visas are "legal, lawful, law-abiding" to use your expression.
Jobs (IT or manufacturing) being offshored to other countries is a completely different question from whether non-US citizens should be allowed to come here to work.
7
"The number of H1B visas available is less than 100K per year."
According to the Wikipedia entry on H1B visas, "in 2015, there were 348,669 applicants for the H-1B filed of which 275,317 were approved."
The picture is more complex than the yearly number approved. Visas are approved for three years and are renewable for another three years. If the visa obtains sponsorship for a green card, the visa is renewable indefinitely until the green card comes through.
It's also important to note that the term "H1B" is often used in conversation as shorthand for a whole host of visas, including L1 and OPT, among others. All of these are used to replace American STEM workers, or circumvent hiring them, and that's before you get to the whole question of offshoring.
The problem is much bigger than 100K jobs per year.
7
Hilarious how the drop in foreign applications to grad programs is immediately attributed to Trump's immigration policies, without giving thought to the unending string of US government false flag terror attacks against American citizens such as Orlando, Las Vegas, Boston, Sandy Hook, New York, etc. These are almost 100% CIA/FBI manufactured events according to high-level ex-CIA operatives.
So, prs, care to share your sources?
I love this false flag stuff. It sounds so sophisticated.
On the other hand, if your statement is accurate, I would think foreign students would flock to US schools, because every false flag terror attack on American students would mean more jobs for me!
This article focuses on IT too much. I know something about engineering, having a masters degree does little to nothing in actually engineering things. Now if you want to do research or teach it is something. And if we have fewer foreigners we might have more Americans or less waste. As indicated a masters degree is mostly a waste of money, even in areas where it is required like social work.
5
In engineering a Ph.D. may be a route essentially directed toward teaching. In other areas of science, like chemistry, a mater degree is little more than an extension of undergraduate work, whereas a Ph.D. has much more important job implications
4
Actually, if memory serves, getting a Masters degree in engineering is a statistically positive economic tradeoff (tuition+opportunity cost vs. future earning potential) whereas getting a Ph. D. is not. In my (40 years of) experience, the M. S. or M. E. is a good indicator of professional success; people with Masters degrees have achieved a decent level of proficiency in their subject area compared with those with only undergraduate degrees. People with Ph. D.s are rare in engineering practice, but my personal experience as one of them suggests that it can be an extremely valuable professional credential. Getting a Masters is seldom a waste of money, and getting a Ph. D. doesn't need to be.
2
Or Architecture.
American kids are too lazy. FACTS
7
There is no practical need to get a graduate degree in computer science, and most American students know that the market for PhD's in many other fields is poor: one can make a better living as a trash collector than as an adjunct professor.
Also, there is no shortage of highly qualified programmers in this country. The H1-B program is used to drive down wages by in effect making foreign workers indentured servants who are barred from taking a job with a company that offers higher wages.
278
Yeah right. Hope you did not discourage your own kids from pursuing math and science.
1
Facts are rough, right Pete?
My son graduates from college in May, without a STEM degree. He already has accepted a job offer with an amazing company and will start at more than I make after teaching for 15 years.
His friends with excellent grades in math, science, and engineering degrees have not gotten any offers. H1-B is a huge problem.
STEM is a lie that American kids see through and they're certainly not going to double-down on a bad idea by going to grad school.
16
Petey, as an engineer and physics major I'd hardly do that.
My point was that graduate degrees aren't usually necessary in computer science, and that there is currently a massive oversupply of PhD's, meaning that in many fields (not all) the job market is terrible.
5
I wonder how many lower caste Indians, such as the Dalits, are heading to NYU for grad degrees. Probably very few. Half of India's population - over 500 million people - lack access to toilets. No wonder those with money send their children to the US to get grad degrees - and green cards. Then, the parents can escape India as well via the US's immigration policy which focuses on family reunification.
Graduate education for students from India, Pakistan and China is a well-trod road to becoming a legal resident in the US and being able to import one's family members and save them from living without toilets.
7
At least in China’s case it’s the true, due to single child policy, they don’t have extended immediate family anymore, they can only sponsor their parents after they become citizens. But if the parents can pay 60k a year for graduate school for their child, why would they want come to a foreign land with no social life in their 50 and no job prospect.
3
In my experience, housing Chinese students in my apartment, they all come here with a basic living allowance and tuition paid by their government. Education in the US costs Chinese families $0.00, regardless of universities chosen.
3
In the Life Sciences, the American Grad Student is not disappearing, but the
face of American academic science is disappearing. American Life Science Graduate students are opting of a career in academics. As a consequence,
the professoriate is aging with no relief in sight. There are multiple reasons for this including the greed of academic institutions for money from overhead which are included in every NIH grant award. Students are not stupid. They see how much effort their advisors have to struggle to meeting institutional demands for
overhead in a climate where the NIH payline is less than 20%. These days
academics in biology spend half of their time writing and rewriting grants - at the
expense of their research program and the mentoring of their students.
It is now commonplace for academic promotions to be directly linked with
the ability of a professor to bring in overhead for the institution from grants.
Is is any wonder that once graduate students are made aware of the realities of
academic survival- they opt out?
15
This has been the case for engineering post graduate programs at least since the '80s when I was a graduate student. US citizen.
DoD-related research contracts in my department needed US citizens. I was forced of the non-DoD research was working on, by my department, to require me to do my thesis research on a DoD project. It wasn't related to the technology of the employer I was on leave from. So I left and joined an engineering program at another university and things worked out well, except for the lost time. But this difficulty was directly to the very small number of Americans in the program.
Those from outside the US that I've known in my decades-long engineering career are by and large stellar individuals and great contributors and entrepreneurs in our society. However, if they are to be discouraged from bringing their talents to this country, then those who need employees in the engineering disciplines (and not just computer science which gets outsize attention from the media) need to bring rewards and compensation more in line with the other professions, including the finance industry, with which these programs compete for US citizen grad students.
7
As an engineering professor, I've seen many talented U.S. students decide against an advanced degree. U.S. student applications are preferred because students can in general better communicate with undergraduate students and research sponsors. They also have completed coursework that often is better connected with graduate level courses. Despite this preference, small numbers of U.S. applicants in combination with large numbers of international applicants yields the small proportions of U.S. graduate students that this article reports. Main drivers for the low interest in graduate school by U.S. students are the high availability of good-paying jobs requiring only a bachelor's degree and the shortening time frames for returns on investment by companies. Companies have less need for engineers with advanced degrees when they place reduced emphasis on research and development. This lessened need results in a smaller salary advantage and also diminishes differences in career trajectories. Given all of this, an effective response for U.S. engineering colleges would be to revitalize undergraduate engineering education so that engineers are better able to utilize modern tools such as advanced computational models and work effectively within multi-disciplinary design teams.
14
I'm currently in a doctoral program myself, but not in any STEM fields. I haven't really seen this same trend in the Humanities and Social Sciences (if you have seen them at your university please do share!). Being at a R1 institution it is no lie that the university heavily recruits from abroad not because of the high skills these students have worked hard at, but because of how heavily they charge them. It astounds me when looking at domestic-in state, domestic-out of state, and international charges respectively. How is it that one bracket, on face value, is up-charged for the same education I am receiving? Even consensus amongst graduate students at my university is that higher education "preys" on these students for the money they bring in (even at the undergraduate level). However, this is not to say that my or other international peers aren't highly qualified to pursue a MA or PhD in their respective programs. I just don't think it is as innocent as saying international students are more qualified, I think a lot of them could get a wonderful education with the skills they have for cheaper, but maybe US universities have too much perceived "prestige" value to consider otherwise. Any thoughts from higher ed. international students on this topic?
13
Could this be because so many American college graduates are struggling with student debt from their undergraduate work that they are afraid to take on even more debt for advanced degrees?
31
I have a STEM Phd and was born in the usa. my colleagues and i agree it was the worst financial decision we could make. Our current jobs, which are considered good but are inline with peers without degrees, will never outweigh the 7 yrs of lost earnings. In addition, our skills restrict our lateral mobility within the job market. One colleague quit and sells life insurance. Many teach high school science.
30
Recent immigrant parents ought to recognize that their children will grow up and be schooled in the educational system that so many commenters here fault for its shortcoming. For all material gain, there will be an immaterial price exacted.
5
It's the OPT visa. If you graduate with any degree from a US college, you can work for 3 years in the US guaranteed. So, international students who want to work in the US get a 2-year Master's in the US, after doing undergrad in their home country. It's cheaper than paying for a 4-year undergraduate degree in the US (which would also work). In many STEM fields, Master's are not really required, so these international students wanting the visa are filling the programs. And the schools make them pay full price, so the schools like it.
12
I currently have 8 graduate students. 2 are foreign, 6 are american. This isn't by 'design', but some of that 80% foreign grad student figure is by design. Shamefully, there are a number of professors that solely recruit and support foreign PhD students because of a combination of racial prejudices and the ability to 'work' the foreign students harder (since they can't as easily just up and walk out when you overwork them). I am talking about maybe 1 in 10 professors in the STEM fields, it isn't a lot, but it should be called out more often than it is. That being said, the overriding factor is that too many American students just plain don't think more than 2 years in the future. They graduate with a BS and want to get a job, then 5 years from now, they find themselves rather unsatisfied professionally as colleagues with advanced degrees surpass them. I've managed to recruit a few of our best BS students towards at least getting an MS (I am talking about STEM careers here), but it is hard for them to think about what they want to be doing in 10 years and they just don't see that many colleagues forging ahead towards advanced degrees. So there is indeed, a 'disappearing American grad student'. While I may get an email a-day from an interested foreign graduate student, I get maybe a half dozen applications and contacts A YEAR from Americans interested in an advanced degree.
6
Federal agencies encourage the hiring of foreign post-docs because of cost.
A friend of mine put an American post-doc on his NIH grant application with a salary higher than the going rate. The man had six years of experience in the speciality my friend needed, three spent at an prestigious university in Switzerland. The SRA called questioning why he wanted to hire this expensive guy. Could not he hire a Chinese for less? My friend did not budge and was asked to write letter of justification. This was the last grant he got from NIH.
Now you know what NIH Director Collins means when he refers to the 'talent' the country desperately needs.
8
You are conflating 2 unrelated problems. PhD rate are fixed by the NIH. The problem was hiring someone with 6 years experience for a post-doc position. The second candidate could have been an American, your colleague would have had the same problem.
Most Americans don't want to work in research because it does not make enough money.
4
I am surprised no one has made a comment here about White Privilege.
My guess is that most of the comments will be lamentations about the need for more government funding of education OR free education. White Privilege accusations will have to wait another day.
4
What’s missing from this article is the “S” in STEM. Many graduate students in the sciences are there because they dream of working in academics, not because they want to land a high-paying job as quickly as possible. A person with a bachelor’s degree does not have enough knowledge or experience to teach or mentor graduate students, and likely would find it very difficult to compete for grant money or run their own lab, let alone engage in research at the highest academic levels. Some of us are in graduate school to learn more because it is a necessity for what we want to do in life.
8
Were the locals admitted?
4
I have many friends in grad school - both international and US born.
I see two primary reasons for the high percentage of foreign born grads.
1) They work hard and seek higher education. Not to stereotype, but foreign students are the ones who stay in the library on Friday nights. As a whole they focus on education far more than most US citizens from my observations.
2) Domestic students network more and gain better jobs initially. In reality, hard work is half the battle. The other half is getting the top jobs. Many US students are more willing and have an easier time to join clubs, Greek life, etc, that connects them with employment. They have less of a reason to go to grad school than the brilliant international student that lacks some of the soft skills and did not get a desirable job from undergrad
6
Not a STEM grad myself, but I feel as though I saw the reasoning before I read the article. If comp sci undergrads are walking into good jobs upon graduation, why go to grad school? I wonder if a greater percentage of Americans are opting for MBAs mid-career rather than tech grad degrees...
1
Perhaps some of the students in the photo are American? It's disappointing that the Times would rely on stereotypes that equate Asians with foreignness/the threat of invasion (yellow peril) for the sake of sensationalism. Many international students are from other parts of the world.
The title is also misleading. The article suggests that the main reason that there aren't as many American students in STEM graduate programs is that Americans are finding jobs after undergrad. There is no need for them to pursue a graduate degree. International students aren't outcompeting Americans for slots in grad school, yet the title and photo imply that. Graduate school can be expensive, and it might not be worth the investment and opportunity cost for many Americans in STEM. International students may have different motivations: a US degree can make them stand out on the market back home, they need a US credential to show that they have the language and cultural skills to work in the US, or simply to have their training from abroad recognized.
We also need to look carefully at individual graduate programs before assuming that American students are at a disadvantage. The Tandon graduate program in engineering is ranked 45th by U.S New; the returns on this degree may be low for Americans. Also, some Master’s programs, some that target international students specifically, are viewed as “cash cows” that provide financing for the department or other programs (e.g. some US LLM programs).
13
Why is this an issue? This what the Left and the NYT wants and continues to push for: for Americans to be replaced and subsumed by people from anywhere else. You could just call the article "The Disappearing American."
8
We've turned many of our colleges into NFL training camps and left education to those raised with a better appreciation for it.
13
This story sadly does not adddess differences in funding for foreign students vs American. Are foreigners subsidized?Wealthy? How about affordability of graduate school for Americans? Maybe Americans just can't afford it with pull back in grants and rising tuition. We don't know and this article reports the subject in a money vacuum.
8
In STEM fields, MOST traditional (aka. full time) graduate students are subsidized through research and teaching assistantships that are given at the discretion of professors. This comes with tuition waivers. Indeed though, you make a point in that many US-born graduate students are not aware that if you go into graduate school full-time right after your BS, you can often (though it is sometimes hard) find a professor willing to support you with assistantships.
2
Similar to Mark, my institution also provides funding for their PhD students, though any competitive program in the US does this. It would be foolish to attend a university where you would be paying for 6 years. However, there is great difference between R1, R2, and R3 universities (how intensive their research funding is). Frequently, large state schools are R1 or any of the Ivys'. This means these institutions have more funding through whichever department you apply to. As a result, it is much more expensive for a PhD program to cover international students costs (they are charged at a higher tier at most universities), than domestic. However, there is also the question of qualifications and how many apply in the application cycle each year.
2
"Americans are spoiled lazy," as Henry Hill puts the words into his father's mouth early in the film "Goodfellas." And now they have electronic toys to eat up their time and in many cases their very souls. Social networks, apps, fun and games await. Who wants to go to those boring lectures for months on end, when Daddy has already given one everything?
9
How is financial engineering a STEM thing? Seems like bidness to me.
5
As a teacher in a 'prestigious' New England boarding school here's what I see:
The Asian students put away their phones when entering the classroom, the 'locals' nestle it covertly, so they think, in their laps, eyes drifting downward.
10
U.S. students don't bother because they can't compete with foreign governments who pay tuition in cash and the cash strapped departments who need them.
7
the biggest country we have in this matter, as well as many others, is that it is virtually impossible to challenge the status quo in the united states.
Once a group or industry attains some level of prevalence in the US, it has so many levers available to ensuring favorable treatment from all levels of the government.
...and if you happen to be edged out slightly by one of those groups, well, those levers are there to keep you out.
America rewards winners...only. Runners up, or also outstanding, or very good...all synonyms for 'loser' in this benighted system.
4
I'm an American STEM graduate degree holder. If I'm honest, I would rather be a car mechanic or a cop. All make the same money. And I'm very comfortable and make a good living. So do cops and high tier mechanics. The return for graduate STEM schooling, compared to my alternatives, is basically absolutely zero. This is why no sane Americans do it. It doesn't pay, on average. I did it for passion alone, because I could and wanted to.
My job market is entirely controlled by the influx of foreign graduate students and visa workers. 8/10 people in the field came here after college. We all make good money, but less than an attorney or medical doctor -- i.e., our American job market peers, who got the same grades and test scores. We make about the same as an operating room nurse or something like that.
All in all, the STEM job market is really not in America at all. It exists on stateless ground. It does not pay American wages -- American wages would be roughly double what we are paid. The notion that Americans do not know how to do STEM, or lack the IQ necessary, is complete bollocks, of course. The truth is the job market was debased by visa fraud, and graduate programs were sold out by the academics, who don't have any special regard for the US, as such, in the first place. I like what I do and enjoy my colleagues diverse perspectives. But the reason why Americans are not among them is pure dollars and cents, mainly the actions of corporate employers.
16
What is the degree in financial engineering? But I am afraid to ask.
5
Ph.D.s, even in many STEM fields, are scams. There aren’t enough jobs to justify the production.
3
That is a topic of careful debate in academics. In most S and M programs, I agree with you (though in all levels from BS to PhD, there is more S graduates than jobs that need them). In the T and the E fields though, you are quite wrong. PhDs in E fields have very lucrative job prospects still (in industry/consulting/government more so than academics of course).
A lot of it is cultural, many foreign students come from cultures where an advanced degree dramatically improves your social status. Not so much here.
Also, foreign students are somewhat more docile vis a vis the American professors, who employ them as teaching assistants and research assistants. In most cases the academic quality is fine and the only issue is weak English language skills which make them problematic as teaching assistants. But this is only a problem for the undergraduates in their classes, and unfortunately the undergrads have little to say in the matter.
11
Meritocracy might be the answer to your question of why the locals don't strive for advanced degrees? In most developing countries it is still possible to move up with a some extra brain smarts, but in the most advanced countries it is those with the connections that make the big bucks and no matter how well trained you are, more training ain't going to give you the boost that connections do. The rich got it fixed for themselves.
21
The area is ripe for disruption - build machines that read text, and the only skill of value will be deep language skills, more likely held by native speakers of English. How far away? - now working on an interface to a human-readable dictionary. No point training someone for five years in a skill a machine can read about in one year, and then tell its mates in a second. Nothing to do with machine learning - too primitive a concept to be taken seriously.
You got it wrong, it ain't english any more it's Chinese language skills that are going to be the game changers.
3
The US public school system has been watered down to make it appear that all students are succeeding to appease the general public. Challenging programs of study are frowned upon. I know this as a retired teacher. A dear friend who teaches advanced high school science is not allowed to give anything less than a C according to her principal. Our public education system is being demolished by those who want to privatize it. The result of all this is the dumbing down of education, hence many US students are not prepared for the rigor of a reputable university.
20
Ellie, I cannot agree with you more. I see this every day where I live. Young people who can't give you change in a store because they cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide. When "everyone gets a trophy" when you hit the real world you cannot succeed. We have ruined the education system in the US.
11
I applaud non-US people studying here. The problem is not just a lack of US citizens in graduate STEM programs, but undergraduate as well. We are graduating more marketing, sociology, and other majors (which are all worthwhile), then STEM majors. If the future economy is STEM + AI (part of STEM), then we are educating people for jobs that will not exist.
2
I was an international graduate student in the early 2000s. I am now a naturalized American citizen with more than a decade working in Silicon Valley and spending majority of my adult life in the US. I've paid my share of taxes over all these years. My masters degree at a top 10 school was funded by the American taxpayer. My undergraduate degree was funded by taxpayers in an Asian country, where I've never paid taxes, but my physician parents both did for their entire careers. In my former country this phenomenon is called brain-drain, as the educated emigrate. America came out on top gaining a trained engineer and a taxpayer but at the cost of investing in the graduate degree.
7
I recently got my MLIS degree, at the age of 58, simply because I felt like doing so. Keeping the old mind active and all that.
We had few foreign students in our class (possibly because people do not travel across the world to study Library Science). One student was from Kuwait; he already had a master's degree in LIS from his country, but his government sent him to the US for further study, so that he could go back to Kuwait and set up a modern library system for them.
Many of my coworkers in Silicon Valley were from China (both mainland and Taiwan) and India. Many of the Chinese planned to take their new skills back to their native countries and set up businesses. Most of them had earned advanced degrees at American universities. Most of the Indians I worked with had also studied in America, but planned to stay here.
Obviously, American universities and colleges are a big draw, some of the best in the world.
2
I think this lopsidedness in favor of international students for graduate degrees makes a lot of sense. I came to the US with an undergrad in computer science from a foreign university that few companies here had heard of. In order to be taken seriously and to broaden my horizons beyond programming, I had to go to grad school ( a tech based MBA) in the US to get exposure to recruiters and the broader business community. And just like the foreign students profiled here, it worked out very well for me. It also helped that I did not have mountains of student debt that the typical undergrad carries and which makes the decision to go to graduate school harder.
7
How much "sense" is it going to make for your children when they reach college age? Are you be willing to send them back to your home country only so that life keeps making "sense"?
1
Desperate people in desperate times do desperate things and US colleges and universities along with US corporations will gladly take advantage of this desperation by making education more globally "competitive" and US corporations more globally "competitive" which simply translates into more and more people globally clamouring for fewer spots in the college classroom (higher prices more selectivity) and more and more people clamouring for fewer and fewer jobs which translates into lower and lower wages and benefits.
6
If the opportunity to work whether as OPT or H1B is not possible then many student's parents will lose their houses in India. The houses are mortgaged typically between usd 30,000 to usd 70,000 to fund these graduate programs of their children. It is their American dream.
8
Hmmm, an H1-B visa worker will get offered less money than an American citizen. Why bother educating Americans? Let's encourage Americans to major in liberal arts, not Science and Math. End of Story: Corporate Greed, the 1 percenters rule.
7
We may have too many lazy young people in our country and they have a good life without a graduate education. College education is already good enough. For foreign students they have more competitions both at home and abroad. Graduate education is a necessity for foreign students. I have a Chinese friend he has a PhD in engineering and his son and grandsons only have undergraduate degrees in computer science but all of them have a high incomes. They have no plan to go to graduate schools.
1
As an American-born student in an elite STEM masters program, I can confirm that this is very much the case. I am one of the only native English speakers in my class. Interestingly, this enrollment trend may soon decline -- not because Americans have suddenly become more studious (quite the contrary), but because America's brand is in tatters.
As far as my foreign peers are concerned, this is the country of daily mass shootings, xenophobic news coverage, and outrageous tuition bills. On top of that, OPT visa requirements are both expensive ($410 is merely the application fee) and onerous. Many bright foreigners from here on out will simply choose to study in Europe, which offers greater comfort, less hassle, and the chance to graduate without six figures of debt. And as for students currently here, rest assured they are already rushing for the exits.
This is a pity. In my experience, foreign students have had a stronger work ethic, greater breadth of knowledge, and a less cloistered worldview than my fellow Americans. And, statistically speaking, they are far more likely than a compatriot to found a successful company upon graduating.
38
As someone with a graduate degree in STEM and works in the technology industry, I can tell you that degrees are not what gets you hired. Few hire with a graduate degree requirement even when times are bad. The degree does not make you a great engineer. Being a great engineer is not something you can learn in a college program. The great ones are self learners. They don't need the degree. Universities are businesses and this barometer is more a metric for how well the universities are doing than how well Americans are preparing for technology employment. The universities aim to grow revenue, and they will find students however they can to achieve their revenue targets. There are way too many inexpensive opportunities today for talented students to find the education they need to achieve their goals.
3
I would be very surprised if employers while looking at applications would buy the "self learner" story. There are too many competing that already have both the talent and the degree. Talent cannot be measured by a resume. What "inexpensive" opportunities are there that can be had and that can demonstrate to an employer that an applicant has the skills and talent to do the job?
2
Too hard, too much work, cuts into video game time. American women steering clear of STEM. Nobody wants to study foreign languages.
6
I am never surprised to hear numbers like these. Most young Americans of this generation are docile and lacking in curiosity. I really think we are doing something very wrong in our child rearing the past few decades. Kids expect stuff to be handed to them.
10
Even in many technical fields, the US vastly overproduces masters degree and PhD candidates. In non technical fields, including law but not medicine, the overproduction is more like 2X to 3X. Thus, the uber drivers. It doesn't help to have a president who obviously places low value on education and is anti-intellectual to the extreme.
13
Uber drivers with a math degree, baristas with a degree in chemistry, and neuroscience postdocs moving into entry-level marketing all too common here in Boston have told me the answer: no pay, and indentured servitude even in the sacred hallways and labs of MIT and Harvard, not to say, in public institutions...
17
The drop is real especially after Trump and the hanging doubt over H1B continuation. Graduate degree investment is substantial and especially for those who are coming from likes of India, China given the dollar exchange rate. For many the job offer post graduation and atleast some chance to pay loan off before returning is needed and real. Given uncertainity for employers and an already dwindling pool of companies willing to sponsor H1B and invest in a new employee the students look for other avenues like Australia and Canada. I would also suggest looking into admit rates in those places to see if those planning to go abroad are increasingly seeking other countries welcoming them.
For American students, already indebted to their undergrad loans Grad degree is significant investment especially given the lost income of those two years. Needs significant rewards to motivate. And payoff is not proportionate. For those coming from other countries the pay off is clear. a 8K salary in India vs a 80K salary here.
To get admitted into these top notch colleges from a population 1.3 bn people usually means those who make it here are significantly motivated too and are really the cream of those countries for most part.
Scholarships in STEM for american citizens might go a long way to swing the balance. Providing a clear path to work for those who are talented enough to get a job offer from the good universities and a way to pay off loans will ensure applicant pool and talent stays.
4
There are hundreds of reasons this is true, one of the more arcane being that the language and actual letters in the Chinese alphabet lend the brain toward mathematical thinking.
I was raised in the U.S. in the 50's with the Sputnik era, new math, the race to space, but could care less about STEM. The only time I use math is to see what time it is. Is it not OK that others have skills that I don't and they can practice them? I am grateful someone cares about STEM and can get educated and find work in their field of passion. Global approaches work well for us!
3
The Chinese language doesn't have an alphabet. They don't have letters. Chinese characters represent syllables. Even if they did have an alphabet, that assertion is specious. It doesn't explain Russian excellence in math. Or historic Greek and Arab excellence in Math. You of course know that Algebra is an Arabic word. Those languages all have more-or-less typical alphabets, not at all arcane.
15
I thought America voted overwhelmingly in most parts of the country to return to blue collar jobs. Coal mining, steel production, manufacturing.
Voted to say science doesn’t matter
Voted against development of new technology to protect the environment and expand fossil fuels
The majority of white men and women voted for their children to work on factories.
So this is fake news.
40
Not to mention that the majority of Republicans think going to college is a waste of time!
15
American Universities and Graduate Schools are a legitimate entry point for legal immigration. Foreign students take up coursework in areas that have a clear path to jobs; computer science/engineering is the current hot field for this---this is not rocket science!
5
My advice to stem people: Go only to grad school, if your employer pays for it.
My advice to aspiring academics: Be aware that your career may undergo a drastic change come 45. The traditional master-apprentice system and a lack of mandatory retirement in academia will see to it that there will always be plenty more contenders than funding agencies and universities are able to keep on the payroll.
4
Frankly, as a parent of children in college, excellent colleges, I'm rather sick and tired of hearing about American laziness, etc. My guess is that there are the same percentage of driven American students as there are driven international students, we just take note of the driven international and the lazy American. We have amazing people here and they should be treated as well as the international students.
13
Deb: I disagree with you -- we compare the 'universe' of US students with the 'cream' of international students.
3
Deb's comment in regards to funding of universities and research is spot on. The Trump administration favors deep cuts in federal funds for research; federal agencies are now run by people who openly scorn facts, knowledge, and expertise in their domains; and many red states are attacking education budgets with chain saws. Guess an informed electorate is seen as a threat to Republican politicians.
4
not really. India has invented the inverted education system. Schools are more expensive than colleges. It is beautiful entry barrier to the lower class and keeps the competition in higher education away. For most poor are unable to afford good schooling and result in poor scores and are unable to access the cheap government colleges.
If Indian universities were good, students will not flock to usa. Indian universities are riddled with nepotism, corruption, mismanagement and government interference leading to very poor outcomes. The government is throwing money but is unlikely to improve matters.
1
I think because American education encouraged “art”.
4
...and majors in international communication, home economics and human leadership.
3
The dean of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth says, “If there are one or two more years of comparable 20 to 30 percent decreases in international applications, we’re very concerned about our ability to conduct research and spin off and start companies." However, doesn't he realize that research and new companies aren't that important? We'll have coal!
12
Young people involved in postgraduate math and science means that there were public school children being inspired to learn math and science. America is woefully short of competent teachers of math at all levels. That our postgraduate college programs depend on foreign born students is not new and should not surprise. Just as we ignore the wellbeing of persons based on variables of income and skin colour, we also undereducate large numbers of American born children. Have not the foreign born contributed immensely to the founding and growth of this great country? What's new?
7
I think it is largely a wealth effect. In my generation, even children of working class parents could not have thought of pursuing a higher degree without merit based scholarships (in India or abroad). Now, with commodification of degree programs (in India as well as abroad) with many universities offering good quality education and many moving up the wealth ladder, high ranking degree programs are becoming fairly accessible. Perhaps, domestic candidates are not exactly shrinking if one looks at the absolute numbers or the ones that are not going for higher education are second generation immigrants. These are just the conjectures. My feeling is that Americans are certainly not slipping back or away.
2
I work at a university, and one of the primary reasons (I believe) is because many foreign countries (such as China and India) see education as an investment in the future, and therefore are willing to provide funds for their young people to earn their graduate degrees. Most of these foreign students don't have to pay a dime in tuition, whereas American students are forced to take out thousands in loans and go into debt.
18
not really. Most Indians mortgage their houses to pay US college fees. I have done the same for my daughter. We stake our houses for their education.
1
Interesting to read the comments here. We have been hiring more senior level software engineers for a few months. The salary is industry-standard. All the applicants we've had have been first generation immigrants. Good for them... there's a decent job & they are applying. But I don't get it - where are the American born engineers? The Trump crowd keeps complaining about immigrants, but how can we hire Americans if they won't even apply for the job?
15
My thoughts are that the Americans cannot afford the tuition for graduate schools especially after incurring as much as $50K-$100K for undergrad education; whereas the international students are from the rich families overseas. Also, the universities are "greed" oriented these days as their CEO's and administrations want to be paid like CEO's and executives in Corporate America so they want the money from international students and give very little scholarships to the poor American students.
11
Most of the foreign students are not from rich families, their countries are willing to pay for their education because unlike the United States they see investing in education as an investment in the future.
14
Clearly you know nothing about graduate STEM education in the US. Most programs do not even admit students without full support. To be clear graduate STEM students in research programs are paid $20,000 - $30,000 per year _plus_ tuition and fees. This is for research degrees. Professional degrees are off the rack. The debt problem does not exist for competent STEM graduate students.
5
Seriously.....it’s obvious....the cost of a graduate degree is prohibitive!
3
You get paid to go into Ph.D. programs in STEM in the U.S. and the tuition is waived. People need to realize that being a graduate student in STEM is a paid job, so saying 'the cost of a graduate degree is prohibitive!" is simply false in STEM.
Add to the fact that being a graduate student is a better paid job than fast food and Walmart, the lure of immediate entry into the U.S. under a student visa, and there is no wonder why the majority of STEM graduate students are from outside the U.S.
3
No competent STEM student in a research oriented degree incurs any expense. They are paid to attend school, $20,000-$30,000 per year is typical _plus_ tuition and fees!!! You clearly know nothing about research degree in physics and engineering. You pay big money for second tier professional or even worse for for profit schools. Debt is a myth in STEM especially engineering. It is an investment.
3
except that you are giving up 2-5 years of 'acute; earning'.
This administration does not value science or math or anything else that has made this country technologically great in the past. It values racism, the Bible and easy well connected days on Wall Street, our market does nothing but go up up up with full employment and short-term profits as we destroy the last of our natural resources. That's all that's important, the market is going up.
Students today believe that they are working very hard; they don't know what it means to study.
7
I can relate to what's described in this article more deeply than some readers, as I immigrated to the United States a long time ago after being accepted into a prestigious graduate school, to pursue a PhD in science.
To answer the question "why" in the context of this article one needs to realize that there is a confluence of factors here:
- indeed, as already noted, there is an overproduction of PhDs in this country... At the same time, I've seen many cases when trained scientists found rewarding careers in industry and as entrepreneurs.
- this abundance of PhDs was a well known phenomenon even 25+ years ago and its stems from the fact that schools depend on grad students for both research and teaching labor force. It makes sense economically for them to hire a large number of people who will serve as TAs and later as low paid research assistants who would be locked in that position for YEARS working hard to accomplished the goals of another research grant.
- people born in the US are less inclined to assign some sort of poetic, moral or philosophical value to pursuit of science. I met tons of undergrads (also as a TA) and they were all clueless about what they wanted in life, so a lot of them went for career tracks in law or medicine without even having specific enthusiasm for any of this profession and only caring about securing some sort of decent future. BORING.
- finally... plain laziness. Sorry but that (and complacency) is a part of the big picture.
19
Don't forget beer. Partying is a problem.
3
For those who do not have much knowledge about graduate schools in the US, it should be pointed out that masters programs and phd programs work in very different ways. The majority of masters students have to pay tuition fees while virtually no phd students have to pay. The fees paid by international students, as they are all out-of-state students, to those public universities are much higher than domestic graduate students, at least double. Given the fact the a masters program in STEM fields could cost more than $30 K a year and does not necessarily increase the job prospect, domestic students would have to think twice before making a commitment. After several budget cuts by the state and federal governments, many universities have fell short on their budgets. The easiest way might be just to milk those "cash cows". They simply went all out in effort to lure international students because they mean more revenue. And in the job market, those IT companies, especially in the Silicon valley, have long been addicted to those indentured and hardworking H1B workers. If you are an American student who might be interested in one of those graduate STEM programs, you might have to be prepared to compete against those cheaper foreign workers once you leave school, provided that you can afford the cost and graduate. Looks like those universities and big companies are not really helping the future engineers and scientists from US.
11
i'm in a science field at a large east coast university. frankly i can find 10 motivated, highly skilled international students for every 1 american undergrad. Our students just don't have the base in math, science and analytic thinking that we need in my program. And our really good undergraduates end up matriculating to finance where the pay is high and relatively easy. as a society we just don't value science. in many other countries, science and math and advance education in such a field is a source of pride. something parents wish for their children and something kids grow up wanting to pursue.
21
Jan, that's definitely part of it, but it is also about money. I received a M.A. in microbiology where I was one of 3 Americans (and the only African-American) in the entire program. Foreign students receive grants and scholarships from their home countries where Americans have to pay nearly $100,000 for a graduate degree which often means taking out loans and going into debt.
8
At the university were I worked we also had plenty international undergraduate and graduate students. Since about 1990 they have originated mainly from The People's Republic of China, Korea and India. None was supported by their government. I recall that international students on foreign government scholarships were common in the 1970s. They came from countries like Iraq, Libya and Nigeria.
3
Could it be that the US public education is simply not producing STEM ready students with the grades to complete a STEM undergraduate degree at a level that would permit entry to grad school, and the private system has no interest in STEM subjects as they are not necessary for entry to preferred professions
4
Well, good for NYU and all the other STEM universities who are recruiting talented foreign students. Now, lets get these hard working students to graduate, get them jobs here in the US (with either domestic or foriegn companies), make them citizens, harness their creativity and then they can become high income taxpayers. We need all the taxpayers (from wherever they were born) that we can round up with the US Government running trillion dollar/year deficits!
36
Your plan would work, but for the fact that companies keep off-shoring jobs and desire cheap labor.
8
The problem with these foreign 'talent' schemes is that the new comers with their high-end salaries will neither be able nor willing to pay for the needs of the ever-growing pile of home-grown 'deadwood'.
1
Its really quite simple. America is producing too many PhD's for the current job market. My friend has a PhD in Chemistry, and when applying for jobs, he is one of hundreds vying for a SINGLE position. It just doesn't make sense for most of us to get many of these advanced degrees. My niece by marriage is a PhD researcher at Ohio State, but her own sister, who has a PhD in Biochemistry, now teaches primary school in England, and is much happier than when she was competing for a place in academia or industry. People want lives, they want flexibility and they want time for their non-work interests. A PhD may have, at one time, been a ticket to a secure job and a stable career, but those days are long gone. Many of us are better off, working at a career with more flexibility and portability.
27
The USA contains less then 5% of the worlds 7.5 billion people. Many of them want to immigrate here. For people smart enough to get a Ph.D., becoming a U.S. based graduate student is the best legal way to get here, likely with an option to stay when the degree is completed.
Few positions require a Ph.D. so the incentive for existing U.S citizen students is much less.
7
This is totally correct, and please add that becoming a U.S. graduate student is not only "the the best legal way to get here"....but also to be paid to get here.
4
is this a race issue or a cultural problem? the US gave up on education long ago so wheres's the news.
This story, among developed nations, is strictl a US problem.
2
It's not a race issue , it's a class/money issue. I'm African-American and extraordinarily lucky that my parent were about to pay the nearly $200,000 in tuition I needed to get a B.A. and an M.A. in biology. Most Americans cannot afford that whereas foreign students receive scholarships and grants from their home countries.
America needs to start investing in education again. Unfortunately, republicans have convinced too many people that providing funds for education is communist.
7
Of course Americans aren't getting graduate degrees. Most people who go to grad school are looking to do research and most research is still done at universities. Some want to do research and teach students and that obviously is done exclusively at universities. Anyone who pays attention knows there probably is not a group of highly educated, brilliant people who are demonized as much as American professors. When they aren't demonized as a bunch of communists, they are frequently portrayed as a bunch of unionized takers, especially if they work in public universities. Finally, let's not forget they are paid about as well as the average college bachelor's graduate in the same field and work twice as hard. Unless you work in the private sector PhDs are for suckers or masochists. I know few PhDs who encourage their children or relatives to go for a graduate education. It used to be a valued, cherished, respected degree but no longer.
11
Keitk, your facts are incorrect. A scientist with a PhD doing research for a private (such as for pharmaceutical companies) or government (such as the CDC) research can make upwards of $200,000 per year.
1
The 'demonized' professors tend to be in humanities and social sciences. STEM professors are not normally demonized nor are they much involved in the 'culture war gobbledygook' currently raging on U.S. campuses. They often have rewarding careers with no 'boss' hovering over them, creating new knowledge and opportunities. It is, however, very difficult to obtain these positions, since there is such an excess of Ph.D holders in STEM fields.
1
Sally,
Huh? I never said phds in the private sector make little money. In fact I clearly excluded them from the suckers and masochists in academia. Now that you bring it up though they don't usually make as much as you say. I know many STEM PhDs from nation's best universities and few can get good academic jobs. indeed many go into the private sector (not the subject of my post though). Most left their degree behind however and work crunching numbers or some such endeavor. I only know three who are making even close to the money you mention whether they are working in their field or not. BTW just as a small percentage of PhDs in the private sector make 200K or so, so do some profs. I was clearly speaking to general trends though.
1
When I read through other's comments I see a common line of I would love to go to graduate school, but I have too much student debt. The thing that most American student's don't know is that one should apply to a graduate program that will offer them an assistantship/stipend. If the university does not then don't go there. Assistanships are a part of a recruiting technique to get the best students the department can get. If you are not offered one, but still are admitted, then the department is just using you for your money.
A bit of an exception to this that typically master's programs don't offer assistanships. Masters programs are revenue generators for the departments. The more the students the bigger revenue intake to the department.
Running a graduate program is strictly business. Nothing personal. Just like Michael Corleone said.
3
Not that many domestic students want to toil underneath professors who have total control over their lives for few years while earning minimum wage.
Pay grad students more if universities are serious about having more American grad students.
Currently, it makes zero economics sense to be an American grad students.
5
U.S. Ph.D programs in STEM are essentially an immigration platform. First, everyone needs to realize that students are paid, typically $25k-$30k per year, to pursue a Ph.D in STEM, and have their tuition waived, so there is no additional debt to take on. It is actually a modest living, better than an average fast food or Walmart job. For international students this kind of salary and U.S. immigration opportunity are hugely attractive. There is a glut of Ph.D's in STEM areas, the propaganda to the contrary not withstanding, so there is no reason for Americans to pursue a Ph.D. unless they have a pure and deep interest in a STEM subject. Meanwhile, research grants to U.S. faculty require these low paid graduate students to carry out the day to day research so there is a symbiotic system of immigrant students coming in at low wages to do highly specialized research for professors who have grant obligations to fulfill. When they finish their Ph.D’s their quest then begins to change their visa status gradually to permanent residence, usually by claiming that they bring a proven, unique, economically important skill to the U.S. UI.S. citizens simply don’t have to go through this long, expensive immigration gauntlet, so don’t expect them to be graduate students in STEM where there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
17
What many people don't understand is that the professors that decide who to admit to graduate programs are often biased against American citizens!! For example Cornell where I went to graduate school in engineering. The professors admitted that they prefer international students who they think "work harder". What? Why? Many of the professors are from foreign countries, and believe that Americans are lazy. As this article points out, there are plenty of good students who are American and complete their bachelors degrees in STEM. And some of those who apply to graduate school are turned away due to bias against Americans. Or, they are admitted, but not offered monetary stipends, because the monetary support is also up to the discretion of professors (many of whom are from foreign countries). Guess what. Life ain't fair.
1
The great beauty of the American system of graduate education, until recently, was that the student came from foreign places, worked their indentured servitude as a graduate student at an American institute of higher learning and then found a job here and became a United States citizen. These naturalized citizens would eventually raise a family; their children typical become fully integrated into the US culture and are US citizens indistinguishable except for their race, ethnicity, religion, or culture. The great beauty is that they have the same rights as someone whose ancestors landed at Jamestown. We must continue to encourage and recruit the intelligent/talented individuals who want to come to the United States; doing so helps make America great.
The current generation of domestic American students seem to chose not to delay the gratification preempted by pursuit of a higher degree. (If they do not eschew the undergraduate degree altogether). One can argue that we have an education system that results in high debt, and many years of toil to catch up to the material rewards that prompted the journey to a higher education in the first place. As a nation, we have to lower cost for higher education, and we need to start picking winners. If you go into a STEM field or want to teach STEM in the education system, your costs should be significantly lower than your college cohort. If we want more STEM graduates with higher degrees, we should pay for them to go to school.
3
The locals can't hack it because they aren't being taught efficiently, thoroughly, and rigorously. We in America are at the bottom of the heap is educational attainment. Without a strong foundation, the future is a mountain too steep to climb.
American children, as a rule, have no idea how lacking they are in basic knowledge.
Yes, I am a retired teacher and administrator. And my own children attended accelerated schools which were not much better in content, rigor, and scope.
We are a third world country, and our educational systems are going to tumble with DeVoice of Insanity at the helm, chosen by an ignoramus named the Trumpet. God save America!
17
"The Disappearing American Grad Students."
Maybe, you are looking in the wrong place. More American students are probably going into law schools.
That also explains the mess our country is in -- too many lawyers, but not many who follow the law.
4
Law School admission numbers are way down. Do your research, dude.
1
I was a graduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas Austin in the 1980's, 15% of the students, were from the US, 85% non-US students. Not to mention only 7 of the 350 students in the ECE Graduate program were females.
6
Not to worry. Those of these foreigners who settle here will have kids who also imbibe the American value system and don't want to go to grad school. But there will be other foreigners to fill their places. The world is not going to run out of Asians any time soon. Of course that is assuming China hasn't eaten our lunch, breakfast, and dinner by then.
9
A dirty little secret is that universities are becoming dependent on graduate foreign students paying the full international tuition rate. It covers for loss of state funding.
10
American students are smart why work hard for no money. Companies can get foreigners to work cheap
1
i was a lab administrator and had this conversation with the PI why there were only a handful of american students; when the lab was dominated by chinese, indian and a couple of brits. the foreign students excelled in grades, commitment and they had the benefit of their governments picking up the tab. unlike their american counterparts, who were certain to be weighed down by tens of thousands in student debt.
3
There is no simple answer to a complicated question. However, many foreign science students love science more than anything else. For them, the American dream is to be able to learn top notch science and to practice it. They often come from poor countries, and have not known any luxuries in life, and do not want them. All they want is science. America has opened her doors to them, and they have paid back handsomely. It is hard to compete against such devotion and idealism.
7
I earned my PhD in Engineering/Atmospheric Physics in 1982, I am near retirement from a life of being scientist studying climate & hurricanes. It's been a good and interesting life ... but not easy, not easy at all ... even though I made tenure, had by most standards a good but not truly exceptional career.
It's obvious why very few Americans are going into the sciences now: long hard training, years of living poor, uncertainty of whether you'll make it, and what "it" will be. All the way until about age 55 I felt it necessary to keep a "plan B" (returning to being an engineer) open.
While any competent scientist should be comfortably middle-class, salaries are not high, and they only become decent for most in their late 30s or early 40s.
The work is very competitive, requiring long hours. For women this is particularly hard -- compromises with having children are severe.
Most Americans don't want to work that hard and take those risks. On top of this now scientists are widely reviled in current American political culture on the right. Universities all across the USA are under assault from their states -- this isn't just Scott Walker and Sam Brownback -- state funding for public universities has been falling in almost all states.
The USA is now run by extremely ignorant people who despise science and math. Our universities are increasingly training foreigners who know that American science has been the best in world, but they can see its end.
29
The era of giant subsidies to US higher education is coming to an end.
This may make everyone more accountable, including students. But it is painful.
The risk of failure here is the easy-degrees-for-fast-money-problem. This is
a bad outcome or a vulnerability of inappropriate accountability.
Finally, there are a number of anti-US-talent development government policies.
This may follow from anti-intellectual social attitudes and anti-talent-development views.
2
When I entered pharmacy school over a decade ago, my counterparts from Nepal studying physics had already taken all the basic organic chemistry, biochem, statistics, calculus, etc. in high school that I had to waste two years of college for. They ended up coming to study in the US with ease. This is why our foreign counterparts are far ahead.
16
It;s pretty simple. American grade schools and high schools now focus on teaching self-confidence and protecting oneself with safe spaces. Those are not important factors in educational systems outside the US.
13
We need to begin free tuition at state or city schools for American students, and we need that now.
6
Really? Most international students pay higher tuition than US student already. So, it's not the tuition that`s a real factor.
3
For many, their countries are paying for the education, not the students' families.
6
No competent STEM student in a research oriented degree incurs any expense. They are paid to attend school, $20,000-$30,000 per year is typical _plus_ tuition and fees!!! You pay a lot of money for second tier professional or even worse, at for profit schools. Debt is a myth in STEM especially engineering. It is an investment.
The economics are not clear for a PhD but the ROI on an MS is amazing. More interesting jobs and better pay. You do a PhD in engineering because you love it. I tell my students that if they would be doing the same thing in their free time they should pursue the engineering PhD, otherwise leave with the MS.
To be clear this is true in engineering even at a second tier institution. Most US students lack the math (and writing, ouch) skills, but the payout is exceptional.
1
Getting a Ph.D. in the Social Sciences means a life of poverty for everyone who doesn't secure an increasingly elusive tenure track job. You sacrifice years of your life, and if anything goes wrong financially or health-wise, you potentially have to leave the field and re-adjust an academic skill set to the real world. The education your receive is priceless, in every sense of the word. It expands your intellectual horizons beyond anything you could have imagined before, and no one wants to pay you for what you learned. That's the United States in a nutshell. If what you do can't be played with or eaten, no one wants to invest in it.
As for why in the potentially more lucrative STEM fields you see less American graduate students... I think it's very difficult for a country with such limited support for K-12 education, from funding to teacher pay, to produce great minds in general. We're just not high achievers as a society in education, and high levels of superstition and folksy beliefs about teaching erode support from our government for funding education.
11
Give me a break teacher pay in the US is among the highest paid in the world
http://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-2017-5
4
Those statistics include private schools.
I see plenty of US grad students in basic sciences, but where we see a real gap is postdocs applying for positions at the med school where I work. Many times, the only applicants are foreign. There are excellent foreign PhDs, so we usually wind up okay. I've figured that US PhDs wanted more money, so they would work at pharmaceutical companies, or they would also get MBAs and then get even more money ... at pharmaceutical companies.
2
I would love to see a comparison of public versus private U.S. high schools and how these students fare vs. lumping all students in the US together. We and just about all of our friends have pulled our kids from public schools years ago despite living in the neighborhoods with the "best public schools" in the states based on testing. The difference has been night and day with curriculums that prepare students for college and discuss their future plans with them all the time. The public system we left was an IB program but still pales in comparison.
6
I don't think it matters where you did your high school and I think having a good liberal arts education in undergrad is helpful. Sure, some of the undergrad and grad students from countries outside the US are better prepared, but for the most motivated, best and brightest, if you want to accomplish something, you can. People with the "immigrant mentality" are more likely to have this drive than later generation offspring of immigrants, because that's the reason they come here (to study). I came here as as an undergrad because I could do well in standardised tests, but I was a failure by my original country's standards which relied on rote memorisation and lack of creativity in thinking (which I personally think is the most important thing to succeed in STEM). I succeeded because of my creativity and drive and I had good mentors who convinced me that whatever I chose to do, I could choose to do it well. I am a US citizen now, and the work I do benefits the world. So I think it's a win-win for everyone. This is the American dream as far as I am concerned - and it's open to everyone, not just Americans, but anyone with the drive and motivation. Selecting from an international pool is better than selecting from a smaller, local pool, but everyone has to pay it forward for there to be the greatest benefit. Unfortunately, money corrupts.
6
I have a degree from my local university in Kenya but what sets me apart from my colleagues at home is the fact that I also received a master's degree from a university in the United States. The premium is certainly there (whether real or perceived) and I believe for most international students studying in the U.S., the same is true.
11
hmmm I wonder why the US has so much international competition nowadays? Maybe because we have been educating our competition for decades.... great job state department
2
Or maybe it's because we get kicked out immediately after we receive our degrees...
5
If we couldn't rely on a constant stream of foreign, well educated, motivated and disciplined students, many of whom would be only too happy to work here when they're done studying, we might have to fix our own failing education system
8
By the time students get to their senior year of high school in the U.S., they have been convinced they're no good at math, for a variety of reasons. Read all about it in my solutions-based book "Why We Failed: 40 Years of Education Reform" now on Amazon.
3
If the new tax bill is passed, prepare to see these numbers go to 0.
No one goes to grad school for the money. If it's passed, tuition waivers become taxable income and the students who could be making six figures will be responsible for taxes on $80,000 on an income of under $30,000. That means that more than half of my income will be owed in taxes. I literally could not afford to pay rent, let alone eat, buy textbooks, or make a car payment.
I know I would need to leave the country to afford to finish my PhD. Is this supposed to be good for American industry? For America at all?
No. America will lose any dominance in science and technology.
14
The lack of interest in advanced education among Americans is a cultural issue that gains in strength as the European roots of this country recede farther and farther into the past. Ignorance is rising, and as ignorance rises, so does the stupidity of the average American voter. Trump and the consequences of his rise to power are the price of American Ignorance. Unthinkable a century ago, ignorance is the new American reality.
13
Am I in an alternate reality? This sadly misses the point. There IS a story here, but it wasn't reported in this article.
How many American professors are there? From my 6+ years in grad school, not many -- and generally speaking, foreign professors have preferences. Yes, language and culture play a role, but it's secondary. How about that H1-B Visa matter?
American's can change their minds or leave, but recruit (or capture) an H1-B Visa holder and you've got yourself a slave for 5-7 years. No vacations, no family, no weekends, just work. American's have those pesky families, friends, and national holidays.
This has since become the expectation / culture -- so why would anyone knowingly throw themselves into the snake pit?
Classic scenario: What if a student is 5 years into their degree? Too far along to quit or switch professors, that requires starting over. Tough for anyone, but an H1-B Visa holder, it's a rope around their neck.
So professors simply quit paying, all while demanding more work -- because who's to stop them? Maybe a TA position is available, but not always. Hence, you have highly stressed and poorly fed graduate students living under their desks.
This has little to do with debt, level of education, or work ethic -- the best Americans can absolutely compete with anyone in the world, it's a distribution -- most just choose to avoid the snake pit because they can afford to.
11
Neither professors or graduate students come in on H1-B visas -- Col. Flagg is clearly uniformed.
6
My apologies, F1 Visa is what I meant to say - as this has strict course load & student enrollment requirements. The H1b Visa is a specialty work permit.
As a US citizen, immigration policy is not my area of expertise -- I'm only reporting what I observe.
Too many lazy so-called social justice warriors majoring in soft victims studies pablum.
5
I completed my physics PhD about thirty years ago. At that time, industry and government warned there would be a “shortage” of STEM graduates, and the United States would be left behind if it didn’t train more PhDs. Several years later the “shortage” proved to be a myth. The US economy was in recession and the Cold War had ended. Industry and academia weren’t hiring and the science job market was flooded with highly-qualified people. Government and academia insiders said the situation was the worst they had seen in 25 years. Congressional hearings discredited the PhD “shortage” forecast. Like many of my peers, I left physics. I became an engineer.
Today, the “shortage” myth continues. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-jobs-industry-c....
9
My spouse was in a graduate program part-time, but needed to continue full-time work. He had top 1 percent scores on all facets of the GRE and was in an Ivy League school. As the only native English speaker and part-timer, he felt out of place in his classes. He moved to a different program at the same school, still in a STEM-related education PhD even though graduating from the other program would have led him to a more lucrative career path.
Highly selected and motivated students whose pre-graduate education, including primary and high school, have been paid by the tax-payers of their original country and cost nothing to this country. The US can continue to profit from this siphoning off of other countries' resources while de-investing in its own public schools. Great or sad?
16
I am currently getting my Master's in a STEM field at a school in the North Carolina University system and am one of very few Americans in the program. As a NC resident, the tuition is very affordable and the entire degree will cost me less than $20k. With a couple of part time jobs I have been able to support myself and cover tuition without going into any debt. A lot more is going on here than simply costs - especially when you factor in the fact that these international students are often paying much higher tuition fees at public institutions.
Frankly, I think a big issue is the difficulty of the material and the downward pressure on wages created by the supply of foreign labor willing to work for less. My degree program is incredibly demanding, much more so than most humanities degrees but my wage expectations are not significantly higher than for those with graduate degrees in the humanities. Visa programs that allow companies to hire foreign labor with low barriers for justification have created this phenomenon.
16
As someone who is 3/4 through a graduate program I am shocked to see that some commenters say they do not learn any more than in an undergraduate degree. Since I started grad school five years into working in my field it has been invaluable and completely on point with what I'm doing at work. As a more mature student I have enjoyed the classes immensely more and they are taught by business leaders in the area who have worked in the field for 20+ years and enjoy sharing their knowledge. I have also been fortunate enough to have my employers offer tuition reimbursement so that I have had very little out of pocket costs. I wish that more employers gave people this opportunity as there is a tax benefit to them and I do believe the more educated employees give back to their employers.
7
Well, if the Trump tax bill passes we can stop worrying about any of this as it taxes the tuition waivers grad students often get for working as research or teaching assistants. The result will be that nobody but the wealthy will be able to afford graduate school.
I find all this really unfortunate. I got a Master's before I went to law school and it was two of the best years of my life and it substantially improved my skill set and did a great deal for my intellectual development. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
11
Seems like there may be two reasons for US students: (1) Get out of school, get a good paying job, and pay back enormous student loans, and (2) no one really wants to go into R&D. Foreign students have better prospects in their home countries with a graduate degree, and if they are really good academically, have the opportunity to be hired and stay in the US.
7
I'm always skeptical when I read something that implies American students simply don't want to pursue higher education, as if it's a choice. We have Americans going overseas for undergrad and graduate degrees just to avoid massive amounts of debt, not to mention that institutions have a financial incentive to favor international students whom they can charge more for tuition. American students want higher education, make no mistake; they're simply being squeezed out by much bigger forces.
21
I teach PhD students in Economics at a leading US program. We continue to have only a small number of American students ... not because foreign students are willing to pay more (the vast majority of our students have financial support -- either fellowships or teaching assistantships) but because foreign students are (much) better qualified. Put differently: the American students who are well-qualified for our program either go to better American programs or they do not go to PhD programs at all. And keep in mind that PhD's in Economics are very well-paid ...
3
“ In comparison, only about 9 percent of undergraduates in computer science were international students (perhaps, deans posit, because families are nervous about sending offspring who are barely adults across the ocean to study).”
The reason of the above is that international students know very well that college is a joke in the US. While their American peers enjoy them selves with a jolly college life, foreign prospect students in STEM stay home and complete a STEM-only curriculum at the best university they can find; then they apply to their preferred US graduate schools well prepared for any challenge.
9
Has there ever been any significant fraction of American scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians who were not descendants of immigrants?
16
Check the adjacent story about the Prelim connection with Milner, major early investor in FB etc. Similarly China-based entities are now 'investing' in many tech startups in Silicon Valley/ basically a foundation fro industrial and even worse, Research espionage.
The US system is extremely naive -- what Carter attempted to do was necessary. Limit access of non-citizens to the latest research even in non-military use. Limit admission of non-citizens to high-tech grad school programs. And federal rigorous funding replaces the tuition that keeps these universities going. We pay now [with tax $$], or we pay later with an ever weaker industrial and tech foundation.
9
Several years ago, a newsletter from NC State sent to alumni outlined in a very positive article how the graduate program in furniture manufacturing had trained a foreign student (possibly Chinese-memory fails). Over time, 30 years, this extremely successful graduate student started furniture factories abroad and sent more students to the US school for training. He may have sent a few $10k donations to the graduate school of industrial design and manufacturing or to the Furniture Manufacturing and Management area.
At the time, the positive spin on the article seemed strange. In retrospect, I wonder if the article had implied “sarcasm” tags.
In 2012, the school dropped the furniture manufacturing major.
http://www.furnituretoday.com/article/381361-nc-state-drops-furniture-fo...
This could be a good area of study without all the politics of currently active and successful industries. A well researched long form article on the decline of the furniture manufacturing industry and ties to training provided at local universities would be a good read
Well, gosh! $100k in student debt, 10 years of indentured servitude as a grad student, no science funding by US government or corporations, competing with cheap docile H1Bs, and the high likelihood of being an adjunct if your PhD is not MIT? What could possibly be more attractive?
I blew that off, Jack.
46
I have a bachelors degree in healthcare and I would love to go on to graduate school. Unfortunately, I can’t. I have so much student loans and I simply don’t want to incur more. Period.
21
The real problem is that higher education has changed.
In the 1960's everyone that completed high school could obtain a reasonable job and did not have to go to a college or university.
Now everyone that has finished high school has to go to a college or a university.
In the 1960's there were many Americans that went to college or university to learn. Now there are large numbers of American students that go to college or a university to get a job.
This is also true for the many foreign students that go to American colleges or universities. These foreign students are not the there to learn but are there to simply get a job.
The reality is that now not "for profit" American colleges and universities are simply the same as "for profit" colleges and universities.
This is a real problem for the United States since nations do not do well when there is a denigration of the higher education system of a nation.
14
American's (especially women and minorities) don't get masters and PhDs in physics engineering and computer science because the awfulness of the culture in graduate school at most places isn't worth the little to no pay bump you get over an undergraduate degree. I started with 6 women in my physics PhD program. 7 years latter I finally got my PhD and every other woman had dropped out because it was a miserable experience and they could all be doing something better. I stuck with it because I want to change the system and I am trying as a professor, but the pay is horrible and the work conditions are less than ideal. I do not advise my students to go into any advanced degree program unless they have fully vetted the program and know that it will at least be a tolerable experience.
13
Why, why it is - in your qualified and professional opinion - that in other countries, including Western countries and surely in Eastern Europe and USSR under communism - the share of women earning udergraduate, MS and PhD degrees are (or were) higher or much higher than i the US ... on top of that (in communist countries I am qualified to talk about) without any particular, specific, loud, trumpeted out set-asides for women?
Are America males or American "patriarchal culture" so bad and so "oppressive" compared to the rest of the Western world (and India, China, etc. where women are represented in STEM fields at much higher rates, agin, like i communist countries w/o any special "Bring Your Daughter into STEM" programs) to explain such low rates of femal participation and completion of any level of STEM higher educational programs?
9
I can't speak to the narrower issue of graduate education in STEM fields, but I can tell you from direct experience that the cost of my legal education makes me question my life choices on a daily basis. Those incentives I'm sure have a lot to do with people's guarded thinking about investing in higher education.
All I know is that I have a house and an income I probably would have never had access to in my prior low-paying field before I changed careers -- but I'll also probably be left taking out a second mortgage on said house 22 years from now to cover the loan forgiveness tax bomb that awaits me after I've made payments on my student loans for 25 years and actually owe more (because of interest) than when I started. All in all, I'm on pace to pay off my house at age 90, if I last that long; but I wouldn't be able to live in it in the interim on my previous career's salary and I'll struggle to keep it if I decide I tire of my current indentured servitude and want to do something else with my life at some point (which will matter that much more if I ever have kids).
I've got food on the table, a roof over my head, and an income with my wife that puts us in the 86th percentile of houses, so it's a blessing, all things considered (though I shudder to realize how bad it is if our struggle is so "elite").
But needless to say, obtaining a graduate education at its current price is a mixed blessing if ever there was one.
10
Two things to keep in mind. Many colleges will pick students from abroad not only on merit and grades but on the money they or their governments pay. Most of my students tell me they can go back home and not worry about student debt. Not true of our own citizens. Our government has made US students consumers of debt. Blame that on Congress and Sallie Mae. Congress distorted the student loan markets for private enterprise's profits.
Second, not one founder/CEO out of the two hundred I know would employ a more expensive local than a foreign student. I can hire a H1B PHD with some experience at a substantially lower price than for a comparable US citizen.
The international tit-for-tat over H1B visas is obvious. We take their students get paid and they take our products.
A US Citizen working overseas has a lot more bureaucracy to endure than STEM workers who come here. STEM education is great but we have to ensure that the market place is fair for everyone guest workers as well as our own, and right now it's not fair for our own students.
19
...... and who can afford it?
11
Exactly. U.S. students pay top dollar, take out loans and must work and pay FICA and federal taxes once they graduate. The very OPT touted in this piece enables Indian and Chinese grad students to work 3 years without paying federal tax (and, no, they are not paying at home either) and neither them nor their company pays FICA. In addition, because it is an F-1 visa, no health benefits must be provided by the company. What U.S. student (except me, first generation American) would waste 5 years of their lives to earn peanuts and be undercut by foreign students. Stop OPT and H-1B and it will correct these measly wages and fill our research labs once again.
2
FYI, people on H1B DO pay FICA taxes which they do not get back. So in effect H1B end up subsidizing the Social Security system without getting anything back. Get your facts right.
2
Get your facts straight - you do pay FICA and all local, state and federal taxes when on OPT/CPT or even while studyin if you'v been in the US 5 calendar years. If youre on on H1B which is very different from the OPT you still pay those same taxes. And where did you get this nonsense of the hiring company not having to provide healthcare benefits? You Sir are misinformed.
University endowment income is currently not taxed (the GOP bill proposed a less than 2% tax). And universities and professors receive all sorts of other grants and government subsidies. Even private universities. Essentially, these large universities, public and private, are heavily subsidized by the American taxpayer.
Shouldn't they prioritize educating American students?
6
International students are not eligible for grants and government loans, thus have to prove they can pay tuition in full before being allowed to matriculate into any particular program. As the story indicates, American students aren't seeing the same value in graduate studies as international students. If U.S. students aren't applying, then of course universities can't prioritize them. STEM interest has to begin at the secondary level, or this decline in STEM at the graduate level will continue.
3
Mmmm -- professors don'e "receive" research grants like manna from heaven -- you compete for them via grant proposals. Right now funding rates from NSF/NIH are about 20% ... 1 in 5. The real fact of being a scientist in the USA is that AFTER you do your PhD, the better fraction of those get postdoc appointments, usually 2 years, and then a fraction of those make it as independent scientists - the key problem is winning proposals, really. But you need to actually do really good work, to get proposals funded.
And as far as "favoring" Americans ... what are you implying? Take dumb and lazy Americans over smarter and harder-working foreigners? That's sure not going to work.
The problem is that smart, hard-working Americans see that scientists are treated badly, have relatively poor opportunities, not great pay for the skills and training required ..,. what do you expect? What are you willing to do to fix that?
4
One factor that is left out here is that American Universities have been expanding admission for overseas students for a decade because they pay higher fees than native students. I do see it as a tragedy that American Universities may have to go back to serving Americans.
2
Astonishing, even though I have watched from on campus as the trend became obvious and grew and grew.
3
While this article focuses on computer science and other STEM fields that offer fairly high pay for people with only an undergraduate degree, I think this is also happening in fields where more advanced degrees are needed (such as biostatistics).
I don't know if the list of prerequisites for many of these programs is a deterrent, if there is reluctance to spend so many years in a graduate program, or if Americans are turned off by fields that are considered "hard." It's just so surprising to me that there are so few Americans who want to get advanced degrees in high-paying fields with a lot of job security (and a field like biostat is a 9-5 job with good benefits, not the crazy work weeks that characterize popular visions of computer science). Perhaps Americans are just not familiar with the array of STEM fields and potential jobs open to them.
4
I'm noticing increasingly more people in the US with ambition or talent and mobility have more than one passport/citizenship. This makes it much easier for them to slide back and forth between the two. Nice to have that option available unlike most of us born and raised in the US. We are stuck.
8
Yes, but there is a simple, long overdue solution to this. Make US citizenship and green cards harder to obtain, and disallow dual citizenship. The latter one is harder to accomplish, but it can be done. Citizenship of convenience in a global, asymmetrical economy is utterly unfair to those US citizens whose loyalty is only to the US.
4
Worth reading a previous article in the NY Times:
Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: November 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-ch...
l
5
Knowledge, mastery and simple comfortable handling of math and "hard" science are not by far that much present in general population and thus among K-12 or college student population.
Our "culture" favors (and in real life and Hollywood and TV productioon glorifies) bankers, Wall Street "wizards", MBAs, and lawyers of many sorts ... while labels STEM folks "nerds", portrayed them unfavorably, etc.
Also (with exception of some high tech and Silicon Valley companies - where those MBAs ad lawyers are simply out of their wits) American cooperate culture is hostile to STEM majors as far as promotional potential is concerned.
Ulike in other countries where you find CEO with STEM major, our companies strongly prefer finance, sales, business background. No wonder we have, so many decades in a row, so huge trade deficits!
5
too expensive
4
When I went to college, the only full scholarships not based on financial need were athletic scholarships. Shows where America puts its priorities...
6
Yup, even in the 21st century, where there is no Wild West to conquer and no physical ability required for succeeding in global economy and life (besides ot being morbidly obese), our culture and even model of higher education (starting with high school) still glamorizes and monetarises sports gladiators.
2
Delayed gratification does not appeal to Americans, but in reality one's potential for promotion to management positions in tech, engineering and business is tied to these advanced degrees. A bit of investment of time and money now will pay rich dividends in 10 or 20 years. Americans should heed this and see the big picture. Although, as long as we are welcoming to these international students, they will stay after graduation and strengthen American companies. But, Trumpites, we do have to welcome them, or they will leave with the fruits of their advanced education.
5
And I wonder why they need to be here for that advanced degree? It's not just because of our lovely schools, it's to stay in the U.S. They aren't going anywhere without a fight because a big reason they get the degree is to stay in the U.S. I'm in HR and I see it every single day.
5
Not mentioned in the article that these figures are true elsewhere in the developed world. I don’t think there’s anything nefarious to it: it just makes a lot more sense to travel abroad for a Master’s of PhD than it does a Bachelor’s. For the Master’s he degree is quicker and will lead to better employment opportunities at home or in the US. For a PhD it is usually longer (at least in North America), but the quality of one’s PhD programme really matters in hiring and a PhD from a major US or UK university carries major capital all around the world.
It just makes sense. I went abroad for my post-grad degrees and would do it again.
2
I think one of the main reasons is simple: Money. I remember back in my college days at BU, that all of the International students came from very wealthy backgrounds because they needed to be able to afford full-freight tuition and room and board and everything else. The American students had various forms of loans or grants, but not nearly enough to cover all the costs without leaving them in horrendous debt. Now, that still holds true.
Americans can't afford to go to the colleges in their own country. It's very sad.
31
Just look at the name "Tandon" - Indian fellow!
Foreigners are being admitted into US schools so their tuitions can keep the doors open -- also these 'kids' are more pliant/ less demanding and coolies for the 'internships' associated with the professors' consulting contracts.
Foreigners see this as a path to US residence - they will be either from the quite rich families OR be on scholarships/ grants. Some may be funded by their governments - as 'spies' into the latest tech developments.
In 1972 the [graduate] dept of industrial engineering was often referred to as international Engineering and-or Indian engineering > so this is not a new phenomenon.
4
The Tandons did well for themselves and gave back to an educational institution to make a difference. There are many successful Indian families here in the Boston area who have generously endowed MIT, Harvard, BU and other institutions of higher learning.
3
One feature of the new tax reform proposal will contribute to the downward slide in American students in Ph.D. programs in the STEM fields. It proposes to tax tuition waivers as income. That would be a huge disincentive to getting a Ph.D. - in any field. Most students who get tuition waivers are making perhaps $15-30k for a stipend, but the value of the tuition waiver could be $20-80k. If that was treated as income and taxable, most grad students couldn't afford survive financially on the stipend. One more stupid Republican idea to make education less affordable. The only people who could afford grad school would be wealthy people and students from foreign countries.
13
Think about it this way: Bill Gates did not stay in school to finish his degree program. Nor did Zuckerberg. Nor did Steve Jobs. They were able to write codes to talk to the 'machine' and did not see the need for a degree even at the BS level.
Why do these geniuses now insist that we need to churn out more STEM graduates so that their companies can hire them?
Sheer Hypocrisy. Learning to write code is like learning a new language. Not all that hard. No degree required.
4
SIR:
Do you know that truism that "Exception proves the rule"?
Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jobs are (statistical) anecdotal exceptions to the rule that a college degree (still) is a good investment when looking at life-long earning, career and quality of life as criteria of success.
4
You do not need to understand how a car woks to drive. You don’t need to understand how a computer works to code trivial programs. Bill Gates actually invented the first operating system that would allow everyone to code simple programs easily.
Page and Brin, who invented the Google algorithm, are Stanford graduates. Facebook is a smart business model, running on systems invented and created by scores of smart STEM graduates.
Naïve oversimplification never helps.
2
Gates was in Harvard. First get yourselves admitted there for comparison.
1
Why are American graduate students in the STEM disciplines disappearing? The answer is not so complicated.
Part of it is illegal immigration, which has lots of unintended consequences.
One consequence is population growth. US population has increased by 82 million during the period 1980-2010. This is not just due to immigration, but also to higher fertility of unskilled immigrants.
States like California have responded by shifting resources from universities to K12. You can see this in state budgets that are published online.
In 1965, a talented California student would receive a State Scholarship to pay all of his expenses. With the diversion of funding this program has vanished. Now undergraduates finish with huge debt and often cannot afford to go on.
Confronted with huge immigrant populations high schools have watered down their material. In the 1950's many high schools taught Latin and calculus, now the language taught is English as a second language.
We used to have entrance exams for universities, but minorities have successfully lobbied to have these watered down to meaningless levels. The result is that many students enter the university without knowing high school math. The university is not equipped for large numbers of remedial courses. So the degree programs are also watered down to compensate.
American is gradually becoming a third-world country. Power will become centered in China, which adopted a one-child policy and values education.
9
I've never heard a discussion linking increased immigration (illegal or otherwise) with reduced funding for colleges and reduced competitiveness of American educated students.
There certainly is a correlation. I'm curious about learning more. Thanks for the insight.
1
In the 1950s most high schools taught Latin. That way, their graduates could talk to the Romans.
I went to high school in the early 1960s. In response to Sputnik, U.S. high schools were just beginning to teach calculus and the "Advanced Placement Program" where high school students take college level courses was just being developed.
Now, several advanced placement courses and calculus have been completed by every student admitted to the top colleges. Regional schools generally have students entering who have not satisfied those requirements, including some who need remediation. Community colleges get the bulk of those students.
Undocumented immigrants have nothing to do with what you are talking about. Mostly you are just wrong.
4
MONEY. American.grad.students do not have the access toony foreign students have. A check on their backgrounds will show they are of the top tier of their upper middle class and/ or the wealthiest class. Here since St.Reagan opportunity is only given to those who have secured the Protestant theological point of being granted god's predestination. Or worse the capitalistic theleological idea that competition is inverse to profitablity and therefore there should be none as.the.interlopers have to pay and.rwduce competition
6
Our society and our education system emphasize emotional persuasion over empiricism. Science, in its best hours, attempts to minimize the role of "enthusiasm" as a basis for evidence, putting it clearly at odds with the "truthiness" of the zeitgeist. When truthiness, being a "boss", and otherwise being boastful if the height of ones culture, all other things are devalued. I teach statistics to business students and few, if any, of them are interested in the evidence but just in the ability to sell and persuade.
6
US education from grammar school through bachelors programs have low standards. Grade inflation is pervasive. Even Ivy League colleges are no longer special in terms of getting a superior education and grade inflation is a problem there as well. Better to send your children out of the country for grade school through college and bring them home for grad school.
5
The All India Council for Technical Education has recommended that as many as 800 engineering schools be shut down because they churn out poor quality engineers who become unemployable and because many of these institutions have declining application/admission numbers.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/800-engineering-colleges-to-cl...
It is time we did the same thing here States-side as well, and reevaluate the need to keep our universities continuing to offer engineering programs at any level to graduate students in the current numbers. As long as our universities depend on "customers" who are mostly foreign to "buy' their program offerings (students pursuing MS degrees mostly pay tuition to pursue Master's degree programs while those continuing to do PhD get supported by their professors through the grants they receive), they will continue to recruit students from places like India and China.
Companies like FB need Code Ninjas, not those with Master's degree in Computer science. A PhD in Computer Engineering may be required to pursue research in AI, the excess supply that inevitably results from current emphasis on recruitment numbers is unwarranted here and overseas: the grads who go to mediocre engineering programs even here cannot be employed and do not have job opportunities in their home countries like India.
Let's have the courage to call a spade a spade.
2
This is consistent for other fields too -- i.e. graduates of 'universities' are not prepared to be productive employees. Employers have to train them in the basic. REASON: the 'education' system is [largely] by rote -- even at the wonted IITs.
1
SIR:
You likely know as I do that the educational-industrial complex will not any time soon and certainly not voluntarily give up on its model: as much as governmental student financial assistance + as much as unsubsidized student loans + watering admissions standards still further, alll in keeping enrollment growing, departments expanding, salaries of presidents and Student Diversity Officers increasing.
"College education is human right", remember?
Something that as a country we don't get...
All of our competitors send trillions or billions on public education. It is expensive but you see the effect it is having in China, India, and others...a rise in the standard of living and an rise in a middle class.
In the 80s, the Republicans with Saint Ronald Reagan, defunded public education in the name of local control, "because they can always do it better." and cheaper.
Also, other countries will commit to replacing public education infrastructure instead of just letting it fall to disrepair and say that that is up to the states to build their own schools...when knowing they don't have the money or the tax base right now.
Self fulfilling prophecy: The right complains that our schools are a mess because we should apply more capitalist principles not less...more accountability, and more entrepreneurship like making them private.
Let's ask Rod Serling his opinion...maybe he can explain...we have entered the Twilight Zone.
6
I don't think it's a matter of "the locals don't bother." Rather, the grad schools no longer have a mandate to educate the locals, and so they look afar to the international talent pool. More local students get overlooked in this more competitive situation.
1
American pre-college education has been on a steep downward slide. Ironically the introduction of technology into classroom has resulted in students learning less and therefore being less prepared to go into technology careers as well as any career.
3
And in Californian St Reagan DESTROYED the University of California system because he had a PERSONAL vendetta against the then chancellor - Kerr. The university is now basically a privately funded institution with several public school constraints. SAD.
2
A quick route to the promised land: Master degree - OPT - H1B - green card. However, buyers be aware. Many of these people are not that good because master programs are becoming a significant revenue source. There are too many mediocre programs out there. Rich families from overseas are taking advantage of the opportunity.
My suggestions: (1) OPT should only be given to PhDs. At least they made the commitment. (2) STEM is defined too broadly. It should be more selective. (3) Only Ivy league schools and a few other vetted schools are qualified for OPT. (4) Salaries should be above certain levels. Today, many of these people become "cheap labors". (5) Companies hiring these people should pay a special tax and the collected money can only be used to fund public school science programs.
I support opening door to talented immigrants. But we should be more sophisticated.
3
All good points -
OPT SHOULD NOT lead to a green card 'almost automatically'.
PhDs are not very useful in the industry -- MS is better.
Ivy league is a false standard -- there are MANY good 'STEM' universities.
3
You have spoken the truth which no one wants to hear. OPT in STEM includes psychology degrees (http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2011/05/visa-extensions.aspx) and communications (watch the credits for an animated film-the lowest paid employees all hail from Asia). How are U.S. students to have a chance at entry level work with this system? OPT was never put through congress, no one with a psychology degree will say they are in short supply. What silliness.
Simple. American left wing public schools and radical left wing College professors have brain washed American youth against of country our culture and our civilization
3
Yes.
Then it is so many times easier to "earn" PhD in gender studies and likes than in say Physics. One can be so much more "creative" in writing gender studies PhD thesis ...
2
Cuz we Americans are too busy watching reality TV and voting to Make America Grate. U.S.A!
9
I do not dispute NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, however, I have not seen that degree of lopsidedness where I've worked for many years. A major department in my workplace is construction and engineering. For many years, it was men who dominated this field at my company. However, within the past 10-15 years, more women than men with not one but two or three different masters degrees have been hired. And these women are Black, Causation, Asian, and Middle Eastern. Occasionally they will kick their male counterparts' butts with their different perspectives and ideas, but mostly, they ALL work well together, complimenting each other's areas of strength.
Like many situations, nothing is simple nor black or white. ANY masters program will cost big bucks and when that amount is added to the undergraduate debt, the bigger question is always, just how deep in hock can I go and how long will it be before I am debt free? The real shame is that there are a lot of bright and creative minds out there who simply cannot afford to push that financial envelop.
I recall when some companies would "sponsor" a student in undergrad and/or a masters program, pay their tuition, and then hired the individual. That scenario sounds so simple, too bad it either went out of fashion or companies did not find no longer profitable, especially since the notion being a "company man or woman" for 25 years is a thing of the past.
42
last week my company fired someone with 20 years experience. They had hired H1B contractors in few months prior. It is an epidemic in the IT world. This was a good worker too. it was about H1B and new york MBAs that care nothing about our culture.
4
Are you implying that the foreign students somehow have more ability to pay graduate tuition than their american counterparts? I would like to see some stats on that, such as mean, median, and standard deviation of their personal and overall family resources.
2
And now the new Republican tax plan wants to eliminate deductions for student debt. Draw your own conclusions.
3
When huge swathes of the country insist on teaching creationism in schools and government funding for science is cut to the bone, what do you expect? When I was growing up, many of us were inspired by the space race, by vaccine development for diseases that just a few years earlier paralyzed and killed adults and children (polio, e.g.). Science was respected. But that led to an environmental movement that had to be crushed by corporations like Monsanto and others. It led to the development of AstroTurf groups, which were phony "grassroots" environmental movements funded by corporations. Those groups disseminated fakery under the guise of a concerned citizenry. Corporate propaganda derides real science and it comes up with derogatory names for real scientists and concerned citizens (treehuggers, climate cranks).
Right wing propaganda in America has harmed our standing in the world of science. Tax cutting hysteria has undermined medical research in the US. Cynicism born of the tactics of Big Pharma and Big Agriculture makes citizens feel science is untrustworthy and purely profit driven. Good luck getting more Americans to study science in today's home-schooling, Bible thumping, science-fearing nation.
12
You obviously forgot to take a swipe at President Trump.
Then, your assertion that "many of us were inspired by the space race, by vaccine development for diseases" is clearly only very partially true. Our, American culture and academic studies focus never was (even as result of the Sputnik national security risk and shock) in STEM.
We love, glamorizes, pay, and promote financial wizards, salesmen, lawyers, not "techie nerds".
This problem was there in the late 70s when I was an undergraduate foreign student. President Carter issued a directive to the colleges asking them to recruit more American students into their graduate programs for national security reasons. Back then more than 50% of the graduate students were foreign nationals and President Carter was rightly concerned of its effect on national security downrange. Unfortunately, an honest president was portrayed as a weak leader. Things have only become worse since then. Nothing will change unless the educated populace actively participate in the political process and manage the country's affairs instead of outsourcing the management part to politicians, and pledge their allegiance to the country and the values that made it the greatest country on the planet, instead of any political party.
10
American preference for financiers, salesmen, lawyers instead of "techies" is cultural.
So is say German or Japanese (or even Chinese and Indian) preference for techies and STEM folks.
The tipping point, mentioned in the article will come. China and the EU will be paying more for graduate students and getting them. The entire USA will hurt, with fewer technology developments, but perhaps worse, the USA will become a more insular country of have-nots as the rest of the world uses actual science to move ahead.
In the USA an anti-science attitude is much preferred in academic and social circles. It will cost Americans dearly.
6
For decades, a Bachelor's degree was all that was needed for a good career unless one was going into medicine of the law. Then, we saw an era of EVERYONE had to have an MBA and so off went everyone to grad school.
But they quickly discovered that very few employers were actually going to pay them enough more to justify taking on that kind of debt. They didn't need further training for what they were doing.
Many of the foreign grad students intend to go into academia, either in the US (if they get their coveted documentation), or at home, or they intend to go into research. For these career plans, higher degrees are required.
I think what we are seeing is a GOOD thing! Way too many students went on to grad school in the past, mainly to avoid growing up and actually getting a job. They took on tens of thousands of dollars in debt. And they were not rewarded for this with higher salaries.
We already have way too much grade inflation; we do not need degree inflation as well.
4
I teach computer science at a college in Southern California. Last semester I attempted to recruit my best student, a Vietnamese man as a computer science major. "I'm majoring in accounting." he told me. "I have my green card and I don't want to compete with all the H-1B visa holders majoring in CS."
17
As a liberal arts major currently applying to grad schools.. I’m on the low income scale. I want to attend grad school- for an MFA. Apparently one of the hardest areas to get funding and jobs in.
Here’s the thing- when you can barely afford to pay your own bills, there’s no time to consider higher education. It’s hard to continue on unless you’re someone incredibly talented. Otherwise it’s a risk- to take on 100k debt- a lifetimes worth to pay for a degree you’re not quite sure will get you a job.
But it’s my dream to become a college professor with a focus on the arts. Because self expression is one of the most underrated aspects as a species we understand- it’s capacity to heal and teach.
It’s not that we’re not interested- it’s that schools are going to have to work with interested applicants.. the gateway to Grad school is student loans- Perkins and federal aid are truly for Undergrad recipients. If you’ve got poor credit you’re truly stuck. And now with lawmakers attacking endowments- something that should be absolutely illegal to tax- they’re in turn attacking their own people.. the same ones who would love to be in school but can’t because of costs
The US does not value higher education. That’s the problem. Because if we all did, we’d have a society of well educated people who learned in college to fact check, source check, and always question where information comes from..
17
Jackie:
Your pessimistic interpretation of life and educational opportunities have their roots in highly impractical and naive expectations and plans:
"But it’s my dream to become a college professor with a focus on the arts. Because self expression is one of the most underrated aspects as a species we understand- it’s capacity to heal and teach."
Do you think that the world will change its ways to accommodate you? Do you see your way also advisable to your kids (or any youngster)? World will not be La La Land any time soon.
America needs to simultaneously commit itself to making education much more affordable for Americans and to consider fluid quotas that would give preferences for qualified (and I emphasize qualified) American students. There is no reason affirmative action should not extend to Americans, especially at taxpayer financed institutions.
Most comments deal with the demand end of the equation i.e. why American kids are not going to grad school. We should also think in terms of supply issues. The world now has many more people who can afford to pay full tuition than a generation ago. In addition, with economic and cultural (i.e. internet) globalization, going abroad opens up possibilities for making many connections that will prove useful in the future.
From the demand end yes, financial realities have a lot to do with the reticence of American students to take on more debt. But, it is not irrelevant that foreign students are not nearly as likely to have spent a lot of undergraduate time concerned with microagressions rather than studying the courses, thus giving the former another competitive advantage (in addition to paying full freight) in getting in to grad school.
4
Also keep in mind, on the supply side, that Americans are having less children than are those from other countries
Fewer children.
5
Getting a BA/BS overseas is a lot cheaper than in the U.S. Grad school in the U.S. often comes with scholarships and teaching jobs. If the U.S. valued having a locally educated workforce, university would not cost the price of small house.
Like gun murders, this is a problem that the U.S. chooses not to solve.
7
There are a number of reasons that foreign students are dominating graduate schools in STEM in the US. Some of these were pointed out in the article, but one was not: money. Most American grad students in STEM expect to receive support in the form of grants, scholarships and, most prevalent, assistantships as teaching or research assistants. Many, if not most foreign grad students pay their own way, thus saving the school lots of money.
3
Other countries plan and have a strategy for how they will become even better and more competitive than they are now. Technical education is part of that path, so they make sure that is a priority, and they support that no matter what the cost. Their educational system is either mostly free or much cheaper than ours. In the US, there is this idea that the free market will take care of everything, government is just a hindrance, any planning is just "government interference". Their view is that America will become great again by subsidizing coal at the expense of renewables, big tax cuts for the rich and corporations, while the rest get peanuts and are brainwashed into thinking they got some sort of deal.
The education of our children is an afterthought, mostly for the well to do, , and there is a a free market that makes tons of money with high interest student loans that are now being paid off over a lifetime. The banks on the brink of default that drove this country to the precipice were too big to fail, so they got off easy.
As long as the priority is to make a quick buck and never think or plan for the future, America's future will be one of demise.
9
Until I went to college I enjoyed school. When I was in college I found that most of the professors didn't know how to teach a class, answer questions from students, help us one on one when we asked for it and most of them didn't care to. I was deeply disappointed with my college experience. The students were more interested in partying, getting drunk or high, having sex, being rude and inconsiderate at all hours of the day and night than they were in learning. People like me, people who wanted to learn, were in the minority and treated like weirdos. There was no encouragement to go onto to grad school unless one was an A student. I was not. And even if I had been the cost would have stopped me.
If this country wants an educated workforce our colleges and universities are going to have to do a better job reining in costs and business will need to do better with the job end. It makes no sense for a person to go on for a graduate degree if they are already in debt or in a field where the money isn't any good. And it really makes no sense if the advanced degree makes one less employable which I saw when I started working.
As long a companies continue to outsource good jobs, refuse to invest in employees or pay for experience there will fewer of us in grad school than might be desirable.
6
As a business school professor, I find that while many of my students have strong IT and technical abilities, their verbal, social and basic business skills are sorely lacking. This, I believe comes from so much focus on the former. I personally would like to see more American grad students with a balanced undergraduate and graduate background. Someone's going to have to manage all these technical experts.
3
The American higher education establishment sold out America decades ago. One of the forerunners was Michigan State University; now, everyone is in on the money. Many foreign students have gotten in under false pretenses, saying they intend to return to their homelands to improve their own countries. Ha!
3
"Why don’t the locals bother?"?
Too busy watching reality TV, violent sports, and listening to hate-spewing alt-right talk radio blaming everyone else for their problems?
12
The title points to the disappearing American graduate student. The content is about scientific and technological fields. Obviously history, literature, or sociology, much less urban planning or architecture, don't count as graduate fields.
There is a great problem with the US's immigration policies re Asians who attend our grad schools. Increasingly they are not compelled to return to their homelands (as the J-1 visa used to demand for almost all). This is a direct rip-off of underdeveloped countries that need these people desperately. These Asians opt to make money in the US, rather than return to India and other countries in Asia. I can understand this for students coming from oppressive countries, but India for example is a democracy, and these Indians, students and later residents, claim to "love India." But it is a love in absentia.
The Asians coming to America are NOT the "tired, hungry, and poor." They are the affluent upper middle classes.
Make these Asians coming to the US pay a fee - total paid in advance - that will then be used to enable a poor person from the same country to come and study in the US.
And there are many talented poor young people in Asian countries. When I taught at a university in south India the vice-chancellor (president in US terms) was from an Untouchable caste, grew up in poverty, and became a distinguished scholar and administrator. A scholarship enabled him to do grad work in the US, long before our policy came to favor the rich.
2
Why not establish an international exchange program with other countries that send their students to study in the US? It could be something like professional sports teams trading players for the season. We could accept international students, educate them, and then provide special visas for them to work and eventually live here, once they prove their worth in the labor force. Meanwhile, we could open up some social security numbers here and vacate an equal number of young US citizens to work in the service sectors of those countries that feel a deficit of citizens when losing them to the US. It’s a win-win. These simple and yet logical answers are looking us right in the face. And yet, something stops us from carrying them out. Now I know how frustrated Jonathan Swift must have been when he wrote “A Modest Proposal.”
The picture says it all. No: white, black or brown faces. The question is, why? Financial, bad preparation, lack of work ethic,the catch all "cultural", what? I do know that after Sputnik the u.s. went on a technological tear that virtually invented (for better or worse) the modern world. Now, we do some software, make some burgers, a little retail, run the rigged casino known as Wall Street, and import almost everything we need. Education, at the graduate, grade school level (and in between) as well as at home is the bed rock of a literate, well informed, vibrant, democracy as well as a thriving economy. The fact that we would appear to be failing at all these levels should tell us something about where we are headed. With a society top heavy with unskilled, uneducated, unemployable people we depend on immigrants to do the heavy lifting thru out our economy. This is not a sustainable way forward, or a way to "make American great again" either.
6
My son has a PhD in molecular biology; his wife, a PhD in applied mathematics. Neither is working in their field. My son explained the issue in very simple terms to his Liberal Arts parents - the researcher he was working with, during his career, would probably have 30 to 40 of his students earn their PhDs but there would only be need for ONE PhD to replace him. Multiply that by the number of institutions awarding PhD's in the US and it's easy to see that America will never need that many PhD's. It has nothing to do with American students education, intelligence or work ethics. It is simply a matter of supply and demand. Most private companies do not want to hire PhD's because they don't want to pay them a higher salary so a BS is preferred. Modern Academia consists of constant grubbing for both grant money (as my son said "Always mention a cure for AIDS") and possible tenure track positions with actual research a distant afterthought. The places he was offered interviews were in Bangalore India, Seoul South Korea and Singapore. His wife was determined NOT to work in Finance. My son is now employed as a software developer, taking evening courses to get certifications in that field and his wife is now a stay-at-home mom. Foreign students they knew received financial support from their counties governments and were generally guaranteed jobs when they returned- their countries looked upon their education as a valuable investment in their countries future.
8
PhDs in molecular biology are valuable in biotech engineering companies, where a bachelor does not cut it, by a long shot. A PhD in applied mathematics is very valuable in these new AI startups. I agree that perspective in academia are very limited.
1
The market for molecular biologists in the US maxed out in about 2003. Ever since then it has been a bloodbath and thousands of talented scientists have been left in the scrap-heap.
Biotech isn't interested in "discovering" much of anything. Far easier to repackage the same old drugs with minor tweaks and charge extortionary fees as patent rights get extended.
1
My son got his PhD in 2012. He found when he was job hunting that US companies only wanted individuals who were already familiar with commercial lab procedures and techniques- in other words, they only wanted the researcher they laid off 5 years before. When a married couple both have PhD's, looking for two positions befitting their education in the same town/region also narrows their options greatly.
1
Corporations love this. Foreign STEM students, the majority of which are Indian and Chinese nationals, get a Master's degree (which is usually a joke, and not necessary for the job in the first place) and companies hire them on the OPT visa (valid for 24 months), while they dangle H-1B sponsorship. Once these employees are on H-1B, they get sponsored for green cards and that's where the real fun starts. It takes 7 years (or longer) for Chinese and Indian nationals to get their green card, and during this time they are beholden to the sponsoring company. Changing jobs means starting the process all over again (since the I-485 hasn't been filed and pending for 6 months). While it is possible to change jobs, it does carry a risk of uncertainty since the PERM and I-140 have to be filed again. So they put up with any demands managers throw their way. Just look up the priority dates on the Department of State website.
Foreign countries love this. They get their nationals educated and trained at major US corporations, while they bide their time. Chinese nationals have access to all the opportunities in China, and their US-born citizen children have all the opportunities available to them in the US. So, if the US economy tanks and the Chinese economy prospers, they are free to look for opportunities in China.
Moreover, Chinese managers in the US tend to hire other Chinese, and Indian managers tend to hire Indians, furthermore decimating the American workforce.
16
We don't need schools! We need community farms! We need to grow our own food and share with those who can't take care of themselves. We need to help and nurture everyone, except Republicans. We need love and understanding [and Facebook]. We need peace and open borders and the ability to travel and live free [we need a cell phone and wi-fi access to communicate]. Higher education is for Republican elitists - we need to commune with nature and drink from fresh spring water.. we need flowers [and X and medical Marijuana]. We need emotional support animals and plenty of safe spaces to protect us from Republicans.. We need all of this stuff now and for free -- BTW- if we have religion it better be mine!
1
Because of the climate of political correctness, and the cupidity of programs trying to get federal monies.
1
If we had enlightened immigration policies, foreign grad students would not be a concern. Many would become citizens and work hard here adding to our national wealth.
1
For the college it is people paying out of state or the highest fees.
For the students it is a good chance at employment in the US and a good job. In many third world countries the standard of success is engineering/CS or medical degree.
For students in the US there are more interesting careers than CS.
Because our students are more interested in pursuing advanced degrees in things like Gender Studies.
3
It is interesting to know that most of the graduates from these prestige universities are students from other countries, I believe that the culture that an American child is grown up with, is such that it effects their perception towards their goals. The Asian Children are usually gown up with very strict parents who push their children to practice a lot and do hard work when it comes to academic or school matters. therefore, the Asian kids are more focused and dedicated to what they do than the American Kids and that has has a big impact on their dedication when they become adults.
7
John Kennedy met with Nehru at Mount Vernon—negotiated what was effectively a grant for India to open a series of MIT-like campuses.
Odd that we could find the funds to pay for an open educational system for them but cannot do it for ourselves now. Thank you Ronald Reagan.
4
Warren, it was bound to happen, sooner or later. There is scant a place in the world where you wouldn't run into a Chinese or an Indian, every 6th or 7th person on the planet is either one of them.
2
with Chinese and Indian populations totaling to 2.5 billion that would be 1 out of 3 humans in the world.
This debate has been going on for a while, and not just at graduate schools. It's not uncommon for engineering and science programs at major universities (and even high schools) across the nation to be majority Asian. I recall a past article here in the NYT that stated it's often more common to overhear Mandarin while roaming Berkley than English. Universities are of course incentivized by the huge dollar signs (international students pay far more than in state or even just US students). While the purpose of universities is to train and prepare one for jobs, the culture of a school is often equally important. While I can't be completely certain, I don't think the current student makeup of a school such as Berkley is now, would had been nearly as engaged in student activism back in the 1960s.
2
Your premise is wrong. It is the stratification of graduate schools based on test scores and preference given to foreign students who pay more money over American students that is driving most of the problem. That and the continued isolation of departments from one another that is creating stagnation within the fields. My own experience in applying to graduate schools with a Linguistics approach to programming and teaching AI neural networks, I have been rejected not only by Anthropology departments who "don't do that sort of thing,' but also by Computer Science Departments who say "you don't have a background in Computer Science." Yet my resume shows I've been an innovator in the field for a good number of years and my self-taught coding was enough to create a software good enough to be named a top IBM SmartCamp Entrepreneur, I don't fit the CS Box and have been rejected from every grad program I have applied to.
What this tells me about the graduate system is that it's run by elitist departments who can't see the forest for the trees, driven by tuition revenue rather than by innovation/education.
Unless you want to work locally within the state you attend school in, the only way elite companies are going to hire you to work in STEM are if you graduate from top ranked university that you can't get into unless you're foreign as those admission requirements are less due to the higher tuition rate. Many foreign students in university grad programs barely speak English.
6
I empathize with your situation. However, as a lecturer in CS, may I point out something I faced in many social conversations? Since we are talking about advanced degrees, the foundation for taking them up is important by definition. Today, being able to put together a basic program or website is easy because of the powerful software tools available even for free. However, this hides the theoretical foundations behind software development of complex systems. Take computer programming, for example. I often use the analogy of algebra and calculus to explain the difference between being able to cobble together a simple program using a language such as C and developing a complex software with object-oriented technology for a bank. Another analogy I used if the person I am having the conversation still did not get the idea is a hillybilly who cuts up a frog and thinks that he is now qualified to discuss heart surgery with a surgeon. A basic foundation in programming today means understanding, among many many things, why we have abstract methods in abstract classes, why is polymorphism so critical, what are the implications if we increase the data types that an instance method can accept, and so on and so forth. Things that anyone who may be able to write a simple C program but have absolutely no idea.
Again, as I said, I empathize with you and this comment is in no way undermining your point.
1
Interesting read. I share a story from my daughter with a prominent Silicon Valley company. She attended a deposition where one of the supervisory engineers (an Indian) was pounded by the EEOC counsel. Why so many Indian engineers? Well, many years ago, Nehru looked at the future and saw it was in STEM. Their government poured money into educating the best and brightest. The kids responded and achieved...and many got hired in America. Why aren't there a proportional number of American employees? Well, even though the company made a job offer to every graduate in computer engineering in the US, the kids declined: they didn't want to work that hard.
But we do have great football teams.
5
India churns out minimally qualified "engineers" - many would not pass a basic licensing exam in the USA.
"Over 80% of engineers are unemployable, according to various studies."
https://qz.com/973435/even-the-iit-heads-are-now-worried-about-the-quali...
5
They made an offer to "every graduate in computer engineering in the U.S." and every one declined??? Sounds fishy to me. If this is even true, I'd examine why every graduate in the US refuses to work for your company.
2
The default degree in India is engineering and the numbers are humongous. My neighbors stay at home lady is an engineer. The girl next door raining to be a decoy for attacking dogs {something that puzzles me too} is an engineer.
There are cultures in which additional academic degrees are an indication of success, the level of education a sign of achievement. And then there is American culture, in which the number of figures in a salary is the indication of success and achievement. Many immigrant groups come from cultures where the former is true. Then the next generation becomes Americanized. Then it is no longer important to learn more. Rather, what is most important is to earn more.
6
American grad students are disappearing because they can't afford it, and they're being replaced because interested students from abroad are usually the sons and daughters of diplomats and business leaders who can afford it.
Also, how many of these students return home after they finish? It seems to me like we're training our future competitors. We already know how powerful China already is, and India can be a behemoth too. These guys are gonna wipe the floor with us in a few decades, and it'll be because they were taught how to do it at prestigious American universities.
17
Universities and employers are eager to tap the pool of international talent that helps them stay competitive globally...
Universities make a pile of money from foreign students, and American companies save money by hiring cheap foreign labor.
Just like the old Mafia: "Nothing personal, just business."
12
When shortsighted profiteers can dictate nearly everything people suffer and business opportunities vanish. We are a lawless culture that worships expedience over almost everything else . . . our children are kicked to the curb. Just watch what Betsy Devos continues to do . . .
3
If I was a university, why would I want to recruit a U.S. student whom I might have to help with financial aid when I can recruit a Chinese grad student who will arrive with a suitcase of cash to pay the tuition bill? And then I can hire him? And give the white male American student I jilted a lecture about his "xenophobia," "white privilege," and his need to value "diversity." Shell game all around.
10
Sold to the highest bidder! Isn’t that how anything for sale is supposed to work?
The Republican tax plan to “ Make America Great “ diminishes the value of education even more. This bill cuts the educated minds and the technology they develop and sustain in an ever changing world at the knees. Professional degrees are excluded from pass through corporations and their lower tax rate. Moving expenses are no longer deductible as well as interest on student debt. State and local taxes are no longer deductible and local property tax deductions are caped at 10K. Contributions to SEP IRA’s are 3 times higher than 401k’s. Mortgage interest deductions are capped at Home values of 500k which limits the homes available in larger high priced metro cities coastal and otherwise that have educated and in demand occupations. The details with regards to intellectually property I suspect have a diminished tax benefit that the building of physical plant and equipment. The list goes on but this GOP bill holds more favor with liquor store owners that software developers. This is the future being put forth by the party of stupid. Those educated Chinese, Indians, Koreans and East bloc countries will be designing and building the electric cars of the future.
5
I wonder why the ratio is so high for these three groups?
Graduate schools are money-makers for colleges but set students up for a lifetime of indentured servitude through student loans. There is now a vast oversupply of Ph.D.s (to say nothing of people with masters degrees and professional degrees) without enough jobs. Still, universities continue to pump money into recruiting graduate students, which further depreciates the degrees of their alumni. American students - except those who come from underrepresented groups and are less plugged into the grapevine - now know this. Foreign students are the new suckers for the game.
2
Do Americans think industrial spying is a matter of chance? Intel Corporation would tell you, "No." The Intel v. Via Technologies patent lawsuits illustrated a 10 year plan where Taiwan coached high school students into Stanford Electrical Engineering and on graduation the students were working for Intel by day and emailing Intel's IP back to Taiwan at night. Is America again engineering its own undoing?
2
Common sense suggests that survival of the fittest in STEM fields is displayed here.
No, it's survival of the state-sponsored fittest, as in China, Inc., and India, Inc.
America has never really understood how and what methods foreigners use to get to the US. Graduate degree is seen as a passport to America-it leads to the H1B, then green card. Indians and Chinese are not flocking here for the education and you are not getting the brightest either. In India there are cottage industries on how to ace the GMAT/GRE, people go to classes for months. Why? Because a high score results in admission+scholarship money. Once foreign students get here, US academia is a breeze compared to the high and rigorous rules in India. Besides Indians can share homework/assignments in their dorm/appartments as many live together to reduce cost.
The reason Indians are not seen in undergrad degree programs is because it is expensive and also is not a direct path to the green card. So no, Indians are not coming here for the education-they are coming here for the green card via the education. What you do get is substandard labor who has found grad degrees to be an avenue to get here.
4
I worked in the USA in IT for 30 years. Almost 0% of my coworkers had graduate degrees. They are not necessary, as the article said. What I found necessary was to train new employees I hired for my own company in the computer language our clients needed, because in school they focused on the wrong stuff. That has changed now. As for AI and ML, that is my specialty today. What you need for that is a math and not a computer design degree. There a master's degree might make sense, but only if that is what they study.
1
It is called hard work and dedication. Even at the bottom of the employment sector - health aides for the elderly - in my experience (working with over 20 aides in my home), I have found that immigrants (compared to American born aides) are harder working, more reliable, more trustworthy and honest, and more concerned and dedicated to their patients. Across the board, in every case.
I blame the American culture of greed, "me first"-ism. Greed for as much money as fast as possible keeps Americans from serious post graduate studies too.
7
The exorbitant cost of higher education driven by declining revenue to state governments in the case of state universities and the equally exorbitant debt that comes along with paying for grad school is why we are seeing this decline. Another factor is the American society's emphasis on materialism, which discourages young adults from going to school simply to acquire knowledge. We are teaching young people these days that school should be a means to a higher paycheck, which may be the wrong way to go about how we view higher education. At some point in this country, we are going to have a moment of reckoning where we will need to decide to dramatically increase funds state universities in the form of taxes to keep this country moving forward.
2
I appreciate the substance of the article, but I am not keen on the associated photo at its lead. Non-white does not equal not American. Beyond the photo, the declining interest in graduate school by US students reflects changing opportunities and interests, and perhaps a misunderstanding of the reasons to go to graduate school. Graduate studies in the sciences are hopefully about doing exciting research.
6
There's a lot of talk about Americans not being able to afford graduate school, but there's a large piece of this puzzle that people are not posting about in the comments. Many graduate students are paid with a stipend and tuition costs are covered. Many foreign students are paid through Professor's grants from NSF, NIH, DOD, etc. Most of these funds don't go directly to non-citizens, but do flow through professors, departments, and colleges. Meaning that our tax dollars are not training US citizens to work in STEM fields, often the dollars are used to train the next generation of US competitors.
6
The "cost of education" for scholars who have stipends is the years they spend off the job market while their peers are socking away money into their 401k's. The other "expense" is the long post-doctoral period that can extend a decade beyond graduation. The average Ph.D. in molecular biology (for example) is about 7-8 years. Post-docs last for close to a decade. These people are near the age of 40 or OVER 40 before they can get a real job that pays the bills. Meanwhile, this kind of "support" isn't easy street by any means. The stipends are barely livable and your work day never ends. 70 hour weeks are the norm. Same with the post-docs. 60-80 hours a week for well under $50k a year. It's the biggest bargain in the world - for academia and biotech.
After all that, your chances of having a real "career" after years of investment are about as good as becoming the next Lady GaGa or perhaps becoming a quarterback for the NY Giants.
In the 90s, graduate students were bamboozled by a projected "shortage" of Ph.D.'s. The shortages never appeared, the salaries tanked as did the job market and thousands of very gifted people were left with degrees not worth the paper it was printed on.
Thank goodness the current generation is not getting suckered into such a mess.
The problem of the high cost of tuition is compounded at the graduate level. Undergraduate tuition rates have some public visibility, so the university administrators have a political incentive to hold the line and moderate tuition increases.
Where then, does the university look to raise revenue? The graduate programs. The student bodies at that level are smaller and more fractured, so it's harder to organize opposition. An advanced degree is considered 'optional' and we will all make fabulous salaries after graduation anyway, so no one loses sleep over soaking the grad students.
The rate of tuition increase for graduate programs in my state's university system has been about triple that of undergraduate. Whereas I paid about $8,000 in tuition and fees per year in the late 90s, today that figure is over $30,000. Over that time period, tuition has gone up 375% and starting salaries have gone up 50%.
5
The root cause of the decline of American graduate students is, sadly, the demise of the public K-12 education system. When students are brought up with the culture of "everyone wins a trophy regardless of ability or effort," a lack of intrinsic motivation soon develops. Often, students from non-US cultures have a different appreciation for academic excellence. Personally, I don't care about the geographic origin of the employees at any particular business....as long as that person can do the job with excellence and dedication.
6
The reason why foreign students have to pursue doctoral studies when they enroll in our universities is that they could not get a green card if they just have 4-year college degree in STEM areas. A doctoral degree allows them to claim skills and talents that are beneficial to US interests, and obtain their green cards more easily.
The fact of the matter is, if you want to be a code jinja for a company like FB or Google or Microsoft, you do not need a graduate degree in computer science: a 3 month crash course in computer programming and machine languages is sufficient to become employable.
In fact, many of the H1B visaholders from India go through such crash training in coding and have just a bachelor's degree in science.
So, whatever it takes to live in America is what this academic pursuit is all about. The argument that a person with student loan debt cannot pursue grad studies is untenable because all grad students receive "living wages" as research assistants or as teaching assistants. An American resident does not have the same pressure to pursue grad studies to be able to continue to live here. That is the simple truth.
8
I'm a graduate student, and I like it. I make around 35K a year. A friend of mine who majored in the exact same thing makes 80K straight out of our undergraduate institution.
3
Maybe because we can't afford to spend another 2-6 years flat broke after all our undergraduate loans come due? Maybe because foreign students pay full tuition and US students live on a stipend, that, even with a part time job (which is unofficial and could get me kicked off funding if anybody in the dept. objected), my kids are eligible for free lunches? (before I get the single mother attack, know that I'm going to grad school in my 40's after divorce and escape from an abusive marriage).
8
College is a business, and foreign students pay more and don't bother professors with irksome questions not on the syllabus. Any inquisitive or nontraditional student can get the stuffing kicked out of them by the academics, who are only interested in servitude and free labor for their own research pursuits. I took out loans and used up my savings for grad school, to be hired at that same institution at 19.5 hours per week, slightly past the cutoff to qualify for medicaid. At a state college, mind you, skirting labor laws and steeped in the hierarchical conditions they publicly decry.
5
To summarize succinctly - "...a major (factor) is the booming job market in technology. For the most part, Americans don’t see the need for an advanced degree when there are so many professional opportunities waiting for them."
Our younger son can command a high five-figure salary at age 22 with an undergraduate STEM degree in a high demand field. So can most of his friends and school colleagues.
Grad school? Why now? Perhaps later.
Speaking as someone who has been there (is there!) and done that.
5
My perception is that too few American students are willing to make calculus (or other relevant math skills) second nature and work their tails off for $100K per year, more or less. Millions of people around the world are willing to do both.
3
This is disappointing but not surprising. As President Coolidge famously said in the roaring 20s: "The business of America is business." Today, with the stock market roaring, with jobs in computer science in demand, with Wall Street and the Republicans in charge of the financial sector, with college itself becoming more and more a path to social mobility and wealth, fewer college students are interested in teaching careers in the humanities or the liberal arts, in which I include mathematics, physics, chemistry: learning for the sake of learning, art for the sake of art.
The colleges and universities are mimicking these trends by adopting the business models of Wall Street. Harvard is expanding a costly engineering school,even though there is a world-class engineering school a mile or two away at the other end of Massachusetts Avenue. It is starving the humanities of funds and teachers while it is boosting support for computer programming, business, and economics to train (not educate) students for jobs on Wall Street and the tech industry.
Perhaps these trends will end as the roaring 20s ended--with a crash.
6
There are not enough jobs for all the STEM graduates (except for computers), and these graduates do not make as much money as graduates of business or management. So why bother?
12
I think there's a pragmatic element that perhaps causes a disproportionate number of foreigners to be in these grad programs: The schools that they got their undergrad degrees from are unknown (at least in detail) to many U.S. hiring managers as compared with the schools that most U.S. residents have graduated from. So foreigners who want to work in the U.S. are more inclined (than U.S. residents) to go to U.S. grad programs to give them a sort of "seal of approval" that's recognizable to those managers.
7
"Her decision paid off. Ms. Joshi, 25, has accepted an offer to work in risk management at American Express once she completes her master’s."
Foreign countries pay for foreign students to go to grad schools. After a foreign student works in American companies the foreign student can bring back to their country the expertise that they obtained at American companies.
The value pf the degree is simply the ability to obtain the expertise that can be learned at American companies.
5
It's not hard to figure out what's happened, if you're aware of demographics and other basic facts. More than one-third of all the world's people live in just two countries--China and India. Their combined populations are around 9 times greater than that of the U.S., the world's 3rd most populous country.
Until near the end of the 20th century, both India and China were poverty-stricken agrarian societies with closed national economies. Everything in China changed after 1978, and everything in India changed after 1991. Both countries are much wealthier today, especially China. But not surprisingly, young people from both countries still approach their lives with a kind of siege mentality akin to how Jewish students in early 20th century America--the children of people who in some cases had literally fled for their lives from virulently anti-Semitic societies in Eastern Europe--approached their own academic studies.
It all comes down to the deprivation motive, combined with economic reforms that have made postgraduate study overseas a far more achievable possibility in the world's two population giants. That so many of these students have gravitated towards STEM is no surprise. In India, your proverbial "starving artist" is *literally* starving.
Asking why native-born Americans don't bother is the wrong question. Asking why such Americans don't live their lives with the same kind of siege mentality is the right question, and the answer is obvious. They don't need to.
12
How quaint to think that it requires a "siege mentality" to complete a graduate degree in a STEM field. This comment illustrates the sense of economic entitlement harbored by U.S. citizens. Thank heavens for immigrants (and their citizen children) who forestall the collapse of the American Empire.
3
At the rate the Oligarchs are taking over this country, our students my sooner rather than later find themselves living with that same siege mentality that you mention. And, if things don't work out, they can always become famous by shooting innocent people.
It's not just U.S. citizens. It's citizens of all wealthy, developed countries. Notice that citizens of Japan aren't desperate to study in STEM fields at the postgraduate level in America either.
As for the "American Empire"--got news for you, it's already collapsing and a bunch of Chinese and Indians studying physics and engineering at NYU won't turn things around. The permanent turning point downward for America came in the summer of 2001 (before 9/11) when the Republican-controlled government elected to cut taxes rather than continuing with the paying down of the national debt. A country founded on the basis of a deeply selfish and self-centered tax revolt was never going to last for too long as an empire. An empire requires revenue, and sufficient revenue requires taxing upper-income citizens at a disproportionately higher rate.
Many upper-income Americans made it clear some time ago that they have no interest in being taxed enough to keep the "empire" or even the country for that matter afloat.
2
Graduate students need to disappear some more, both US and foreign. Currently we have a glut of PhD students, a carryover from the times when they were cheap work force. PIs/mentors didn't have to pay tuition for them, and one's stipend could often be covered by making them teaching assistants. Nowadays a graduate student cost almost as much as a postdoctoral researcher without expectation of similar productivity. On the other hand, PhD recipients now have much slimmer prospects of vertical mobility (e.g. faculty position), instead they get stuck in limbo of low-paying (compared to MDs) jobs in academia, or "alternative" careers. So neither side is particularly happy with the current predicament, but no individual University prorgam is willing to go first and drastically cut graduate student enrollment while providing greater benefits to students (return of tuition waiver, higher stipend, loan repayment assistance, etc). Unless substantial changes are introduced in graduate education and work force, US students participation will remain low.
11
Same reason there are insufficient American UNDERgrad students in STEM majors: For most students, these majors are significantly more work, and significantly more difficult than most other majors.
4
If you had read the article you would have seen that there is no lack in American undergrade students in colleges and university.
But this would have called for significantly more work on your part.
"There’s concern, though, that the current climate around immigration could jeopardize that flow of talent."
If there was foreign students with real talent college and universities would be charging nothing for these foreign students instead of high fees.
Colleges and universities are afraid they will no longer be able to make money from foreign students. Opps there goes that the ide of a campus building!
4
Indeed. The author fails to mention that most of these foreign grad students are paying full tuition, which is no burden on their parents who have grown wealthy from Globalization. Most U.S. students need to apply for a spectrum of financial aid in order to attend.
Universities are not nearly so interested in actual education as they are in the money that backs it up.
7
Oops there goes the idea of a new campus building!
1
Foreign and domestic students are treated the same financially in graduate programs: they pay the same in professional Master's and usually all get funded in PhD. So this motivation just isn't there. The issue is that the U.S. do not produce a stream of competitive STEM undergraduates who want to go into these programs.
While it may be a bit off-topic, I would amend the article's title to read:
"The Disappearing American Male Grad Student".
In my small corner of the academic world I see far more young women in the masters and doctorate programs than men. This may not be true in computer science and engineering programs but in other science programs women seem to outnumber men these days. I have absolutely no hard data to back this up, just a personal observation over the years.
6
I graduated from college 23 years ago with degrees in physics and history, and completed the coursework in mathematics as well. I was accepted into a Ph.D program to study mathematical physics. What I realized during my senior year was that there were too many physics Ph.Ds for the number of open positions at universities and in private industry, and that too many recently minted Ph.Ds were having to do multiple postdoctoral programs before finding a permanent position, putting them into occupational limbo after spending seven years earning their Ph.D. Indeed, during my senior year, my college physics department received nearly 600 applications for one tenure track position.
What I realized was that I could be the in the top 300 physicists of my generation, but if there were only jobs for 50, or even 100, during the time I completed my Ph.D that wouldn’t matter, and I wouldn’t find myself gainful employed.
I went to work on Wall Street, and I don’t regret that decision.
20
Bingo. If a student has the talent and academic background to be accepted into and excel in a graduate STEM program, he/she also has many job opportunities elsewhere (if he/she is a US citizen). Many of those career paths are considerably more lucrative than the opportunities the grad degree will lead to--without the delay.
I'd postulate that the relative paucity of native-born Americans in STEM grad programs is because the very talented among them have many other options, and the merely capable are outworked by the interested foreigners, who have relatively more to gain.
4
I left grad school in STEM field because the money part of it simply did not make sense. To stay would have ballooned my 8.25%-interest student loan debt, and since I already had a secure job (with retirement benefits!) and would be unlikely to find a better-paying one after grad school, I sadly cut short my time at university, even though I loved the science and the intellectual challenges. Instead I chose to live in near-poverty with more than half of my before-tax income going to service student loans, specifically so that I could retire early and independently focus my attention on matters of interest to me.
If I had stayed in grad school, I'd likely still be one of the many "adjunct" professors or post-docs making less money (with no benefits) than what was provided by my existing job--math that simply did not make sense to me. I do have regrets about losing the chance to do that kind of work, though.
Higher education now puts all of the financial burden and risks on the back of the individual student, even though substantial benefits accrue to society and employers from those individual investments. Students are expected to forecast future job markets, and will pay dearly if they miscalculate.
If society values education--and it should--there should be real support provided for the real work involved in one's obtaining that education, and it should not be reserved for those with parental wealth. I think I could have contributed a lot, if I'd had the chance to do so.
31
I recommend U.S. students start training to be 'Houseboy' if they don't want to study competitively. Ironical, isn't it? As long as we are providing our opportunities to the rest of the world, without preference for those who created them our opportunities will soon become their opportunities. I only hope then that our children are welcome to their table as theirs were to ours.
7
Students are not only expected to forecast future job markets, those who "do their homework" and make decisions based on the best forecasts available are rudely surprised when universities, governments, and private industry "disrupt" those forecasts for newer, cheaper ways of making money. Individuals don't have a chance anymore to make sane, rational decisions about their lives but they are expected, as you note, to bear the burden of others' speculation and market manipulations. Then those same consortiums of private industry get wealthy off the student loan industry impoverishing the students they manipulated the first time. Follow the money. It's a web of exploitation of entire generations of Americans who did exactly what everyone told them to do - go to school, study hard.
7
As a “local” (US citizen, English as first language, etc, etc) I would love to attend graduate school. The problem? I can’t afford to pay for school and I don’t want to go back into the student loan hell I have just started to surface from.
When I went back to school at the age of 28 to get my BSN my (now) ex-husband and I were making approximately $54,000 a year and this was too much to qualify for any sort of grant. I took out federal student loans to pay for in-state tuition which was aprox $15,000/yr at the time (unsubsidized>subsidized due to our income) and left my 4.5 yrs of Bachelors level education with $65,000 in loan debt to the federal government and more than 50% of that was at the unsubsidized interest rate of 6.8%.
Although I would benefit from the opportunity to advance my career through obtaining an MSN or PhD I have no will to take out loans and end up $100,000 in debt.
That’s my “local” reason:(
43
But wouldn't admission to a PhD program in your field typically come with tuition funding+stipend? It certainly does in mine.
Don't bother. I got my MSN and my NP in 1998 and I've been unemployed for 13 years. Had to "retire" (without a pension plan). I originally wanted an MSN so I could be an administrator -- hahaha. Just as I graduated with my MSN, managed care came along and everyone I knew in administration was laid off. I thought, "I'd better get into a post grad program and become an NP, since NYS is cutting its funding for medical residents."
So I did that. And so did everyone else. NYC then became a playground for the filthy rich and my subsidized building turned into "luxury condos," necessitating a move to the sticks where I couldn't find a job.
My advice - stick with working on the floors, in the OR, PACU and ICUs. I wish I had. I'd still be working and looking forward to a pension.
I've come to believe that this "disappearing" is a conscious devolvement of American public education and, by extension, graduate studies. As demonstrated by the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 50's through the '70's; an educated and informed populace is detrimental to the powers of manipulation by government and the necessary skepticism, critical thinking and involvement of 'the people' in the process. A key component in that repression being the inability of all American to have access to quality public education.
Pop references be damned;but it's all too evident that stupid is actually leads to stupid does....and stupid elects.
17
Having been an EE for over 30 years, here's some observations:
1) You can always tell there's a recession that coincides with American grad student rates. If you can get a job after your bachelors,then why bother getting a masters degree? If you can't, then park yourself in school and wait the recession out.
2) American companies will rarely hire foreigners without real world
experience or a masters degree. Getting a masters ensures that the foreigner didn't go to some diploma mill in China or India, and also "Americanizes" their speech and social skills.
3) Unless you go to a really sharp grad school, computer science is way overrated for STEM. Computer science is a ever-evolving skill, and most schools are way behind the eight ball in teaching up-to-date programming techniques. Hanging out with contemporaries teaches you more than schools do.
4) Even with a technical masters degree, most Americans will be pushed into management, not technology after a few years. The money is much, much better.
5) I've always thought it's better to work a few years first, then go for a specialized masters degree.
6) I resent all the letters implying that all American high schools suck - the Americans hired by major companies all had great educational backgrounds in all subjects, not just STEM-related. Kids need to be exposed to different ideas in all subjects, so they can choose what career they want, rather than having their parents decide for them.
83
Well said. Especially the part about technical people getting lured into management because the pay is so much better. This not only removes talented people from the day-to-day work in their fields that they enjoy, but puts individuals in people-managing positions who often have no interest or talent for it. Why can't we figure out how to pay and advance the technical track better?
3
Best comment I've read to this piece. Total agreement from me.
1
There is not high exceptional about Americans. They got lucky after WW2 in that their industrial power wasn’t destroyed like the rest of the first world. They scooped up millions of high paying jobs for people with zero skills. Now that competition has arisen we see the real story. America is one of the richest and dumbest countries on the planet. One of those will soon fade.
9
Well, America prevailing in WW2 wasn't exactly luck, was it?
A globalized world economy does indeed bring more competition to the picture. That said, other members of the world community are free to not attend our universities (or read our newspapers like you are) if one finds better opportunities elsewhere.
1
One could also wonder about a country where scientists are demonized (EPA?), and even basic tenets of science like evolution or the age of the planet are not accepted by a significant proportion of the population.
67
Yes when a nations leaders promote ignorance and magical thinking the collective IQ nose dives.
1
I have been a software developer for more than 20 years and I echo comments made by others that in general, a graduate STEM degree has little value in most situations. If one wants to work in machine learning or data science (areas that are very math/stats heavy), then a PhD could be a plus. However even in these cases, a motivated individual could learn what they need post bachelor's degree by taking MOOCs (massively open online courses) for free or a very low cost. As for me, I obtained an MBA after my bachelor's degree in computer science and found this to be a useful combination. Compared to a STEM degree, an MBA is really easy and helps broaden one's perspective. The issue I see with many software developers is an incredibly narrow focus in which they cannot envision broader perspectives with an organization - i.e. what should we be building or how does one lead? An MBA is incredibly useful from that perspective.
9
Unless these American students have a corporate sponsor to help defray their college debt, tuition costs to attend a Masters program, they are out of luck.
Foreign students, by design of their H1B citizen status, have full access to the sadly corrupt corporate sponsorship system which gives them almost total advantage over their American counterparts. This is not rocket science. But, it needs to change. Only our conflict of interest lawmakers can make that happen and I'm not holding my breath.
13
H1B doesn't confer citizen status apart from being taxed as US citizens. H1B holders are not eligible for most benefits available to US citizens and permanent residents. Moreover, H1B is not a student visa. Graduate students in this country usually have F1 visas, in rare cases - J1. These are not rocket surgery, these are facts.
6
help me out here-- I am in higher education, but not a STEM field: 1. students don't get H visas, at least not where I live. They need F or J visas, specifically for students and academic visitors. They have no "advantage" from those visas: they apply to US graduate schools, and if admitted, they can apply for a student visa. 2. Most serious graduate programs-- PhDs at least-- pay for you to attend, with a scholarship or a stipend from a professor's research grant. Is this different in technology fields? Why?
2
The situation you described holds for biomedical, chemical, and computational fields at least. Our good friend RLC doesn't really know how things are, but eager to change them...
1
There are two reasons and two reasons only why graduate schools especially in STEM are overwhelmingly populated by foreigners. it's not especially a complex calculus and it's disingenuous to try and say that in this article. First is that grad school is very expensive and confers little benefit in the job market for citizens or green card holders. 2nd and probably most important reason why so many foreign-born are in grad school is because afterwards they have a six-month window to find a job in the United States. Graduate school holds out the hope often quite real of being able to obtain a visa or green card and stay here. There's nothing wrong with that but there's no great mystery either.
13
Graduate school is usually not expensive for many people because research universities (R1) offer tuition waivers and stipends to most graduate students. Most students getting Ph.D.s do not pay tuition. But lots of people don't know that and, perhaps, many native-born students don't go to graduate school because they don't know about the tuition waivers and stipends. Especially lower income students who don't have the cultural and social capital to have heard about this kind of stuff.
5
Sorry, this used to be true in some fields, but isn't even true in STEM anymore. At a few elite universities there are fellowships. Everyone else is on student loans, or at best on a teaching fellowship that gives them a few years of support (not enough to finish) while depressing wages for Ph.D.s who are already finished because the universities use the grad students as cheap labor. These teaching fellowships are jobs, not supported time to study, and they often involve long hours and dealing with the least prepared undergraduates. Frequently, they prolong the time to degree and grad students wind up taking out loans to finish or dropping out, having lost years in the job market. And these are the lucky ones.
4
There's a significant financial benefit for the institutions, that also tips the balance: cash. Enrolling increasing numbers of foreign students is a boon for these institutions, as students applying from outside the US don't get financial aid. This means that universities get paid Immediately, don't have to deal with paperwork (FAFSA), and don't have to wait for federal tuition reimbursement.
23
In the early 1980s, after a few years of law practice, I wanted to get a Master's degree in international law. I investigated the application process at UCLA and UC Berkeley. I discovered that only foreign students were allowed in these programs. I thought it was a federal government program to indoctrinate foreigners going back to their countries in the American way. Maybe I was wrong, it was just for cash.
2
As someone who has spent 40 years teaching at US universities.
Getting a Ph.D does not add value in most STEM fields . The salary curves ($'s vs time at company) in the semiconductor industry start at the year where you received your bachelor degrees, and are the SAME for bachelors, masters and Ph.D's.
That is, after spending 5 years getting a Ph.D. your starting salary is EXACTLY the same, as that of a bachelor who entered the company 5 years earlier, and spent the last 5 years climbing up the payment ladder.
Foreign students sign up because they need to learn American culture, American Enginerring language, and still believe in the prestige of a Ph.D
(or at least their parents)
Smart American undergrads have long figured out the system. They rather enter early and spent the 5 years on advancing in the company.
Unless you really, really like research (not development, not R&D) your are better off in most STEM fields not getting a Ph.D .
There is a spectrum (Chemistry at one end, CS at the other) but on balance this is true.
In CS, I know of cases where students were hired before they finished their final year.
Come now, we need you, and NO we do care about degrees. In 3 month we can figure out what you can do, if you can do more than a Ph.D will promote you right over one.
12
There was not one word about the crushing student debt that US students endure to go to college. The slow degradation of scholarships, research grants, and PELL grants started in 2000 & has never bounced back.
These foreign countries pay all of the tuition for their international students Whereas, the Republican free marketers prefer our research dollars go to banks & private corporations. The imbalance isn't in US skills- its in the distribution of public dollars not going to our students.
38
As someone who as an American who went through earning a Ph.D, I recall a story from two three four years back in the NY times. A career in science in the U.S. is a path into poverty for Americans Academic jobs pay far too little to overcome the years of accumulating college debt and low earnings as a grad student. For Asians it is a way out of relative poverty. While I love science it is not a job where you earn enough to justify the investment.
21
And the Republicans are hoping to end the student debt tax deductions in their new plan. That ought to help lots!
1
In the 1970's American grad students were paid to teach under graduates. You did not have swarms of grad students.
Now grad students are foreign students that will simply increase funds for a university or college.
7
Private 4 year college in USA costs ~ $200,000 or more. I train foreign MDs at a very prestigious hospital in NYC. DO you know most of have NO educational debt or maybe $10-20,000. It's very insulting to our students! Why would anyone become an MD or other STEM graduate in the USA today? Some US MDs grads have over $400,000 worth of debt to start life out at 26. Capitalism fails in this regard. The only US grads I see that are debt free are ones whose parents have paid for their education. All of this is very sad and adds to the "fallen empire" feel that the USA has at this time.
157
As long as we are providing our opportunities to the rest of the world, without preference for those who created them our opportunities will soon become their opportunities. I only hope then that our children are welcome to their table as theirs were to ours.
3
Well, of course, if parents can pay kids can graduate debt-free but not otherwise. Where and how can a 18 year old pay for even a state school on their own? Of course if family resources are insufficient the student will have to take on debt. The bigger problem is the monstrous growth in tuition and corresponding increase in loans to pay for it.
1
Many coworkers I worked with had MS/PhD from US colleges, they were foreign students at one point, when they came here for school, they worked as TA, got a stipend and free tuition. They were the cream of the crop in their countries of billions of people. They stayed and became Americans. So what is not to like? USA got the best and brightest from around the world, didn't fund their undergrad study, they later created jobs, paid high taxes due to their income...
Or Do you want illegal immigrants?
6
More fallout from the messed up values of a country whose citizens, or too many of them, would rather give its money to billionaires than spend it on anything of benefit to the public good.
19
I've seen too many intelligent, multi-talented students gravitate to Wall Street investment firms because the big money is there. Too many of our best minds are being used to make money for the wealthy and not to make the world better for everyone.
58
The largest number of foreign students in American
universities are from China and India. Their STEM
education has helped these two countries make
progress in science and technology. In not too
distant future China will be competitive with USA in
technology as they pour money into research and
development and we into the wars.
19
Computer science foreign students study in the US to aid their English. These students know they will always have jobs as cheap foreign labor of American companies.
Look at India where IBM now has less Americans workers in the US and now has the most IBM cheap foreign workers of India.
9
The system is designed to get talented students from all over the world to the US. Some come for money, some for the freedom, some for the love of science. On the other hand, the country exploits these talents in its economy and also national level. US desperately wants these talents. For instance, bright talents could go and build things like Baidu, a company that probably would beat Google soon in Machine Learning, the next revolution that will make any nation the next superpower.
As a student, I bring my talents here, build it and polish it for the benefit of US. In comparison to citizens, for the most of my career, I will not get what I deserve. Many PhDs are dependent on that 30k yearly, and they cannot work in any other place. They do research for NSF and DOE, exploring what is the best direction in any field, while these agencies never allow them to continue these best directions and be the next Edison. They publish their works with US universities, rising their ranks and improving their research. So, I do not necessary think this system is not working.
You would ask why we come here? US is open, we can be ourselves here. Many of us are escaping from suppressive regimes. Others come because their country is not fully developed for their talents. Other to support their families. And many because science, look at universities, filled with professors from all over the world. I used to think this was what makes US different, this openness, but apparently not anymore.
14
I appreciate your intentions but as part of a 'family' as long as we insist providing our opportunities to the whole world without a preference for those who created them, we can expect to have less on our table with each boatload, unless you do decide to stay and contribute in appreciation. but should ti be a god given right enter our house? would it be for me to enter yours and to take a place at your table and a portion of your food? Not sure how that always works out. I'm just not sure anymore. Especially in a world that sometimes seems so ungrateful and hateful toward Americans.
1
Grads usually stay, and have families in the US. This is mostly because all the reasons I mentioned. And we appreciate this opportunity. We do not take jobs, we create more jobs. We create stronger economy for US to compete. We take technical jobs, while creating more service jobs to support corporations (lawyers, management, financial). We take academia jobs, and teach same things for students here. It is a constructing cycle, not a destructive one.
And it is not a given right. If you know the process of admission to grad school, the requirements, and all the screening, you would not say so. Many people wants to come to US, as always. But, universities are very selective for grads. The choose the bests.
The reasons the we leave this country after our studies is caused by the same environment that we are making today. Based on the opinions who do not see all the aspects. We can go to any country with the talents we have (btw, I personally thinking of Canada), but everyone I know in grad school wants to stay.
And for this sentence "Especially in a world that sometimes seems so ungrateful and hateful toward Americans." I would not say anything, people usually don't know the details of what US is doing or have done overseas. Americans tends to remember good things, while other countries never forget bad things US have done. So there is a bias, and I don't want to open this discussion. "The True Flag" by Stephen Kinzer" is a good book about this issue.
3
I was a graduate student in Mathematics and in Economics, with a Ph.D in the latter. My experience is that the internationals are using the graduate programs as a legal, cost efficient way to immigrate to the United States. My neighbors, a Chinese couple, got their Ph.D in Chemical Engineering and went to work for DuPont for a total income of about 200k. Typically in the sciences/engineering, the universities provide stipends/assistantships so that it costs the graduate students nothing. In some cases, the students have to do very little for their stipends, in other cases working in the lab can be a very hard job. An international student typically will not go to a program unless they get an assistantship.
Why so few American students? First, getting a Ph.D is not considered a favorable career track. Second, if the American student is really good, most likely he/she is going to law school, med school or business school. Third, the American undergraduate programs do not prepare the students as well as the foreign universities do. So the American students fail out of the Ph.D programs or just don't do well. Fourth, there is a lot of discrimination against the American students. The foreign graduate faculty (which also dominate the faculty ranks these days), look down their noses at the American students.
A international student told me the following joke: Are you American? then you are stupid.
39
A computer science class at N.Y.U.’s Tandon School of Engineering..
Big surprise that Americans do not want to spend money to work in a field that is dominated by cheap foreign labor.
Enrollment in the computer science in 2002 went down greatly when Americans learned that there would be no job for Americans since companies were using cheap foreign labor instead of Americans.
The only engineering Americans are interested in is civil engineering since now American companies can not use cheap foreign labor instead of Americans.
The New York Times continues to have articles like this and always refuses to admit that the problem is that Americans will not go into fields that are dominated by cheap foreign labor.
23
As an astronomer for half a century I've seen this change first-hand and it worries me. I welcome all of the foreign students, and they contribute enormously. But it's an unnatural balance that cannot be sustained. I'd be delighted if we were exporting US-born STEM students to the rest of the world at a similar rate to our imports of foreign talent. Much of our economic growth is arising from bringing the best of the world here, but I don't see how that can last.
7
What you're reporting on is the successful conclusion of a decades long effort to delegitimize higher education. All education, really.
We (by 'we', I mean conservatives) took the best education system on the planet and tore it to shreds.
The effort was holistic. We hate our teachers: money-grubbing liberal laggards with one interest: to indoctrinate students to a liberal gospel of no ambition, no values, no care for anything except to despise the rich. To what end nobody ever says, but they know it's evil.
Never mind that conservatives flaunt their degrees far more than most. It's just that knowledge anywhere but in their own heads is a perversion.
We removed the rewards of academic work, allowing employers to substitute less demanding foreign workers at every opportunity and refuse reasonable pay. We created a culture of deep mistrust of academic accomplishment, have come worship stupid opinion and deny any value to scientific meaning.
Trump, a no-talent, no intellect showman is just the latest incarnation. We have a cadre of Republican legislators committed to forcing serious students into debt and insecurity. We have governors like Rick Scott who denounce anyone with the temerity to study history, philosophy or ethics, or >gasp!< literature.
The cherry on this poisonous sundae: Betsy DeVos, an ignorant woman who desires to share her ignorance with the nation. Desires to put her faux-Christian beliefs atop the rapidly crumbling pantheon of American thought.
143
You don't understand the topic.
It is about the graduate program and the OPT foreign work permit that is granted with the masters degree.
U.S. students do not need a work permit, so why would they pay money for a useless degree. Few STEM jobs require a masters degree..
As a professor, what I notice is very different from what most observers of American higher education say about this topic. Over the past two decades, as undergraduates have become less idealistic about the world and more obessessive about the job market, their interests in STEM careers have declined. The cadre of smart and ambitious undergraduates who would have majored in basic sciences and dreamed of changing the world by making discoveries 20-30 years ago are now majoring in some version of business and economics (as shown by empirical studies). Indeed, it takes enormous idealism to pursue a career in the sciences. Four years of undergraduate studies, another four to six years of maters and doctoral work, and two to four years of post-doctoral work all mean that one cannot do a cost-benefit analysis at the age of 18 for a career that will begin in earnest at the age of 32. So, in a counter-intuitive way, we need to foster idealistic motives to encourage American students to pursue higher education. This means more focus on non-financial motivations for pursuing education. We already do a very good job of financially supporting American graduate students in STEM—almost all American Ph.D. students in top 50 science programs are fully funded. Graduate programs must do a better job of appealing to the better angels of American students who want to make a difference in the world rather than simply cashing in. The time horizon is way too far off for the latter.
10
I doubt you'd be enjoying your tenure at a 'Top 50' were you aiming for an advanced STEM degree today. Without saying it's right or wrong, you'd probably have been beaten out by one of the hungrier, richer, better trained amongst the 6.5 billion other people waiting to get in at the wall.
2
'Non-profit' grad schools in the U.S. are opened to competition from 7 billion inhabitants of this planet. We are not the only country with money and brains. The relatively few U.S. students available that can qualify with both of these attributes required for advanced STEM degrees simply can't compete with the hordes pouring in from countries without the same opportunities. This drives up prices which further gaps the proportions and so on and so forth. It's pretty simple math and doesn't require an advanced STEM degree to figure the cause. The fix, if we want one will not be easy if we insist on providing our opportunities to the whole world without preference for the citizens who created them.
7
My two sons were both computer science majors in college, much to my despair at the time, they both were offered very nice jobs in their fields in New York and left college before graduation; just before September 11, 2001, they both were able to secure lovely jobs in the Research Triangle Park of N.C., for that I am grateful; they were spared the infamy of 9/11.
One of my grandson's is now working on his degree in computer science at ECU, his dad has three kids in college so our young man works part time in RTP to foot the bills; he too wishes to go to grad school; hope it happens.
3
I have no data to support my idea that first generation immigrants, where ever they come from, have more fire in the belly than those who have been here longer. Most 1st generation Americans since the major immigration wave in the late 19th century saw their parents struggle and viewed education, particularly in challenging areas like STEM, as a way to move up. Their descendants did not have that experience and seem to gravitate more towards "soft" studies. If anyone has data in support of this hypothesis, or in contradiction, I would like to know.
3
This has been going on for some time. I attended a UC Berkeley PhD program in the late 90s. After the first year of non-resident tuition, half of my fellow candidates, who were foreigners, were continually granted assistant teaching positions that covered tuition and health care. I got their scraps and made it along on a scaled back GI Bill and by continuing to serve in Army Reserve. A senior professor told me at the time they needed to give priority to the foreign students, which were his grad students, as a way to get around the high fees charged to them. Make no mistake, they were all very nice people and whom I had nothing against, only I as a citizen was put in the back of the line.
As things turned out, before I passed my oral boards and went into my dissertation writing phase, 911 occurred. Then came three deployments and an additional two years in a Wounded Warrior Program. In total, I missed 11 years of grad study. Thankfully, though, the VA Voc Rehab program has been very generous with funding and helping me get back into my program and finally finish, hopefully this year. It has been very difficult though given my injuries.
My impression is that the system is set up backwards and designed to work against American citizens. BTW, my father was a medical doctor and received all his training overseas in his home country. He came to the US in 1959 in response to the demand for doctors but not to compete with American students aspiring to be doctors.
11
Why aren't graduate school making substantial and effective efforts to recruit the best and brightest American students before any foreign students are even considered? How many young Americans are being shortchanged because school admissions officers believe that diversity and multi-nationalism is more important than American students who want to attend graduate schools but are driven away by price or other economic considerations?
I don't begrudge foreign students opportunity to attend American universities. But the commitment of higher education should be first to American students. There's more than an "imbalance" that needs to be corrected. What must be looked at is general admissions policies and requirements as well as recruitment policies and requirements for American students.
Let's give the best and brightest American students/citizens the first and best opportunities for higher education. Fill all the openings than can be filled with Americans first. Then and only then can we consider foreign applicants.
7
@Jay: Filling all of those slots with American students would require funding that isn't currently there. As far as international students, diversity and multinationalism are secondary concerns of the typical American university. Of primary importance is that international students pay full tuition at non-resident rates.
Between finding and recruiting American students who likely need substantial financial support to attend or accepting foreign students who apply in droves and are willing to pay full price, the college administrator's choice is clear.
2
Joe Bob the III MN
Joe, sorry, you're misinformed. Many colleges have large, if not very endowments for students who need financial assistance as well as student work programs. My son used this to pay for his last two years at the University of PA when I was compelled to close our almost 100 year old family business due to NAFTA. There are also, tons of scholarships, loan programs, and private funds that make it possible for kids who are well qualified to pay full price regardless if a state resident or not. There's some hard work in find those programs but they are out there. My son found one operated through a local bank that was funded by a wealthy donor who only asked that if a student graduated and became successful that they would contribute back to the fund. They gave him $20,000 annually and now he's a very successful lawyer in intellectual property in organic chemistry (masters degree in organic chemistry from Penn). And yes, he's paying back the fund and will add even more. There is no reasonable or acceptable excuse for any well qualified American student not being first in line. None. The college admissions officers choice is clear; Americans first.
1
Please do not perpetuate the myth that undergraduate scholarship money is there and waiting to be claimed. As a single parent earning $60,000/year I can assure you there were no scholarships being offered for my daughter who was attending a state university studying for her degree in Elementary Education. The aid we were offered consisted solely of student loans and Parent Plus loans.
1
A dark age is truely settling on America's science and educational institutes. The highest scientific positions in the US are current being held by industry cronies, dimishing the quality and social impact of federally funded research. A science PhD translates into high student loan debt, no job security, and very poor work-life balance. for all of these reasons my husband, both PhD scientists, are exploring international positions.
19
One factor is "anti-intellectual attitudes" among many American adults. I heard it when my sister and I were grad students: "Are you two going to be perpetual students?" Actually yes, because both of us have continued to study and learn throughout our careers. An advanced degree is not a large casino chip you can cash in... it is the beginning of a lifetime of challenging work in a constantly evolving world of science and technology.
My hat is off to any parent (US or foreign) who supports their daughters and sons in their aspirations to rise above the scolding of the mindless herd of know-nothings or know-as-little-as-possible-ings.
13
A well-known aspect, in the real world broadly and the Tech industry specifically, is that an American with a BS would have an equivalent (/even better) career to a non-American with a PhD. This is particularly true with management positions where people are promoted on the ability to talk and navigate (the "vision" thing) rather than do the boring work of attending to details.
3
Americans are fatally terminally illiterate when it comes to science and technology. From climate change denial to believing that evolution by natural selection is only a theory we are becoming a nation of idiots like Ben Carson and Donald Trump. Gravity is also only a theory. There is nothing in science that forbids you from hovering or falling up. New natural data requires new natural theories.
For most of the past 2200 years China has been a scientific technological superpower. And for the last 75 years so has Russia. While German prowess in science and technology is legendary. Japan is a close second.
9
This article insufficiently differentiates among graduate degrees. .
The PhD is a research degree for scholars and is not a professional degree, although there are professions (including the obvious one, university teaching) for which a PhD is essential. Many PhD students don't pay tuition and get a stipend as a teaching or research assistant - or get a fellowship, which may be supported by the government.
In many fields, the MS is also a research degree, but doesn't equip the student to pursue a research career (other than perhaps as a technician in a laboratory). There is unlikely to be any stipend or tuition support. Some programs don't even offer an MS, except as a way station to a PhD.
An MD, JD MBA or Master of Engineering (MEng) degree is a professional degree, specifically aimed at preparing practitioners. While some limited financial support may be available, the degree is typically paid for by the student, and will likely earn a starting salary that is $10K-$15K higher than a BS degree. It is particularly appropriate for someone who wants to specialize with his or her undergraduate field, or get qualified in a related field. The difference in the starting salary can offset the tuition and 'opportunity cost' of not earning a salary while pursuing the degree, since salary raises are incremental to current salary. The 'payback period' is 8-10 years, after which the difference in salary is all gravy.
Comments based on 10 years running an MEng degree.
8
The problem is that public schools in the US do such a poor job teaching science and math.
3
American exceptionalism="We don't wanna work."
5
The reason Americans aren't going to graduate school is because of the crippling debt they incur in college and the prospect of even more crippling debt they will incur in graduate school with little promise of respite. College debt is forcing graduates to grab the first job offer they get, however undesirable it might be, in order to try and end their indenture to ridiculous debt. Foreign students come from countries smart enough to know the value of education and willing to support their best students.
16
As some other comments clarify, for students from outside the U.S., the postgraduate degree provides a certification to employers that you can get from a U.S. undergraduate degree but not from undergraduate degrees from some other countries.
Partly as a result, higher education is one of the biggest U.S. exports (via GATS's Mode 2).
1
Why bother investing huge amounts of time and money to become qualified for a career when a completely unqualified real estate developer managed to win the presidency only to fill his administration with other unqualified pols? There are no merit in merit anymore in the US. I am heartened that merit and education is valued in other cultures. There is where the corruption at the heart of our end state capital democracy brought us.
13
To fill those grad schools with native-born students, possibly blacks and Latinos seeking opportunities, the US would need to improve K-12 education. That would cost tax money that could be spent on invasions of foreign countries. It's cheaper to cherry pick the best of Asia's students who have been educated at the expense of their sending country as we are now doing and have been doing for two generations. We need to keep our priorities straight. Let's give Trump those 30K brand-new nuclear weapons he's requested. Many additional countries in Africa are now available to invade. Why waste the opportunity?
8
Who's paying for all those foreign graduate students to go to school? I'd bet they don't need to take the vast amount of debt most U.S. students do.
6
Once again an article starts with "STEM" and then ends up being all about computer science/the IT industry specifically. Top tip: "STEM" and "computer science/IT" are a single overlapping circle in the Venn diagram.
3
For an article that makes sweeping generalizations regarding STEM fields and graduate school enrollment, this seems to focus only on computer science and information technology; which, of course, are not the whole sum of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. Indeed, while further education in computer-related fields need not extend beyond an undergraduate degree, it is more necessary in other fields, such as those focusing on microbiology and physical chemistry.
Perhaps Mr. Wingfield should broaden his aspects, beyond his own ken, if he wishes to write for a wide domain such as education once more. As it stands, this article lacks corroborating information to be fully believable.
6
Very well put!
Why? How about the fact that a significant portion of post-docs get paid by fellowships originating in their home countries! That's right, foreign governments are subsidizing their people to come here and conduct cutting edge research. When a lab manager is deciding who to hire, you bet you can figure out who they will want to choose. All their millions of research grants and not a penny needs to go to these people. SO UNFAIR!
6
Graduate school is hard - at least it is between orals and dissertation. American Millennials have little capacity to deal with real challenges. PhD programs, in particular, require real tenacity, and an ability to overcome significant psychological strain for several years. The "I deserve an $80K job straight out of undergrad" generation has been raised to overvalue themselves and their skills. An undergrad chemist we hired as a technician recently asked for a raise and
a title change saying, "I'm working really hard and my role encompasses more than a tech." Actually no, he does what he's supposed to, exactly as defined, and works 35 hours a week. These kids cannot understand that doing one's job is not noteworthy. And thinking that you're awesome does not make it so. As Clem notes, his generation doesn't seem to have the capacity to understand the concept of a long-term investment. "To start the pay range is 25k -30k range" - Yeah, you're getting *paid* to go to school, coming out with no debt (unlike MDs and JDs) and setting yourself up for the future. Thinking of it like a job and a salary is idiotic.
But the good thing is that we need fewer PhDs. So, by all means, let the system rebalance. Those that opted for something greater than the gig economy and who want to contribute more to the world than the internet of garbage will be valued and valuable again.
4
[Fixed for political correctness, hopefully this gets published this time.]
Top "sour grapes" comments :
- Who needs a postgrad degree, where most professors speak in an accent ?
- Who needs a postgrad degree, where most have an undergrad degree not worth the paper it is printed on ?
- Who needs a postgrad degree, with student loans for education ? Piling loans for homes and cars are fine, but education ?
- Who needs a postgrad degree, from a university that could be a visa laundering scheme ?
- Who needs a postgrad degree, where most students probably cheated on their GRE exams ?
- Who needs a postgrad degree, when the only degree that matters is the one I have (like MBA) ?
Keep going commenters. Let's see who comes up with the sourest grape.
@Bhaskar: You assume a great deal when people complain about having debt. You assume immediately that they went out and bought homes and cars. But many have debt for things such as major illnesses or chronically ill family members. Many have sold their homes and drive very old cars precisely because they are looking after someone who is old or ill. Remember, this is the United States, where one major illness can plunge an entire family into eternal debt. One bout of cancer can wipe out a lifetime of savings. I suggest you stop looking for sour grapes and start seeing the very real problems that many are coping with.
6
@ Allison
If one is unable to pursue a higher degree for the reasons you mention, why not just say so instead of inventing excuses that I listed ? That's when it turns into sour gripe (sic).
Most comments deal with the demand end of the equation i.e. why American kids are not going to grad school. We should also think in terms of supply issues. The world now has many more people who can afford to pay full tuition than a generation ago. In addition, with economic and cultural (i.e. internet) globalization, going abroad opens up possibilities for making many connections that will prove useful in the future.
From the demand end yes, financial realities have a lot to do with the reticence of American students to take on more debt. But, it is not irrelevant that foreign students are not nearly as likely to have spent a lot of undergraduate time concerned with microagressions rather than studying the courses, thus giving the former another competitive advantage (in addition to paying full freight) in getting in to grad school.
America needs to simultaneously commit itself to making education much more affordable for Americans and to consider fluid quotas that would guarantee preference for qualified (and I emphasize qualified) American students.
2
I am a graduate student.
The article missed an important point: Universities are heavily motivated to accept foreign students. These students pay a lot more in tuition, and very often don't take up RA or TA (paid, tuition-waived) positions that the US students do. This all adds up to a financial boon for the college.
US graduate schools are slurping up the smartest, richest students from around the world, and most of them go into STEM fields. Walking into the Engineering building is like going to Asia. In their shoes, I would do the same. Why would a US student want to endure competing against elite students from around the world while incurring thousands more in debt?
My own career prospects won't be enhanced much by going to graduate school; I'm doing this because I love the subject I'm studying and hope to make a difference in the world. If not for that, I'd bail-out immediately and get a good paying job.
23
Its about values. America values $ over education and character. This administration is taking it into the third world.
4
The fact that the greatest gender imbalance we have today in post-graduate programs is in Engineering and that the trend described here is actually addressing it might have been an interesting angle to a story that is not so much news, because this trend has been on-going for at least half a decade now. The US is helping train not only a growing workforce of foreign citizens, but specifically a more diverse workforce that includes rising numbers of women, helping shift some important professional and hopefully, in the next few years, economic inequalities around the world. Of course, you have to actually care about these issues to start noticing the change and start reporting on it. Go fish!
1
This is nothing new. I attended a graduate engineering program in Texas beginning in the late sixties. My classes had very few American students. There was not much reason for them to attend graduate school since they could get a well-paying job with a bachelor's degree.
Sometime in the early 70s, the Nixon administration canceled some defense programs and the cuts affected the local area. In subsequent semesters the laid off engineers started attending graduate programs because they provided enough financial aid to sustain a small family.
3
Economics is definitely a part of it. The pay-back period for the cost of a graduate level education plus the opportunity cost of potential wages is far too long to make sense for most.
Also many people suspect that emerging AI technologies will reduce the overall demand for graduate level STEM education. There will always be demand for STEM graduates in education and in R&D. However since many practical STEM jobs involve repeatable processes they are well suited to automation.
4
Sadly, if you want to narrow down the reasons for this awful disparity occurring in Master degree math, computer science and technology programs, then please begin putting the focus where it should be, on academia and the corporate CEO's who work almost in tandem to keep their profits in line with their insidious greed.
Academia is guilty of taking too many foreigners for Masters programs because the tuition is more often than not, paid in full thru funky international and/or corporate agreements bordering on not only unethical, but opaque. The American candidates are left out to dry in these cozy practices of quid pro quo since they demand more hand holding about program costs, immediate and long term.
Engineering should not be lumped in with these alternate technology careers. A bachelored civil, electrical or mechanical engineer doesn't need a masters. They can work for four years and be eligible to take the Professional Engineering (PE) exam which makes them far more marketable than a Masters engineer.
9
When buying books for reading on the plane to Shanghai, earlier this year, I stumbled across Emily Hahn, who earned a degree in Mining Engineering from the University of Wisconsin back in the mid-1920's. I wish that I had stumbled upon her back when I was in high school, as I find her to be extremely inspiring.
Unfortunately, I was stuck going to high school in some rural backwater (in the 1980's) where it was believed that women didn't need an education at all, and certainly not a math/science one. And every time I showed interest in anything STEM, it was a fight with the school's administration to get to take such a class. I won some battles, but lost many more battles, and by graduation, I gave up.
8
And since most teachers are female it often translates into the classroom.
They did not do math or science so they're not qualified. Some are but it is rare.
1
In another generation the only place where Americans will be able to get advanced degrees will be overseas. That’s OK that’s where all the jobs will be.
10
I have no data so my comment is from my small observations.
First, America does not have a large middle to upper class of citizens that honor the sciences or math. Therefore those that can afford graduate school choose not to go into STEM but overcrowd the nonSTEM curriculum.
The initializing STEM programs are producing vast numbers of students at the high school or undergraduate level. Thus there are fewer entrants at the graduate level.
The source of the problem for American is not the lack of money but the lack of motivators. Every year highly qualified STEM folks retire from or are retired from industry. These folks could walk into a STEM oriented classroom and teach the next day. Some would need to be paid but many would volunteer. However our old people disdaining culture will not give these motivators the opportunity to perform.
As a result we have no STEM motivators and foreign students taking the STEM graduate seats.
9
Excellent assessment. Really like the idea of retired STEM professionals teaching and mentoring students--that's involvement that would really pay off for America.
3
We should consider also that the US students may not be as well prepared then the foreign students and are therefore less likely to be admitted in a competitive process.
2
Schools do not like people who actually know something about the subjects they are teaching. Take a look at schools of education course offerings or summer programs.
Or sit in on a faculty meeting (if only parents could!).
It’s all about “process” and student self-image. Older, knowledgeable, experienced people tend to be glad when they retire out of such dysfunction.
1
why don't the locals bother?
Because the locals only manage to graduate HS about 60-70%of the time, if they go to college olny 20-40% graduate, of those who remain, 60% take more than 4 years to finish up. Why don't they bother" THEY ARE TOO OLD TO BOTHER.
they don't bother because they spend ten hours a day watching various media so there is NO time to study, they have no aspirations beyond todays dinner--probably a delivery pizza, if they can afford it.
4
Your figures are off. Our high school graduation rate is actually much higher than that - about 83%, and the 6-year college graduation rate is about 60%. What is more likely is the factor that the article explains. If native-born people majored in STEM fields in college and manage to graduate, they easily find jobs, so there isn't much of a need to get a graduate degree (and take on the debt). The other factor is that most American students don't major in STEM fields because they are not well-prepared for those majors and don't enjoy them. Our primary and secondary educational systems don't do a good job of preparing students for math and science, and as a result, students don't enjoy those fields and don't pursue them.
6
Although it's true that having an MA in the US is not what it once was for some disciplines, that is not the case for others. In my field, the MA is a door opener for those who go through our program.
1
Well while in graduate school their undergraduate debt continues to grow and grow. Another gift to America's youth from the Republican Party. The party ire interested in enriching the already wealthy than building the nations future,
5
Except that in science, most of the graduate students are supported by Federal research dollars. So most (but not all) of these students are getting support through the American system, ultimately from the U.S. taxpayer.
4
Their undergraduate loans are still increasing because of interest. I went to Graduate School during the 70's my student loans did not start accruing interest until I started paying them back. Also the TA and Research Assistance ships often don't cover the cost of everything. They did when I was a teaching assistant. Since Reagan there seems to be a war on students and their loans. All waged by America's Republican Party.
The United States has world-leading graduate school programs that are open to students from around the world.
The United States has roughly 5% of the world's population - this suggests that it also has 5% of the really smart and talented people.
So, why would you expect those 5% to dominate the U.S. graduate school population?
2
this is the same kind of argument that says 50% of the population are women , so they should be 50% of everything else.
Because at least 50% of graduate school curricula is funded by U.S. taxpayers, and most of the remaining 50% is funded by U.S. companies. There is no reason to believe that the United States has "roughly 5% of the world's really smart and talented people". Maybe we have more, or just maybe... we have less! Even if we do have less, our own citizens permanent legal residents deserve to benefit from more than 5% of the educational opportunities that their families have funded as tax payers at public schools. No other country in the world is welcoming American students at higher rate than local residents (especially not 95% foreign versus 5% local).
Excellent Point. that so an forget. America's science predominance was created by American Tax Dollars. Every Major University receives millions every years from the Government Research Programs at the federal agencies like the Pentagon, NSF and CDC.
2
Why don’t the locals bother?
Having been taught by science-challenged elementary and middle school teachers and then having received inflated grades during high school so that they’d feel better about themselves, today’s students — and it has been true for some years now — have not been taught to concentrate on things that do not come easily to them, do not put in the hard work of mastering (and often memorizing) what’s difficult, and therefore do not have solid backgrounds in subjects that require said concentration and some memorization.
Creativity is terrific but you can’t be creative with science, or anything else for that matter, before you know something about it.
Sports, social media, lax parenting, and self-defeating school philosophies — not to mention a pervasive anti-education bias in America — have done a job on our kids.
36
I think there are a variety of social, economic, and political reasons why foreign students predominate in graduate schools. For one thing, relentless cuts to public education, especially at k-12, mean larger classes and fewer resources. One indicator in the sciences: Calculus, a primary mathematical tool of the sciences, is considered an option, and not requirement, in American high schools. Most Americans consider calculus "hard" and only the domain of math geniuses instead of a basic tool that needs to be mastered. Calculus does take effort and discipline, but Americans have less of it than their foreign competitors. The breakdown of the American family and the rise of the politicization of science hasn't helped. Our conservatives politicians have successfully demonized our public schools and teachers, and convinced the populace that they shouldn't pay a dime more in taxes. And what taxes we do collect often go towards fun and games: we're more obsessed with cheering our football teams than learning anything.
17
The title should read more like: The Disappearing Top Job Level In This Article. I say disappearing because the phrase STEM does not appear in Top Level Boardrooms and Top Level Jobs. In order to write about The Workplace.... the jobs around the World, a person needs to know about what the Top Level looks like, and requires for these job placements. I do not think even the Tenured Professors as well as Executives mentioned / researched for this article, know about what this Top Level looks like. Thus, the Students wouldn't know either. Probably, even when they graduate from these University Programs described in the article, they will not have this Top Level information as to where their Resumes are ranked in the World Population. If they knew they were ranked on the average to low side, maybe a Student would be encouraged "To Continue To Improve" because they "are not there yet". Maybe even the Tenured Professor and Executives running the University Program aren't there yet either, and thus, would also be encouraged "to continue to improve their Resume" thus, their position in the World Population. ---- Note: At least, I hope they don't know about the Top Level. If they do, then these people sound like they are trying to push their junky product because they themselves couldn't/didn't make the cut to The Top Level of the World Workplace! And they are keeping their lack of expertise from the Students who are purchasing their product... also University Donors.
Hmmn—something got lost along the way here; I thought universities were (ideally) about dispensing/inspiring knowledge, primarily, with job-training lower on the list. "Ideally," he said.
2
Anthony--- Education is required for jobs. Abilities: to reason, read, and write, creativity/ideas creation, think, critique at the Ph.D level... the Literacy Standardized Test Scores are really important. Universities are Education. The Top Level requires a well-educated... highly educated person, to e able to do the work required. Many of these Professors haven't even finished all 52 School Grades. And, from completion: how well they completed each Grade is considered. Then, of course, the person needs to maintain "what they learned", their highest School Grade completed. If they don't maintain, then it is as if they never received the diploma in the first place. Anthony, the Top Level of the BusinessWorld is not Donald Trump. He is not educated enough. It is a shame that the Top Level of the BusinessWorld requires more in Resume skills than The Government of The United States of America.
1
I agree with you there.
I was a grad student at CALTECH. I did it because that was one easy way for me to come from India to America.
When I got there, I realized that my undergraduate education had so poorly prepared me for America's highly competitive educational system. In India, the education is rote learning - and not self discovery - still true today.
My mother wanted me to do a PhD - but I got me a job as I was tired of being poor. Also, it was not clear to me what my PhD thesis really had to do with real world. I like being hands on.
In those days, work visas were easy.
If I were an undergrad today, I would go work like other Americans.
Grad school is way over rated. Unless you want to do real research, then a PhD is the only way to go as the system is set up that way.
Like this student mentioned who is from India - that's one reason she did her Master's - to get foot in America and then, hopefully do not have to go back. Also, in her case, she is migrating from STEM to AMEX because that's where the money is.
And if you survey faculty today in America in this so called STEM - many of them are immigrants to America. And one reason they are on a faculty is it's easy to get a work visa and even a green card.
If these immigrants doing PhD's and research were that good, how come few if any have won a Nobel Prize in any category at least in the last 50 years after I left CALTECH?
Their importance to America's dominance is way over rated.
6
It's hard to believe you went to Caltech.
Have you not heard of Hargobind Khorana, Subramanyam Chandrasekhar.... Nobel prize winners from India, in biology and physics,at American universities.
Not to mention Venkatraman Ramakrishna , Nobel winner in chemistry, arguably doing research in the US and UK universities.
2
The US does not value education. Our high school had an assembly to give out student awards. I won awards for French and an essay contest, both were given as certificates. Then came time for the athletic awards, and they wheeled out a table laden with gleaming trophies. It was obvious that excelling at sports was considered more important than excelling in academics.
65
Congratulations! Just remember, unless they become professional athletes (very few), there are few marketable skills from participating in high school athletics, whereas one's knowledge and thinking abilities are sought after by employers your whole life.
4
Yes but we worship athletes and those who were 'on the team' are more likely to be offered the job over those who are more qualified.
2
I've never seen cheerleaders for any academic competition. Have you? Says it all for both HS and college.
2
Getting a master's degree from an American university is a way for foreign students to enter the U.S. skilled job market. American citizens can do so with an undergraduate degree. In addition, universities make more money off of enrolling foreign students (even as undergraduates), because they are not eligible for all the grants and scholarships the American students are. Finally, earning a Ph.D. used to mean one was intensely interested in the field and wanted to go into research and teaching after gaining a degree. Now master' degrees are a way to earn money, and, as the article points out, may not be necessary unless one is not from the U.S.
3
Maybe we should award our best scholars like we reward our best athletes. Way arn't Westinghouse Science Winers on Wheaties Boxes. MacArthur Fellows on postage stamps.
It's all about the money. And that's a shame on US.
American students -- including myself -- who may want to pursue advanced degrees and have the talent and brains to do so have to weigh the costs. It's expensive to stay in school. When we have to work three jobs or depend on our parents working overtime to pay for school and then are saddled with years of debt, what real choice is there?
International students -- especially those from India and China -- have their entire extended families paying for them. Why? Because once they are in the US, they are likely to stay and can then bring the whole family, or at least, send money back home.
They come to the US as graduate students because they can more easily get a visa and only have to show enough money to complete 1 or maybe 2 years of study. They get preference from the schools because the schools get more money for them. They get preference in courses because they have been tutored, groomed, and tutored some more in the specific subjects.
They may have fake scores; they may have real scores. They may have fake applications; they may have real applications. Hard to tell with all the various 'college mills' churning out applicants and raking in fat fees from the students and the colleges for doing it.
That's another issue: Given that China and India have far more people than the US, there are bound to be more applicants from those two countries. So if admissions are based on percentages, US students are shut out.
14
Thank you! yes, I am very cynical about this. I see it far too often. My husband works for a small electronics firm owned by an Iranian family. The family is immensely wealthy back in Iran; they sent two sons to the US to attend graduate school and get jobs. They were given MILLIONS to start this company and of course, the true purpose was to bring over the whole clan by chain migration -- which they have -- at least 30 members so far -- every young man in the family has an arranged marriage with an Iranian girl back home, who is of course brought to the US as a spouse. Seniors are brought here too and go RIGHT ON MEDICARE and SS, despite never paying a dime into the system. This is perfectly legal.
Yes, the company does employee SOME Americans -- but fewer than you would think -- they prefer to hire IMMIGRANTS, and then grossly underpay them. My husband is the only American-born English-speaking engineer in the whole department.
2
An American education up through the college level is not on par with an education obtained in Europe or Asia. Foreign schools are much more demanding of students. Families are much more invested in their children's education and the expectations for children are very high. Parents sacrifice to pay for their children's education, but in the US many parents don't feel it's their responsibility to help pay for college at all. America is losing its dominance in many spheres, and education is just one example. The number of American families that value higher education is shrinking and the number of American students willing to put in the time and effort required for a first-class education is shrinking as well. As the article points out, both students and the companies that hire them are willing to settle for less than a master's. As long as that's the case, Europeans and Asians will forge ahead, while the US falls further behind.
5
I don't know if American parents are necessarily refusing to pay for higher educations for their children or that they simply can't afford them any longer. Parents are paying out through the teeth for things that used to be free or low cost. Just the college prep road alone costs many thousands of dollars. Many households don't have that 'extra' anymore. They're busy working overtime just
barely treading above the financial waters. Many are drowning in debt.
16
kc-- My son had two friends whose parents refused to contribute to their college costs. The parents felt their obligation was over when their kids turned 18. My son told me that was not unusual for kids in his class. Some kids managed to get loans and work and go to college anyway. Others just get jobs. But, the attitude of the parents was "we did our job. Now, you're on your own."
5
"The number of American families that value higher education is shrinking..."
What?
So many kids are applying to college that competition for spots even at state schools has ramped way, way up.
And US parents definitely feel it is their responsibility to pay for college, but after the Bush/Obama years, most can barely cover basic bills to feed and clothe their kids. If they're middle class, Obamacare crushes them with high costs and no subsidies. State colleges run about $25K a year; many parents simply cannot afford that.
Geez.
2
I'm trying to understand: wouldn't the Trump/Republican proposal to restrict immigration to high skilled workers result in immigrants getting the high paying jobs and U.S. citizens getting the low paying jobs? Why wouldn't they want to bring in immigrants for the low-skilled jobs and let Americans do the high-skilled high-paying jobs?
7
Advanced nations understand that an educated and healthy citizenry is vital to national strength and well-being, and those nations make sure that all citizens have ready access to healthcare and education, seeing those benefits as an investment in the nation's future. By this measure, the US is still a struggling nation, reluctant to invest in its citizens.
13
This article mentions what is probably the dominant factor: money. The cost of an American undergraduate degree has risen so dramatically, that most American students with bachelors' degrees from US colleges have enormous debt, and cannot afford the price of graduate degrees. They accept jobs, which are plentiful for STEM majors, so they can start to pay off their student loans and begin living their lives.
We need to be asking ourselves why college has become so expensive, with tuition costs rising much faster than inflation, and to do something about it.
18
Much science and tech education is very expensive (labs, equipment, labor etc.). Major public universities in the US have seen drastic drops in public financial support and chase any income stream they can grab hold of. Not only are many foreign students better trained and more inured to rigorous intellectual work, they tend to pay full freight more than native students. All in all, that's a lot of incentives driving this. The question is, so what? Why should we care who fills tech jobs in the US? What's of more concern, which some STEM faculty have noted, is that while once all these graduates were trying to stay and staying in the US, many now prefer to return to more vibrant opportunities in their home countries, notably China.
3
Actually, graduate student labor is cheaper than dirt. For example, Columbia University's Chemistry department paid graduate students $7000 per year in 1982, for 50 weeks of 60-hour days. That is about $2.33 per hour. Walmart sells 14 pounds of good quality potting soil for $2.50.
No, you can't raise a family on that magnificent sum but the good news is you won't have any spare time to waste with your spouse. Rates are somewhat higher today, but the main reason the majority of students are foreigners is their governments pay for their education, and provide enough money to live on while they work as intellectual stoop labor.
Master professors much prefer a sexy new lab toy to a ensuring a grad student's survival. Or... There is a great story about Sir Derek H. R.Barton, the British chemist and Nobel Laureate (1969). When told that his invitation to a research sabbatical in the US included a stipend that would only cover the expenses of a secretary or his wife's travel, he chose the secretary.
1
Stuart,
Where is the data that informs you that the graduates want to “go back home”?
America is better than home or they would not have come here in the first place.
1
Money, money, money. Americans do not go to grad school because they have no money to do so. Both my partner and I would quit our jobs and go to grad school in an instant if we could support ourselves without taking out massive loans. We both did very well as undergrads and would do well in grad school - but we have debts to pay off and no family to provide financial support. So we struggle on in our jobs and do our best to make ends meet. Grad school is for people with money, period.
99
Not so fast. Most STEM departments offer grad stipends, like assistantships and fellowships. The income might be less than what you are earning now, but is often enough to live on. And especially if one of you continues to work while the other enrolls in grad studies.
Of course, outside STEM, the picture might be different.
9
When my kid didn’t know what to do after getting his BA In Math I suggested staying at the university for an MA while he researched the job opportunities. The university paid his tuition and gave him a job as a TA. He was later able to turn that education into a great career in risk management and fintech. He came back to give a talk to the undergrads on what they could do with a math degree and he said the MA was what gave him the abilities to teach himself what he needed to know, and the teaching aspect gave him the confidence to speak in front of bigwigs in the industry. By staying in grad school his loan payments were on hold and when he got out he worked his way up to making plenty of money to pay them off. Yes, just one story, but I wanted to dispel the myth that grad school is only for the rich.
7
My husband got a bachelor's and a master's degree in mechanical engineering. He's always said he only got the master's degree because it was free (completely covered by scholarships) and because he wanted to hang-out in New York for another two years. If he'd had to pay for it, he never would have done it, because employers in his particular area of mechanical engineering just don't value master's degrees that much. You have to have the bachelor's to get hired, but anything else after that is just a nice to have, and certainly not worth going into debt for. I don't know if the same scenario also applies in other areas of engineering, but if so, it might explain why you don't see more American master's students in STEM disciplines.
3
Many of the foreign graduate students in STEM fields come with their own funding and already have advanced degrees from their home country. This makes them especially valuable as research assistants for the professors in their departments.
Americans complain about good jobs going to foreigners, because of trade imbalances and immigration, but the US does not support the education of American students the same way that other countries do and American students (like American business) look for the quick buck rather than invest long-term in advanced degrees.
10
This emergence of foreign students is caused by multiple facets. One of the causes is because of the fact that our typical K-12 educational structure along with parental influence on their children does not compare well to the academic & parental influences that foreign students experience in their home countries. Additionally, the focus on STEM is heavy. Importantly foreign parents stress the importance of doing well in academics. That begins in Kindergarten and carries through. Furthermore, foreign parents frequently pay for their children, stretching themselves to pay. They see the need for their children to do very well. Here our students face enormous graduate loans which they shy away from incurring. Many do not receive parental financial assistance. If we want to see American students at post graduate and doctoral levels, we need to be more selective about our educational systems and consider helping our children financially.
2
No matter that there are foreign students ready to take all the places there are in STEM graduate programs, we should be concerned that so few Americans are going on to do advanced studies in these fields. We should do everything we can to encourage graduate studies by Americans in STEM including financial incentives for them to do so by government, by universities themselves and by high tech companies who may not be able to rely on an endless supply of graduate students from abroad as their own countries ramp up their STEM programs and industries and improve their own university programs, thereby rendering a US education less desirable or necessary.
5
I went to grad school for environmental studies and our class started with about 40 students and wound up with about 20, two of which were from Russia; everyone else was from the US. Our studies focused on science and policy -in regards to how it relates to the environment. Here, the focus is math, science, engineering, computer engineering and even artificial intelligence. So maybe this issue applies to only those areas of study...?
2
As an international student whose parents immigrated here during my undergrad, and who has since become a citizen, this is of great interest. There are a few reasons. One is that American students who want to earn $$$ go for finance. Don't assume that these are our nest and brightest though - my insights from current students I've known is that these biz students are actually quite limited intellectually.
Another reason is that culturally sciences and math are pushed hard in countries like China and India, and schools there are intensely competitive. Most American high school kids see high school as involving social, athletic, and academic dimensions. This is not the case in India and China. There, the good students are the equivalent of the prom king/queen, quarterback/head cheerleader. Here, the good students are "nerds," and are ostracized or bullied.
This is a wealthy country, and most kids are soft, and expect things to come easy. The idea of burning the midnight oil, hunkering down, and studying hard is almost inexistent.
I have a 14 year old now who excels in school. Still, when I see how he is tested on small chunks of knowledge, provided quizzes and review sessions that almost entirely mirror the tests, I find it amazing. We never had review sessions or any hint as to what would be on tests and exams, and regularly saw questions on exams that we had never seen before. High school in an Indian system was harder than my undergrad or masters here.
14
This article makes clear that, unsurprisingly, incentives matter. If I have read the news about the Republican tax proposal correctly, it includes a tax on tuition waivers that grad students receive when they work as teaching or research assistants. Let me suggest, boldly, that this knucklehead idea will NOT improve the numbers of US born graduate students in STEM fields or any other field.
31
Follow the money. International students typically pay the full cost of a graduate education. American students usually get a full ride, at least in the major research universities. Which is to say, it’s a financial decision to recruit and admit foreigners.
23
This trend has been evolving for at least 4 decades, particularly at the PhD level, primarily due to massive over-training as graduate programs expanded throughout the country. More graduate students were needed to serve newly-established or expanded programs, including at marginal institutions, even though PhD-level jobs would be unobtainable for most graduates. Prior to this era, students who survived the rigors of a PhD program could expect secure academic employment as well as academic freedom. That paradigm, which served the country well by attracting the "best and brightest", has all but disappeared, and American students are well-informed of this transformation.
7
Enormous debt, low work ethic and weak math/science high school education are the main barriers to grad school in the U.S. I was willing to live with low pay and work hard to catch up as well as usually be the only woman in the lab because I love research. I am a US citizen working in Canada now and see that it would have been easier here. Even though the immigration rate is very high and the Canadian government fast tracks citizenship for foreign grad students, the percentage of Canadian grad students is higher. Canada ranks high in education and the cost of university is relatively low.
9
So, China is busy developing its own universities, and Americans are very happy to get jobs in those schools.(I have a number of friends who are teaching abroad- in these institutions.) The US will eventually lose their Asian students and be basically without enough students to support their institutions. We are moving along quite quickly to second-class status in the world- I guess our 'time' is over. SAD-- and we are so lucky to have Trump to hasten the process.
5
Some comments from an old, really old, Professor, Scientist, Teacher, and Physician.
Since nature is unrelentingly "true," and failure (a bridge, a medicine, an operation) is devastating, and art and literature, for two examples, do not have this quality, the faux "self-esteem" induced in American schoolchildren by current educational theory and practice is not validated for them when studying science and medicine. That is one reason, when they find this out, that these subjects are shunned by American students, in college as well as in graduate school.
Further, the seemingly benign intent of various "student loan" projects, offloading the responsibilities of parents on the students themselves, and for a lifetime, has decreased the desirability of any higher education.
Finally, Masters degrees are simply a minimal extension of college. Only a full PhD may just provide the capacity for basic scientific research, except perhaps in some arcane branches of higher mathematics, where one can play, for a while, as a "quant," at imagining that one can predict the highly variable future, i.e., outguessing the stock market.
The reality of getting, and keeping a job, any job, is not automatically bestowed on anyone not benefiting by nepotism.
The rare scientific and commercial success of college dropouts (Gates, Zuckerberg) is irrelevant.
Arthur Taub BA, MS, MD, PhD
Clin. Prof. (Ret.)
Yale University School of Medicine.
18
You might want to try writing a minimally acceptable novel or performing a Beethoven piano sonata without embarrassing yourself before asserting "art and literature" are without standards of practice and excellence.
What you may be referring to is the marketing of art and literature as tools of self-discovery and fulfillment. here's a difference, however, between self-esteem therapy and professional practice.
But far more people can learn to write acceptable code and building sustainable bridges than can will ever master the novel or the piano.
15
How many lives do pianos and novels save each year?
Unfortunatekly, as my "older" professor used to say, medicine does not really, when one gets down to it "save" lives, but prolongs them, if it can. I used my scientific and medical; knowledge to relieve the pains of those lives (amputations, bullet wounds, adverse events of injury and surgery, and generally painful neurological disorders.)
I work for a life sciences based company which hires many graduate degreed scientists. As recently as 5 years ago, we were virtually all US born/educated, but in recent years that has changed to a more international mix because that's primarily who applies for positions.
3
Not so: it is because they are cheaper for the company.
Why Donald Trump has work visas for 70 workers in Mar Al Lago? Because they are cheaper and "prisoners": they can not go elsewhere to work. Cleaning: $ 10.30/ hour, cook: $ 13.45 an hour: Where do you get those cheap cooks in that part of Florida? Nowhere; and "fixing in cero" the personnel turnover", so the personnel department does not have to be chasing others when a bunch of them do not show to work: "double benefit"; a modern form os Slavery.
1
Why dont the locals bother?
Because:
1) Higher education in the USA is a business and guaranteed federal student aid keeps it that way.
2) With all this foreign competition it is harder for American citizens to gain entrance to these programs when there is already someone who is willing to pay the suggested retail price.
10
It is interesting that like the accompanying article on choosing a major the emphasis is on making money, not advancing science. There is absolutely no discussion of mathematics or science as if the technology of today did not rest on the basic research of yesterday.
17
If we want the graduates, we should be more willing to finance the education. There is absolutely no reason that we have qualified students pay huge interest rates on advanced education. If we need graduates in comp sci, engineering and medicine, finance them with very low interest loans!
In fact, for all the xenophobia, employers would rather import talent than pay salaries that will cover student debt.
And in other areas? Well, my husband's company jettisoned him and a lot of other experienced people - with wages that reflected a lifetime of experience - and are now replacing the people with Master's degrees by advertising for "New Collar" workers. Yep. Minimum requirement a GED, college preferred. Why downscale the job to GED but hire the graduate? To push down the job grade and the salary. Why go for the degree if you can't get someone to pay for the experience?
Getting an advanced degree is an expensive gamble in a job force that wants to drive wages down to equal those in China and India.
88
Dumbing down the educational and professional experience requirements seems to be going on in all fields from what I can tell. When I started in my field, mental health, clinical directors all have Ph.Ds and years of experience providing individual and group psychotherapy - they had something to teach and the knowledge base to mentor and supervise. No more, I now go into mental health clinics and meet CDs with only master degree and little more than five years clinical experience; often their degrees come from on-line programs like University of Phoenix and they may or may not be licensed. Immediate supervisors are likely to have Bachelors degrees at best. It's about the keeping salaries low. The best and the brightest move on into private practice or administrative or monitoring positions with the state or insurance companies where they earn better salaries and benefits packages.
6
A point which is not made in the article is that typically graduate programs in STEM prefer foreign students, unless the domestic student is truly exceptional. Students coming from other countries often come with the equivalent of a master's degree, as university programs outside the US are much more specialized. This is a product of earlier specialization and higher quality high school programs. A domestic student who is quick to learn and motivated enough to choose a major early so as to take graduate courses as an undergrad can compete with foreign students, but without special support even a very good US-trained STEM student is at a disadvantage in top grad schools.
10
When I attended graduate school in chemistry at UC Berkeley I was on an NIH fellowship. Perhaps 30% of my fellow graduate students also had NIH fellowships. The remainder of the graduate students were fully funded through a combination of their research professors government grants supplemented by teaching assistantships. Every graduate student in the U.C. Chemistry department was fully funded in one way or another. In fact, at that time it was stated that if the University you plan to attended for graduate school in the sciences was not funding you, it meant that you should not be going. Over the past several years the Federal Government has cut back significantly in funding research grants for basic research and slashed the money for funding agents like the NIH. Another significant cut is planned for NIH in the coming year. You cannot cut the budgets of NIH etc. without cutting the number of U.S. graduate students. In the past the U.S. has enjoyed a technology advantage envied throughout the world. Unless the public wakes up and insists that Congress fully funds NIH and other research grants the U.S. position in the world of science and technology will collapse. We are already running on the fumes of the past, and perhaps it is already too late.
237
@W.A. Spitzer
When the GOP congress cut NIH and NCI funding in 2011 it sent a earthquake through the UCSF and Stanford medical schools.
Grad students pursuing PhDs for research, as well as MD PhDs correctly calculated that a 15-20% reduction in research grants would squeeze out the youngest and least experienced who depended upon those $25-30K a year living stipends for survival.
Equally troubling, fewer grants meant fewer opportunities to gain experience and publication credits that are needed for advancement.
Trump and the GOP congress are doing this again, with deeper cuts than before.
I was cofounder of a medical device startup and when attending campus events was frequently was approached by students asking advice: Should I pursue my medical career with assured penury for the next 5-10 years and student debt for the next 2 decades, or shift to tech where I can make six figures immediately and not be at the whim of a GOP congress?
But wait, there's more. Take a look at the elimination of deductions college loan interest payments in the new GOP tax cuts for billionaires.
It should be obvious the GOP no longer wants the US to lead the world in education.
1
You are so correct. Funding for education research is also at historic lows. It's as if the US Congress wants our once great public education system to collapse. One graph of their abandonment of research funding is in special education. It is but one example of the collapse of basic education research funds in areas the business elite and anti-intellectuals brand as wasting money on "takers".
https://specialeducationlegislativesummit.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06...
As long as the Congress, the business community & their free market ideologues view children as a commodity and education as a market, we'll continue with the slow collapse of our once, enviable & creative public education system. No private entity can replace a bold government strategic plan that gives children learning opportunities. The GI BIll gave full scholarships to our WWII veterans and in 20 years we put men on the moon with slide rulers. Our children deserve the same.
It is simplistic to believe that more money cures all ills. Look what happened after the Bush administration increased the NIH budget and after the Obama stimulus provided universities with an extra three billion dollars!
Laboratories that were already so huge that one wondered how the principal investigators could possibly read the paper they cranked out, grew even larger. Universities degenerated into PhD mills. I met graduates who could not prepare data and write a paper. Co-authorship on two papers suffices to get you the degree. No theses are written anymore.
Since the old guard shows no interest in leaving soon, the result is a flood of professorial clones that toil for a pie that never seems big enough to feed all, no matter how much money is thrown at it. The failure is systematic and won't be cured with just more funding. American kids recognize this and choose accordingly.
I am all in for more money for science, if the money was spent wisely and not wasted on some director's pipe dream.
The problem starts early in this country. The emphasis is popularity, not curiosity. Why understand it, when you can fake it? And, you can't fit in if you understand it, when your peers don't. Then there are the ethics & altruism dimensions. If one is only motivated by money, power and status; then the rest of life-in-this-universe means nothing not worth the time to figure out. Understanding mathematics is hard and pointless, when your only ambition is to score high on grand theft auto, or kill zombies to get maximum Likes.
17
I am fairly certain the students in the photo are not spending much valuable time and energy outside of class fighting over the National Anthem, Trans Bathrooms, Antifa or Pro Trump Marches, anatomy grabbing, safe spaces, trigger warnings, right-to-life marches, pink hats, etc.
They came to learn.
43
It would appear that your grasp of how science graduate students at our top universities spend their time is woefully lacking.
19
At least partly because they don't have to live in this country after graduation. They can go home or to another country. American students are wise to spend at least part of their time being concerned with what kind of country they will graduate into, although many of the best and brightest are moving abroad and have for years. When Eastern Europe first opened up it was fascinating how many young Americans went to visit and stayed.
3
That is the correct way to state it.
Too many of the future leaders and CEOS have been programmed by questionable educators to the point of when they wish to upgrade their learning, oops theirs a error in the education pipeline.
There are a number of informed comments here from those in the field that make it clear that it is employers and how hiring happens or doesn't, and what is valued or isn't, helping to create the situation. And, of course, American student debt that makes the choices for many. How many undergraduate students in STEM fields end up on Wall Street or in other higher paying fields so they can pay off their loans and have a future? Too many. What incentive does the industry have to change that? None. As a nation, we neither invest in our college-bound students, nor do anything to require tech firms and others to keep jobs here. Foreign grad students come here with the financial backing of their governments and know that if they can't get a job with a top firm here, they can find one back at home for the same American company, where pay will be much lower, but so will the cost of living.
39
I think our society as a whole doesn't support higher learning in any field except for the almighty MBA, which any idiot can achieve.
Plenty of Americans pursued higher degrees in the Humanities and for what? Poor job prospects, high debt and a society that often denigrates their studies as useless.
As for STEM, maybe times are changing, but the vast majority of adults attended schools where either not enough emphasis was placed on math and science, or the curriculum changed so often that only a few could keep up.
12
Could it possibly be that hefting the costs of an undergrad education is becoming too much? These foreign students mostly have a free or very low cost tuition ride in the countries where they are from.
We or our students simply can not compete with that early financial advantage.
Plus, if an American kid is entering school they don't go into the sciences because of the lack of employment or low wages, that can't possibly re-pay for those astronomical tuition and loan interest rates. They'll study business or another lucratively rewarded field instead.
From the start the entire table is uneven for US students.
17
Why does brown skin, Asian eyes, and other non-white features equate with being an international students? The combination of this photo and the headline imply that if you're not white, you were probably born in and are a citizen of a different country. C'mon, NYT - Americans come in many different hues.
160
Thanks for unnecessarily standing up for my fellow South and East Asian brothers and sisters. Read the caption of the photo, "A computer science class at N.Y.U.’s Tandon School of Engineering, where some 80 percent of graduate students are from other countries." Nowhere does it state anything re the students in the photo. If it had omitted the part after the comma, you may have had a point. As is, you are off base with an unnecessary accusation.
2
You're not the only one who noticed that. My classes look like the photo, and most of them are citizens.
4
The numbers of foreign students are available. What makes you think the Times published this story based on looking at pictures of the students?
1
Americans aren't going to be paid enough to pay back their student loans. Foreign students return home debt-free and to a decent income.
17
As a former grad student myself, I speak from experience when I say these foreign students are so bright, so dedicated, and such hard workers that they raise the bar to a level whereby the home grown crowd, cannot (and will not) compete. What we should be doing is trying to keep these stellar students in the US when they graduate rather than forcing them to leave.
138
As a faculty member at a research university, I agree with what you said except for one group - mainland Chinese. The Chinese education system is based on rote repetition, and they take FOREVER to learn the art of disputation, if they ever do at all. In my experience, over half the Chinese students leave with a PhD without ever daring to contradict their advisor. They tend to be extraordinarily pliant and meek, and that makes them much less useful in research.
9
And my son's research years with some Chinese co-workers would also suggest that many are willing to "fudge" the research in order to get the required result.
8
Once the OPT program is scrapped, we will truly see if foreign students came for the value of the graduate education or for the immigration benefit of entry into the U.S. job force.
STEM graduate programs are nothing more than an immigration program, so why is it a surprise that only foreign students enter an immigration program?
Technical educations in science and engineering are hard. But they provide portable degrees that can be applied in any country. It is easier for American students to get degrees in finance or business and make more money in this country.
3
Wall Street’s unyielding demand for ever-increasing short-term profits at the expense of basic and applied research for the future has also led to fewer American grad students. The days of research by the likes of Bell Labs and IBM Research are long past. Even medium-size companies did some research, often in locations in the US heartland near students’ home towns. American undergraduates and their professors grasp this more than those outside the US, and opt for work rather than a graduate degree. Those Americans who apply to graduate schools must compete with foreign students who are the cream of the crop, products of systems like China’s and India’s that rigidly select only the best from a massive pool of students. It’s no wonder that most grad students are from outside the US.
15
"Wall Street’s unyielding demand for ever-increasing short-term profits at the expense of basic and applied research for the future has also led to fewer American grad students."....Nailed it.
In addition to all the insightful comments here, one must add that a lot of these int'l grad students are getting teaching fellowships (they are not paying full tuition). That is, with sometimes incredibly poor English skills, they are running the TA sections that undergrads rely on to really understand the professor's lectures and pass the course. Which they don't because the TA's English is so poor. I have also attended lectures by some tenure-track professors in computer science here in the US, same problem.
On paper these grad students and professors look great, until you put them in front of a classroom. US undergrads bail from these courses or power through and then do something else.
This is an ongoing problem in STEM education for years.
110
Yes, like 35 years...
My daughter is a graduate student in bioinformatics at Arizona State University. The field is hotter than computer science. Successful graduates work at the companies developing genetic treatments for diseases.
The vast majority of students in the graduate program are international. All students receive funding fellowships out of research grants which include a stipend for living expenses. So American students pay nothing out of pocket. But international students, who also receive fellowships, pay more to the university for tuition. They are subsidized but have to pay something out of pocket.
Those who earn a doctorate receive starting pay of almost $20,000 more than masters graduates,and they tend to advance faster. Doctorates are particularly valuable for women, who appear to advance more slowly in the field.
Many foreign students are at the top of the class which is partly attributable to the fact that the number of STEM students in China, India, and Pakistan is astronomical. Moreover, the university's bioinformatics lab has equipment that costs a fortune. So there is a tremendous incentive for the university to recruit students who pay the most for their education.
My daughter passed her comps a couple of years ago and is finishing up her dissertation. Two months ago, she got an unsolicited offer from a bioinformatics company in Phoenix. After she was hired, she was asked to name her salary. She asked for $80,000. They are paying her $85,000.
10
Given the level of her education and years spent earning that education (and not working, advancing with salary boosts), she should be commanding over $100k!
What you make in year 1 is comparable to what a law firm pays a summer associate. If she is good at what she does, she'll be making more than $100,000 soon enough. The real issue isn't her salary. It's the uncertainty of the company's revenue stream. If it doesn't come up with marketable treatments, it will go out of business.
2
The universities are greed-stricken, from ivy league to state. The employers want cheap labour.
Don't be fooled. It's not that American students can't compete, a commonly stated and incorrect issue. Tuition is too high, especially compared to earned wages. A grad degree is around $100,000 - and you haven't even added the interest to that! In contrast, Chinese students can pay cash and don't tax university resources because students help each other out. They would not dare go to the professor with an issue. Today, tenure is a rare thing and teaching is NOT a priority to many professors because they usually have other primary occupations or research is their first priority, not teaching. As a result, professors can keep teaching with poor teaching skills. Part of the reason for high sttrition of students - professors will test on matter they do not cover in teaching or the supplemental course materials. Why should the exam be the first day a student sees critical material? Why are schools relying on outsourced ATI or Pearson for making exams - companies whose staff often are not credentialed in the field they are selling their testing materials?
Often, foreign students come from upper class society back home. For the Chinese students, whose parents are often well-placed in the Communist party, money is not an issue. In contrast, most of the US students come from middle or lower class backgrounds
39
The top ranked STEM graduate schools in the World are primarily located in the US, UK and Canada. These schools market their educational programs heavily to international students. Having a STEM masters from Michigan, Toronto or Imperial College London has global brand recognition. International graduate students improve their marketability in their home countries and for future international postings (including international peer networking) by studying/working/living in a foreign (english) culture. They also have an upside in applying for postings in english speaking countries by bringing language (Mandarin, Arabic, etc..) and cultural skills to collaborate with the rest of the world. Most international students who showed high merit on home country admissions tests (i.e China's gaokao test) qualified for a free or low cost undergraduate degree at the most selective schools in their country. Many foreign governments and companies refuse to hire any potential senior managers who lack an undergraduate degree from the top schools in their home country.
6
As a high school chemistry teacher, that was formally an R&D industrial chemist, I can tell you that most kids theses days are not smart enough nor have the work ethic to study difficult subjects. Public schools are failing kids because we make it too easy to get a high school diploma, if you basically have a pulse and show up 100 days a year, you get a diploma. Then these kids think college will be just as easy, which is why 50% of people don't graduate from college within 4 years, yet take on huge debt. We need to make public schools more rigorous and teach kids that success means hard work. And we need to stop the anti-intellectual movement in America. Other countries value education, America does not.
448
I am emeritus professor from an excellent university with a background in science and technology, and I can say that I totally agree with you. And furthermore, the poor work ethic of US students entering the university that I taught at is terrifying. In comparison to highly motivated foreign students most of the US born students that I taught were unable to compete. The net result of this lack of a poor work ethic characteristic of many US born students is leading to a technology drain that will ultimately result in a major threat to the national security of the US. Moreover the trumpisim of the US will accelerate the pace of the threat: ultimately the best and the brightest (both foreign national and US both) will leave the US for a better life in countries like Canada and the companies that need their skills will follow.
4
Work ethic--those are the two magic words. Why don't American students have much of a work ethic? As a 30-year educator, I've got a couple of theories. One is our anti-intellectual society. We make fun of smart kids, pronounce them "book smart but without common sense." Second, we have parents who are so concerned about getting their kids into top universities, they hover around their students and their students' teachers, pressuring for higher grades, not necessarily better performance. The grade is more important than what is learned. Finally, American public schools have to provide far more than education. A teacher isn't just an instructor; she's a mentor, mother, counselor, nutritionist, nurse. She has to fulfill the most basic needs of her students before she can get around to educating them. This is true to some extent in all schools, but most especially in high poverty schools. Solving the problems in American schools would require #1, that we as Americans value intelligence and intellect; #2, that we go back to the time that a C was an acceptable grade and a B was something to celebrate, not mourn; and #3, that we address the systemic problems of poverty and admit how detrimental they are to education. In a nutshell, Americans need a radical change in their ideas about education. I am pessimistic about the chances of any of this happening.
8
Well said. Time to recognize good students more than "most cheerful child," quarterback, and prom king/queen. This anti-intellectualism is the root of our current political life as well.
10
Hmmm, maybe I missed it but, a big reason to get a graduate degree is to teach and/or also get a PhD and teach. Beyond that, it is more about simply becoming a master in your field!
In some professions, STEM, STEAM, or liberal arts, a small salary boost happens.
2
And not a "master" in your field, that usually takes several years of experience actually doing whatever is required in your "field". Rarely if ever does a degree cover the things that real world experience does.
1
Outside of tech (Silicon Valley and Seattle), an advanced degree is pretty much essential. It was true 40 years ago. Sadly, when you're a tech writer, you're not going to venture outside the reality distortion field of tech.
One of the more mundane fields of study is infrastructure. Take tunnel boring as an example. Seattle got bored with a big old tunnel recentily. Elon Musk's The Boring Company is boring below LA. Let's hope that that overly hyped venture doesn't collapse after an earthquake.
The understanding of how to keep infrastructure from collapsing requires advanced degrees be they geotechnical, geological, structural, or transportation engineering. The details are learned in graduate school. You can't apply "moving fast and breaking things" as an ethos for transportation engineering.
The study of earth, be it exploitation of natural resources or living on earth without getting flooded or burned alive by evermore warming, is done in detail during grad school. This could be making hydraulic fracturing actually work through advanced study or the study of climate science to put an end to the aforementioned silliness.
STEM graduate schools have had trouble attracting folks like me since I went to grad school in chemical engineering 40 years ago. Folks see an MBA as the ticket because that is what the US economy values. Even in Silicon Valley. The actual tech in tech is outsourced elsewhere. US tech is all about marketing and integrated marketing into journalism.
5
That you say an advanced degree is essential means nothing to me. How about indicating what if anything you learn in a masters engineering program that you should not have gotten in a BS. Sure if you want to do some specialized engineering it might help, but one or two courses could as well, and for normal things a BS should be sufficient.
4
Actually no, everything required as course of those advanced degrees could be taught, and tested at the undergraduate level if it wasn't for higher education insisting that college is a experience and therefore force you to take at least 1/2 of you courses outside your major, in all sorts of unrelated subjects.
Computer programming behind snapchat videos and Russian troll farms does not require in depth study of say structural geology for preventing tunnel collapse. Peter Thiel (Mr. Silicon Valley) knows this. When he's not hawking Trump policies and suing Gawker via Hulk Hogan, he's suggesting kids skip college to code for cheap or become the next Theranos CEO or donate their youthful blood to him so he can extend his life. I'd say Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are good examples of tech titans who took advantage of hard work done by others. Then after making billions justify their dropping out of college by saying that further study isn't important. Gates and Trump types can go to Europe and Asia for grad students to work at their foundations. Being sociopathic does not equal hard work required for science. Bezos of Amazon knows this.
The same is true of other professions like medicine & law. Not mentioned here is that the fact that domestic talent long ago eschewed professional careers for financial payouts on wall street, sand hill road, the back bay, and other exclusive financial districts. Hence we have the rise of powerful extremists like George Soros & Robert Mercer.
Also, to say that americans "don't have what it takes", for STEM is false and fraudulent. This type of rhetoric drives resentment that has been building for some time and is being to play out in the form of elected officials, like President Donald J. Trump.
11
Good point, but many don't want to study difficult things they want liberal arts which in many cases is useless and a sub set of say an engineering degree anyway.
1
It's all about money. How many 22 year-olds are willing to accrue $80,000 in debt to obtain a job pays less than $40,000 a year? And they say Americans are bad at math!
26
The average American college graduate is in debt $29,000 just for his/her undergraduate degree. For many, the only option is to work, not take on another $50,000 in debt for a PhD that will likely not improve your chances of getting a job.
Give every American free college tuition and we'll have a huge surge in those seeking advanced degrees. Of course, those in these comments who claim American kids are lazy will then turn around and say they're avoiding work by becoming forever-students.
18
Show me the money. Who pays? Or, as usual, is federal funding and debt at taxpayer expense just a minor annoyance to the "free stuff for all" mentality of the left?
2
I have recently returned from a one-year post-doc research in Australia. At Monash University in Melbourne I saw an even more striking pattern; my lab had 14 people and just 2 Australians: the head of our research group and an honors student. All people - with one exception - were in their PhDs or beyond. I don't have the numbers, but the undergraduates had also a large amount of foreigners. And my feeling is that math-related fields had more foreigners than other subjects. However, as people in the report pointed out, that large foreign number would assure us that we were welcomed. Besides, the cultural enrichment that comes from living in another country was even better.
1
Yes, but it says something about economics in a country. Either the job market is good enough, locals do not need to return for a degree to better their situation or the economy has tanked and people cannot afford to leave their job for higher education. Also, foreign students usually come from upper classes - it's expected of you to pursue higher education and to focus on your studies
2
The increased international student numbers in Australia is less about the job market than government policies.
Monash and other Australian universities are allowed by the government to charge more for international students than local students. The government has a cap on the number of international students. In recent years successive governments' efforts towards privatization has reduced government funding to universities and their compromise has been increased international student caps. The incentive is clear. The outcome too.
1
My wife and I are both STEM graduates and we would never send either of children into this field. The course work is the toughest- taught by foreign professors with difficulty in English. Attrition rates are sky high. Finally, after graduating with a six-figure loan, you look forward to a $40,000/yr job.
There is no dearth of STEM workers- if there was the salaries would rise tremendously- but instead, foreign labor is abundant. American students are smart enough to know that it is dumb to compete with cheap labor.
168
Umar, Im sorry. I empathize and as a US-born person who returned to school as an adult for an advanced degree, the debt is a huge dilemma. The universities are greed-stricken, from ivy league to state. The employers want cheap labour. There are advantages for graduate education but the big difference I find these days compared to when I got my first masters in the 90s - the professors. Back then, they were tenured and had been teaching at least 10-20 years. Now - they hold other jobs, they view as a priority, and teaching is not a priority - it pays for some bills or buys luxuries. They often haven't been teaching long and don't care if a student encounters problems. They blame the student and only the student. No wonder attrition is high, in spite of the over-priced tuitions
11
You must not be engineers, they generally make more than 40K.
I would not recommend taking undergrad STEM classes at a US university. The tuition is outrageous and the quality of instruction is dismal, the classes are crowded and for the most part the instructors cannot speak English, they are the dregs of the system who have been delegated to the dismal undergrad classes.
It is a dog eat dog learning environment and if you fall behind the low grades you get will prevent you switching to another major or college.
The elite academicians are doing research or teaching foreign grad students who expect less than their US counterparts, the foreign students are serfs to the system.
The US system is killing its seed crop, the majority of the world's engineers and skilled technicians are going to be in China, and the US will end up being its economic dependent. I saw the beginning of this, the start of when undergrad STEM classes were taught by non English speaking unqualified TAs, and any undergrad who complained about the sub standard education was condemned as being an intolerant bigot, an enemy of PCness, and told to shut up or face expulsion.
4
There are two things at work here:
First - many foreign technical degrees are not worth the paper they are printed on - well over half of foreign trained engineers fail their licensing exams here. So a postgrad degree gives the imprinteur of competence.
Secondly - no technical degree holder sees any value-add in a masters unless you are on your way to a PhD. Especially in STEM, your course of study in a masters is so narrow as to be essentially useless in a real world application. Smart engineers get an MBA from a good school - like me!
7
Exactly and a MBA might not be that valuable, but I would think taking some business courses while getting a BS in engineering would be great. Especially cost accounting and project management accounting.
I'm an Emeritus professor from a very good Engineering school. In addition to the excellent comments here I would point out that the engineering graduate program is the way the USA imports top engineering talent from around the world. The vast majority of foreign PhDs figure out a way to stay here. They are no smarter or more dedicated than American students but the USA students don't need the degree to get a job.
12
I am a student in the same area as you - the tuitions are very intimidating. People ask me - how can you afford to return to school? This is the first question I am asked. Believe me, the enormous student loan debt I must take on - keeps me on edge. The tuition is in general - insane.
I can't afford to return but I make sacrifices to do so. But most of my friends - have homes, are married with children. Isnt that we are all supposed to be working for? No one ever says - good for you, female adult student, going on for education.
8
Dartmouth saw a 30% drop in their PROFESSIONAL master's program.
Translation: the after-hours master's peddled to sub-par students who pay far too much for a faux-master's degree isn't selling as well as they like, and perhaps finally American students aren't falling for this scam anymore.
I taught in the same program at Johns Hopkins in engineering. The quality of students was unbelievably poor. I quit.
23
Read your own newspaper to find out the answer to your question:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-jobs-industry-c.... There are not enough STEM jobs for the number of graduates we are already turning out.
In spite of these discouraging facts, everywhere I turn, I hear that America needs more STEM graduates. Kids are encouraged to major in STEM subjects, to make the big money. What a lie! Yes, undergraduates with Computer Information degrees can find jobs, but with all the other science majors (physics, biology, mathematics, engineering), trying to find a job in your field is an exercise in worry and uncertainty. There way too few job openings; our own government underfunds science agencies, and undercuts Americans by bringing in mass numbers of H1-B workers for the express purpose of taking jobs from Americans and keeping wages artificially low. But we need the mythology of employee shortages for employers to keep justifying the deplorable, anti-American practice of H1-B workers. One more way that our leaders are in collusion to sell out our own young people (aren't usurious student loans bad enough?), so that the rich can get richer.
Yes, we are educating foreigners to take over the world while we sell out our own next generation. Can't get much more short-sighted than that, but hey, the ultra-rich need money to buy a few more yachts.
262
It's too expensive, even though American students are the future of this country, and conservatives discourage an educated populace in every way they can. Conservatives will stay in power if voters are uneducated and uninformed. Foreigners are happy to take their skills back to their countries where they will use them to diminish the US. Oligarchs don't want us to be number one, they just want to be rich and powerful.
7
We are now a bunch of anti-science, quasi-religious fanatics led by the Lord Donald Trump.
Our children, made lazy and stupid by personal e-devices and social media, now have ye another excuse to major in computer game design, instead of doing something useful for their lives.
So we'll need more foreign immigrants than ever. Of course, they will face extreme vetting! And none of them will be foreign agents because they will love America.
4
You live in a world I don't recognize, I hope you are wrong.
This article is already outdated. The World Citizenship "brand" has been in development for some time now. Thus, the topic of USA "Country" Universities enrolling people from other "countries" is stale, and certainly not "in power". The tenured professors and executives administrators that have been interviewed for this article's topic, have been left-out and passed-by. Their programs do not have the Worldly Mentality to survive in the Future, hopefully, the near Future. Sooner, they are out of business the better. Now, there is a chance that these Students are in these USA Programs for another reason that I don't know about, but if so, these Students are not the most intelligent of the bunch. This is a worry, because they are now accumulating Financial Debt with no real top level job that is secure in The Future.
1
Well, when Donald erases green cards, there may be more than Americans not participating in grad degrees.
1
I knew this piece would bring out the haters who complained about white American kids and laziness. I taught at a community college for 16 years. I met many foreign students who told me they loved English and other liberal art subjects, but their parents refused to help them with college tuition unless they majored in STEMs. How many of these kids are really studying what they love?
20
Yes, I think you've hit upon something. These parents are preaching a doctrine that has served me well and, as a college professor, I've found that it horrifies my domestic undergraduates. In short, I was never under the illusion that I could or should formally study what I love or that I was entitled to a living wage for pursuing It. I saved the arts for my spare time and my elective courses, played music on weekends, and focused my studies on what I was good at which, in turn, led to a job that I love.
Interestingly, I find that I'm at no disadvantage when conversing or debating the arts with those who have spent their lives in the field. I also find that they aren't prepared to discuss science with me.
5
Great point, but you study what will make a career, what you love is for your free time or retirement. Now if what you love is a career for you that is great. And of course those studying stem must take some liberal arts stuff as well.
Majoring in what you love is a luxury for those in comfortable situations. If you are from poor countries, you go after education that can get you a job. Romanticism is wonderful, and I wish everyone could pursue what they love, and earn a living that way, but that is not the case for everyone.
4
“Master’s grads are valued more, but not enough more for American students to get a master’s degree,” That just says it all. Americans are just happy to get a job and what: move put of the basement, pay down college loans, buy an iPhone X. But ten or twenty tears later when he finds all the spots in upper echelon positions are filled with talent from overseas, we may find a disgruntled "working class" cut off from the positions they feel entitled to. Forget the perks of a higher salary, the real perk of being an industry leader will just be out of reach and just like Tantalus, they will find themselves in a punishment of their own making.
3
I earned my graduate degree in M.S for systems engineering earlier this March. I attended a large, and well known public institution in Washington D.C. Despite the re-assurances of my friends and families, I feel it was a huge waste of my time and hard earned GI BILL. Some of the courses were trash and at least one of the professors were more interested in getting to their tee times on time rather then teaching. I use about 1% of what I learned in grad school at my job.
I think American grad school is a joke, a money making machine for universities. I really question the value of the American university these days. I feel college administrations are more about looking after themselves and fleecing bright, young American students looking for a chance to really improve themselves. How else can you explain these crazy tuition rates??
If these foreign students want to come and earn a piece of paper, be my guest. American university grad school programs are out of touch with the market. These days its all about what experience and certifications you have.
19
Look at GRE test statistics for US graduate school and you'll see 336,000 US citizens take the test each year-- along with a whopping 85,000 Indian citizens and 42,000 Chinese citizens. No other countries have even 10,000 test takers.
So graduate school has become an immigration channel for Indian and Chinese students. Still US students take tests 3x India and China combined.
Source: https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/snapshot_test_taker_data_2014.pdf
6
NYT headline "The Disappearing American Grad Student."
Please, this is old, old news NYT!
During my graduate years at MSU, in the second half of the 1970s, foreigners were the majority Ph.D. and Master degree candidates in the hellish areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
At MSU, Iranians were the top grad group in mathematics, engineering and the new field of computer science. At that time, near retirement 1930s born professors were the only Americans left on those departments.
Coincidentally, the decline of graduate American students in areas of science and engineering coincided with the loss of American competitiveness in manufactured goods vis a vis Asia, particularly Japan at that time.
Today, I bet not a single department of science and technology of an American university can operate without foreign grad students.
In fact, in the American academic world of research, Trump's political slogan America First should be renamed Foreigners First.
3
This is nothing new. If your skin is not white or you don't have a Y chromosome, then you have to work harder, go further and be more just for the same opportunity. ( let alone actual job with the same pay with benefits )
On top of that, if you come from a society that doesn't necessarily have Democracy or even indoor plumbing, then chances are you are going to be hungrier and more driven generally in life.
Meritocracy only really works if there is an even playing field. ( there is not )
3
Why is the photograph supposed to illustrate the point of the article? Is the reader expected to assume that the people in the photograph aren't American? Do the NYT and its readers assume that Americans look "European"? Isn't that assumption just a tiny bit racist?
Let's be blunt: Americans, with the exception of immigrants and their children and a very few others, aren't motivated and don't expect to work hard. And our educational system, with the exception of a few selective public high schools (Bronx Science, Stuyvestant, Boston Latin...) ranges from marginally adequate (the best suburban and private schools) to awful. It's not just the "urban" schools graduating semi-literates.
We're spoiled and lazy, growing up in the expectation of inheriting the world's dominant country. It won't be dominant in a generation unless we change. Even if native-born Americans have the intrinsic talent of Indians and Chinese (uncertain), they don't have the motivation and won't take maximum advantage of it. Our only hope is to welcome a wave of immigrants from East and South Asia and acculturate them into the best of our culture, the great Anglo-Saxon heritage of political freedom and democracy. So far that has worked, but the numbers are too small.
30
Fat chance when all those spoiled and disappointed un- and under-employed workers hate foreigners and vote for people like Trump and Pence who stoke their hatreds while stealing their money for themselves and their cronies. just look at the new tax bill. One of the cuts is the deductibility of interest on student loans! Of course, business interest will still be deductible. Home loan interest will be limited in its deductibility, but Jared Kushner can over pay for a billion dollar building which I hear sits empty, offer green cards to potential foreign investors, jet around the world on the taxpayers dollar and deduct whatever costs he has from his income as a slumlord in Baltimore and Virginia. But we are the best country in the world, right?
1
The time required from BS to MS and PhD has increased over the years. Professors use grad students as cheap labor. Foreign students are more tolerant of putting in the six to eight years to get the PhD than US students.
3
A major problem here is the high cost of getting an education. By the time one get's to the PhD level, the cost of borrowing has mushroomed to close to $ 100,000.00 or even more. Many foreigners (the brightest of the brightest) are funded by their respective countries, so money is less of a concern.
The worst part of all is that many foreign students stay in the USA and then "compete" for jobs with American students.
81
If you're qualified by accomplishments to do a PhD at a reputable program then you will pay nothing and take home about $30K/year. If you don't get a full ride to do your postgrad work then you are doing it as a recreational pastime and deserve the crushing debt.
@Majortrout
It's funny. For the previous generation, getting a PhD was considered a waste because you would end up waiting tables. Now getting a PhD is considered too expensive.
Maybe our kids will find another reason not to get a PhD. Or maybe Americans will grow to miss the days when our universities were so strong that people flocked from the far corners of the globe to study.
No one is stopping anyone from getting a PhD. Whether that degree will turn into a million-dollar job is something each person has to decide.
We have President Obama to thank for making our obsession with money as a means to measure the value of an education. Liberals, for years, have been saying that we need an educated population so that people will vote for Democrats (because they aren't "clinging" to religion).
There are many reasons why education is valuable. Some is monetary. Each person needs to decide its value.
1
I did a PhD degree in a top 20 university and graduated a couple of years ago. I would not advise anyone who wants a job to go through it. There are few jobs out there specifically for PhDs. I lost 7 years researching a topic that was interesting to me but left me with few employment opportunities post-graduation. If you're considering academia, forget it. You will end up as an adjunct professor making $30,000 a year with no benefits and no security. Many of my fellow graduate PhDs have gone overseas to developing countries where there are still jobs. There is still some demand there. The disappearing American grad student is wise.
39
I taught in U.S. public schools for 10 years. Most American students don't have the work ethic, knowledge base, or skill set to succeed in graduate school. And at age 21 it is way too late to catch up.
291
I live in a relatively prosperous town in the north west suburb of Boston. Parents here constantly complain that their kids don't get too much homework. Most parents seem to be interested in enrolling their toddlers to town soccer or travel soccer or lacrosse and on the sidelines they behave as though their child is an Olympian or destined to be one.
My son grew up in this mostly lily white neighborhood and now teaches science in a high school situated in the poorest section of NYC. He is convinced that children from these well to do towns in the north east are coddled by their parents. Against all odds, his poverty struck students attend school each day, with the sole ambition of graduating high school, passing their Regents, and becoming the first child to attend college, in his or her family. The drive, the flame that ignites their spirits is something the white entitled kids lack. The white privilege makes them complacent and many times their parents' priorities mislead the kids.
161
While I agree that many U.S. K-12 students lack the academic values and skills that enable them to succeed in college, I disagree that "at age 21 it is way too late" to remediate those skills. Many students enter college or return to college at non-traditional ages now, especially after realizing the skills and values that they need to move further in life must be acquired in higher education. If the rational part of a person's brain isn't fully developed and won't be until age 25, then doesn't it make sense that a person may not come to the realization that higher education is important at 21 or later? Just consider, the average age of entering med students is 24, the average traditional fresh college graduate is 22, not to mention the veterans who return to school on GI bill after many years in service. The brain's neuroplasticity is a fascinating thing, dude.
38
Really? A lack of work ethic is something I have never seen in my Long Island school district. A full schedule of AP classes is the norm.
I think American students are smart enough to know that a graduate degree is not worth the money. They know the jobs are in healthcare, medical or nursing school after graduation, or technology where no graduate degree is needed.
In tech, my company has a hard time filling entry level jobs with a starting salary of 70k. There are some positions where the applicants are looking and getting over a 100k because of the demand. Why would they spend six plus years in college to earn a degree with dismal job prospects or the salary to support themselves?
22
As a former American grad student in New York and current international student in the UK --- albeit in the humanities, where many people "have not yet found decent jobs," despite making huge financial and personal investments in mandatory qualifications so they can hopefully work in their chosen or adjacent fields --- this has far more to do with money than motivation, which this article describes but oddly obscures. The cost of graduate school across the board is monumental, especially at the Master's level (where funding is comparatively scarce - and as this notes, "demand from abroad is so high, administrators don't see a need to offer as much tuition assistance"). Like Mr. Wingman writes, "Americans don’t see the need for an advanced degree when there are so many professional opportunities waiting for them" that can help pay off already accumulated debt. At the same time, MA/MS and PhD programs can offer ample opportunities to highly deserving international students who don't have the same immediate access to the US job market as American students, but who can work - and maybe stay longer - with degrees that reflect their considerable skills. It's also crucial to remember that universities like NYU are big businesses. I'm sure NYU Tandon's dean could find plenty of underemployed liberal arts grads to herd into STEM degree programs that they might not end up using, but wouldn't it be better to see those spots go to international students who will make the most of them?
3
I am a 28 year old American with both a bachelor’s and master’s in computer science and much of what this article says is true. I got a well paying job as a software engineer with my undergrad straight out of school. My employer offered tuition reimbursement and I enjoyed studying computer science so I decided to go back for a master’s degree. There were many grad classes when I would look around and I would be the only American in the class, and I would wonder where all my fellow citizens were. In the end though, my master’s degree has done little to advance my career in the three years I’ve had it, and I knew this going into it. I did it because it was dirt cheap with the reimbursement covering 80% of the costs, and I loved the subject. I think the reason that so few Americans go to grad school is that many accrue a lot of debt in undergrad and they are able to get a good job with a undergrad STEM degree, so they don’t see the reason to go back for graduate school. They are right, an undergrad in STEM will give you all the tools you need to teach yourself anything you could learn in grad school, without spending the time and money to go to grad school.
207
To some degree it's simple economics. For an American computer science undergrad, the role model is Gates and Zuckerberg, who dropped out of college and became mega-billionaires. You don't even need to finish to do that. Masters programs for such students are nearly unthinkable, a waste of prime start-up years. These programs are for those who didn't study coding as an undergrad, or did so at a foreign school with low recognition in the US market. Not to mention that these STEM programs yield a key leg-up in the visa lottery.
PhD programs are a different animal altogether, a path to a career in research, not business, for the most part. The underlying theme to both is that foreigners have the overwhelming incentive to get into these fields to become Americans. The problem will be if they no longer choose to do so, or if we don't let them.
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We are all citizens of the world. This current trend means we have invested in graduate education and have reputable schools. I found the point interesting that many American undergraduates don't pursue graduate degrees because they are swamped with debt. Maybe that ought to be looked into?
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The graduate degree does not increase the chances for employment for the U.S. student, however it conveys an OPT work permit for the foreign student. U.S> students do not need an OPT work permit.
What is the mystery here?
Where's the incentive when so many of these students come out with low pay and loads of debt. How can these students even consider going on to graduate school when so many have enormous debt from just obtaining a Bachelors? Once upon a time I contemplated going back for a Masters degree, but the cost didn't outweigh or even equalize the benefit.
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PhDs in STEM fields are really hard. Students are paid poorly, and often treated poorly, for doing vital work. At the end of this program, they rarely derive any more benefit than if they had done a Bachelors degree as academic careers are few and far between. The opportunity cost of not working for roughly 5 years, rather than just getting a job doesn't make it seem worth it. Having done a PhD, I don't think I would recommend doing one to a smart, ambitious, young person.
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A very important topic perhaps related to future national security. I read all of the comments with great interest. Here are my thoughts;
1. As a middle class American, I would support free tuition for American citizens completing graduate school in STEM areas/degrees at qualified universities. Much more reasonable than supporting the Pharmaceutical industry.
2. I would also not allow corporations to replace them with non-American citizens except in extreme cases. These days, labor laws protect low-performers in the workplace - American citizens with advanced degrees deserve as much or more.
3. I would require corporations of a certain size to hire any and all qualified American citizens before granting them one H-1B visa. Supposedly already part of our system but clearly not working.
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I agree with all you wrote except this: "labor laws protect low performers in the workplace." It's quite the opposite - - there are virtually no labor protections in the U.S., and even high-performing workers can be fired for arbitrary reasons. I saw plenty of it in the software industry.
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Real world example.
My child majored in math at one of the SUNY schools. He thought about earning his PhD because of his love for the subject, but when his adviser spoke to him about the dismal job prospects in academia, he chose not too.
Instead, he took a job teaching high school math here in NY where the starting salary is 60k. As they say, do the math.
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Is it the dominance of international students in STEM graduate programs that undergirds the tax reform proposal that would graduate tuition remission taxable?
I'm an American who got a PhD during the big run-up of grad students trained in the late 90s, early 2000s. Frankly all my effort getting a PhD was a waste. It trained me for low-paying, low-power jobs in academia and some relatively uninteresting industry biotech jobs.
Eventually I clued up and left for Silicon Valley, where the pay and challenges match my skills and knowledge. I should have done it earlier.
Now, if America wants to start paying its highly educated scientists what they're actually worth, I might change my mind. But deans and other administrators at modern universities know they can underpay, and still get tons of applicants for tenure-track positions and research associates.
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The key word in your posting is "biotech". The massive overproduction of graduate degrees in biotech fields skews all the stats in STEM employment.
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Considering that the United States' worship of free market economics, it is odd that Americans don't recognize the workings of the market when they see it. Graduate degrees generally are no longer worth the necessary time and investment. They are very expensive and time consuming. They are no guarantee of a job in your chosen field, much less a well paying, secure job. Unless you are demonstrably brilliant (first in your class by a large margin), you should not pursue a doctoral degree in any non-STEM field. If you do, your most likely outcome is becoming an adjunct teacher somewhere. Commentators regularly over-state the availability of STEM jobs, especially jobs that require an advanced degree. Even in STEM fields, you need to think twice or thrice before committing to a graduate program.
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I was surprised and disappointed that Ms. Joshi has no clear path to permanent residency, having to rely on American Express to sponsor her for a training program and then an H1-B visa in which she will be locked into a specific job with American Express unable to change employers without going through the whole application process.
Why not give anyone getting a masters or even a bachelors and a job offer tentative residency.? After a decent interval of gainful employment and tax paying (say 5 years) give them a green card.
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Part of this is supply and demand. With India having 1.5BB people and China over 1BB, versus 300MM in the US, there is simply more demand for education that is not met by the small number of elite institutions in both countries. Wealthy families can easily send their children to the US for graduate school if they don't "win the lottery" and get into the top schools at home. Also, the US has fairly lenient student visa requirements. A student from India can stay virtually indefinitely on a visa as long as s/he is enrolled in at least one course. With family support not being able to legally work in the US is no barrier. Finally, as others have mentioned, US employers are not willing to pay a premium for advanced engineering degrees. It's just a cost of entry for foreigners, and of lesser value to US students. It's not just that Americans are fat, dumb and lazy.
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As a pioneer in computer-assisted art, animation, and analysis, I need students to help me. I am now 90, almost blind, have post-polio-syndrome, and diseases incurred in Occupied Japan. Over the past ten years, I have found that undergrad and graduate students from China and India and now Vietnam understand my palette, themes, editing techniques, and ultimate film, along with arranging my files that were mixed-up by American students. I have also been approached by South Koreans and Canadians about developing VR with them -- an area I worked in at Bell Labs in the 1970's. Unlike Americans, they do not demand huge wages from the start but accept my sliding scale. I expect to see the addition of AI, another area in which I worked at the Labs and MIT, 1970's-1980's. My associates at small to medium-sized colleges tell me that they are on the verge of bankruptcy due to the fall-off of foreign applicants because of Trump. I cannot lose my foreign students, many of whom went onto high-paying jobs in post-production, film, robotics, etc. Trump is fanning this version of an uneducated mass of white Americans who deserve better-paying jobs as a right as opposed to actually learning. They use defaults while the foreign students follow my instructions.
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Follow the money. There isn't enough money in these field, salary wise, to justify the required effort.
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As an American student, I attended grad school in a STEM field and can see why it doesn't draw many fellow Americans. To start, the pay is in the 25k - 30k range, and remains like that through the duration, which if you get a PhD can be 5 to 6 years. This means that even though one is supposedly developing skills that are highly sought after in the new age economy, it might also mean getting paid 30k/year at age 27.
Additionally, there is the issue that not all STEM fields are created equal. While getting a degree in computer science/engineering will surely guarantee a relevant job post-graduation, there is no guarantee a degree in physics/mathematics/chemistry/other engineering disciplines will directly translate into a career. In fact, one of the main hurdles these graduates face is employers' strong predilection towards "industry experience" -- an oxymoron of sorts: 'we value skills acquired during a PhD, but also want industry experience'.
For Americans, it is much easier to build a career/establish industry connections by starting out right after finishing an undergraduate degree. This often leads to higher pay, and a more established network earlier in a career. International students don't have those same opportunities however, and must go to graduate school.
The only reasons that Americans have to go to graduate school is love of the subject they are researching, and with today's society that rewards more frivolous pursuits, these are few and far between.
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Did you mean more frivolous pursuits, or did you mean more lucrative pursuits?
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Thank you for this post. I have wondered about the reasons, and this makes sense.
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I second that. I have a PhD in materials science from a top school, and a postdoc from another. If you have a PhD in physics, it is almost certainly harder to find a job than if you just have a Bachelors degree, because companies simply don't value the PhD enough. Talk to any physics PhD and there job search is often a nightmare.
8
I just don't get it. With all the examples in US politics and popular culture of people with great achievement based on their brains and hard, careful work, why wouldn't the average American youth follow such examples?
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This article is focused mostly on STEM subjects and that is a relative special case for why people go to graduate school. For many international students going to graduate school is necessary in order to get a US degree, the beginning of a US-based professional network, and in some cases the basics of communication in English. The vast majority of work in STEM fields does not require any graduate level knowledge base, an undergraduate degree is sufficient. So for people who finished their bachelors degree in a US school there is no need to pursue higher education. You would just be delaying the time when you can start earning money at a job.
For sciences which are less focused on getting a job, physics (theoretical), astronomy, biology, and mathematics (not statistics), there are a higher proportion of US based graduate students. That is since the focus, as mentioned in the article, is not about getting a job, but a desire to learn and do research which expands our understanding of the world. The reality is that few people are willing to move to another country (or at all) to do this. Most of the time there is not paycheck at the end of the day. That is a reality which not everyone understands even with all of the hype about STEM.
A better headline for this article would be "Different strategies for US and international students to get jobs in STEM"
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Maybe it has something to do with student debt, and wariness of incurring more debt? As the mother of a student who had a perfect score in the ACT in math, I would like to point out that there are NO government sponsored programs to help fund sending these talented kids into STEM fields.
It's very nice that we are helping the world to educate its well-to-do. It would be even better if we educated our own.
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Graduate students in these fields are generally supported as teaching or research assistants by their institutions. Unlike "professional" schools like those of law or medicine, one does not take on additional debt by going to graduate school in a STEM field.
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American PhDs in the STEM fields don't pay anything - when you are accepted into a PhD in STEM field at an american university, they cover the costs of your tuition, and pay you a stipend of 22 - 30K a year. However, if you have student debt from undergrad, I wouldn't expect to pay it off doing a PhD. Also, good luck living in NYC or San Francisco on 22K/year.
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Surely your child was offered scholarships by colleges impressed by her/his test scores?
To be blunt, the vast majority of American students aren't well prepared when they enter college. They have been coddled in school, don't want to be challenged and easily get bored when confronted with tough problems and homeworks that require thinking, rather than routine application of materials from lecture. The default mode is to search the internet for solutions to homeworks rather than work through them. They drink in the middle of the week, are hungover or asleep in class and expect to YouTube the material. In short, they don't belong in college.
As computer science enrollments in colleges increases, the discrepancy between the top 15% and the bottom 50% is huge. Students take computer science not because they're interested or because they have the aptitude, but because they think they'll get jobs at the end of four years. The good ones go for the money, the poor one scrounge for whatever they can - I wouldn't interview, let alone employ, most of them nor let them near a graduate program. Who is left for graduate research? Only a handful of the top American undergraduates. Thank goodness for the foreign students, bright, prepared, and enthusiastic!
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You seriously have no idea what you're talking about. I have 2 in college right now.
I bet it's been decades since you've even had a child in college, much less been in college yourself.
The truth is that American kids are too SMART to waste time and money (they're forgoing income) in these unnecessary, fruitless graduate programs. The era of graduate degrees is over for all but a handful of fields.
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@honeybee: Just FYI, I had kids graduate from top tier colleges recently, and am a professor of computer science.
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there is no STEM shortage. That is a myth propogated by the Zuckerbergs and Gates who have a vested interest in cheap replaceable workers.
Even this liberal paper just confirmed it a few days back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/education/edlife/stem-jobs-industry-c...
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Is the quality of science and math education in schools a factor?
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No, the lack of decent paying jobs after getting graduate degrees is the problem.
H1-B visas allow companies to hire foreign students at slave wages, so the companies won't hire Americans. American kids have figured this out and act accordingly.
The companies tell everyone the American kids are not skilled enough, and the gullible believe them. Funny how the foreign kids and the American kids all attend the same kinds of programs though.
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the answer H-1-B.
Why take on the debt when you will be replaced by a slave who can't change jobs and dare not complain about working conditions who will later be sent back home to do your job for far far less.
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That's called capitalism. America perfected it. Too late to put the cat back in the bag now! Step up and compete.
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I don't think I know of any PhD who has been replaced by a H-1B.
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is this your definition of capitalism? intervention by government to help foreign students?
As mentioned on this website, the average F-1 student must remain with the employer for at least seven years and in many cases up to twelve years. In addition, the international employee is committed to the company since his or her ability to remain in the United States, especially after a certain point in the process, depends entirely on that employment.
The international employee is not “promising” or “agreeing” to stay with the company for almost a decade. It is the legal system itself which creates this commitment to the company so that after the first two or three years of the relationship, the international employee has two choices: either continue the employment with that employer and obtain permanent residence or leave the United States.
http://hiref-1students.com/
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The pay for engineers, braving the toughest courses where the average GPA is 2.5, is low pay and then they outsource your job at a moment's notice. By the time one finishes his bachelor's degree, one has figured this out and become leery at throwing good money after bad. Some doors are closed to engineers by the engineering GPA. No engineers go to medical school for graduate school, for example, even though they could easily do the work. Pre-med classes hand out As and Bs exclusively. Engineering grades are Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs. Only 10% of those who started my Electrical Engineering program graduated; pre-engineering classes failed 50% of students. Thus, even thinking about pre-engineering carried with it thinking about getting an F and one's future stunted at 18 or 19. In contrast, I never heard even one person flunking out of a non-STEM degree.
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The pay for qualified engineers is the highest for any undergrad program and easily gets into 6 figures very quickly. If you're a professional engineer you will have access to salary surveys done every year that belies the point you are trying to make.
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I don't support covfefe walls, but I do support priority for those who have lived here first (especially the indigenous) and want to enroll in a grad program in the first place.
But other reasons—undergrad debt, a general need to find SOME job NOW even if it keeps them from having time to go grad school and even if it's from awful employers like Uber or creepy ones like the YouTwitFace marketing triumvirate, increasing science and expert disdain among a certain type of voter, ...—are keeping Americans from even being able to go, much less wanting to go.
Once we remove covfefe and make America great again, we need to make learning in America cool and affordable again. Free college would be a start.
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What language is this written in? I'm a native speaker of English but don't know what "covfefe" is. I've never seen it before.
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Google it, Jonathan.
And if you don't know what covfefe is (or to simply Google it), it's highly likely you don't understand that American kids see the futility in going to grad school for STEM which is why they don't. American kids aren't lazy; they're just not dupes.
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Jonathan hasn’t been paying attention to Trump tweets..
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A family member -with a masters degree related to computer science -recently had his job moved to the Philipines AND the company he worked for also invoked a no-compete clause (even though they there the ones who ended his job). Apparently, this is the new norm. So, why would you invest in an advanced degree?
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Advise your relative to move to California. Our state takes a dim view on non-competes.
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@Rufus W.
It's called globalism. Fun for upper class Liberals. Not so fun for everyone else.
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I noticed this back in the 1980s when my lab was in Palo Alto. At one point I had 4 postdoctoral fellows, one from India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Germany, I advertised in Science like many did then. Two of these were grad student from very good American universities. American grad student did seem to have the motivation to exceed in discovery.
1
Clarification: "...American grad students did NOT seem..."
1
Americans are smart enough to realize that an M.S. is simply more of the same -- you don't really learn anything more in grad school than you did as an undergraduate.
I went to a prestigious engineering school for an M.S. and truth be told, it was pretty boring. There wasn't really much new taught; it was basically go through the motions to get that M.S. attached to your name. It did nothing for me either intellectually or career-wise. So why bother?
And one more thing: in other countries, they're more focused on the prestige of the degree than what the graduate degree will actually do for you.
On top of all that, factor in the cost and time. So for many students, a graduate degree just doesn't make sense.
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-- "you don't really learn anything more in grad school than you did as an undergraduate."....That's crazy. You must have chosen the wrong school.
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