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Why Is US Grad School Mainly Non-US Students?
I am a new graduate student in Computer Engineering. I would like to get my MS and possibly my Ph.D. I have learned that 90% of my department is from India and many others are from China. All the students come here to study and there are only 7 US citizens in the engineering program this year. Why is that? I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?
The problem is?
The world always needs more lawyers.
Deleted
I watched something the other day that said India was going to surpass the US by 2020.
They accept those who apply. Most Americans are probably happy with just an undergrad degree and don't want to go to grad school.
Being an American graduate student myself, there are a lot of foreigners where I am as well. I don't have a problem with it. Why are you ranting here and not in some blog?
"I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?"
:)
Yes!
I would give the long answer, but I have to get back to preparing a computer networking paper with my chinese advisor and my 3 chinese colleagues
"I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?"
Tuition cost.
No text
India has a billion people. China has a billion people. America has 300,000 people, which is almost an order of magnitude less than India and China combined. Consider that many of the best grad schools are in America--plenty of Indians and Chinese come to America for grad school, but you don't see as many Americans going to India or China. All in all, Americans are fortunate that we can get the same education next door that other people travel around the world for.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
...there sure aren't as many "americans" here as there used to be. Of course, I mean white anglo-saxon protestant males. A lot more minorities. A lot more first and second generation americans.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The best students in the world go to the best Universities in the world. The Universities in the United States consistently dominate the top universities in the world.[1] Thus, it isn't surprising that many people from other countries come here to study.
[1] http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ARWU2007_Top100.htm
The median income difference between an engineer with an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree is smaller than the median income difference between an engineer with an undergraduate degree and an OBGYN. Let's see corporate America outsource that job.
I have learned that 90% of my department is from India and many others are from China. All the students come here to study and there are only 7 US citizens in the engineering program this year.
90% Indian? This is either bullshit, or you're going to a very strange department. Are you really saying that total percentage of Europeans, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and American students is less then 10%? I find that hard to believe. 20%-60% Indian I could believe.
a) an upstream problem: US public schools suck - badly, that's a bad thing
b) American having a freer, more efficient job market than in most places realize they don't *need* to go to graduate school, that's a good thing.
\u262D = \u5350
Very few Americans require anything more than a BS to get a job with a Computer Engineering or Computer Science degree. On the other hand, it's easier for a non-citizen to get a job if they have a MS from a domestic school. As well, it's generally easier for them to get into shool than get into a job (the job comes after being here a few years and getting that MS), and gives a nice ~2 year jump on the whole green card process. If they somehow fail to find a job after getting the MS, there's always the option to continue on with a PhD while looking for something that will actually pay the bills.
The goal of college for 90% of Americans is to get a better job. Therefore 90% of Americans aren't going to spend any more time than necessary in school, and if they do go for higher degrees it's usually for something that will increase their pay. A BS in CE doesn't get paid much less than a MS in CE, but a BS in CE with an MBA who's promoted into management does get paid quite a bit more.
'cause he's wondering how the next gen of american CS's will cope with the un-american competition. Imagine a future where most U.S. tech-companies outsource R&D and production to India and china...oh...never mind
Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango
It's a matter of economics, are you going to invest that much money and time in something when significant portions of the grad level work is being exported out of the country? With major corporations from the likes of Microsoft to IBM hiring principally outside the US in China and India, this is where the jobs will be and thus, where the grad students are coming from.
The real slap in the face of the whole thing is that said companies than have the audacity to complain that we don't have enough educated workers to provide a workforce here in America.
no market for engineers in US. Market for engineers in India & China.
Next month, no market for lawyers, doctors in US... we'll all flip burgers.
Could it be that foreign students pay higher tuitions, so there is an incentive for the schools to accept them in preference to American students?
This is probably going to be modded flamebait, but I'm going to share my observations anyway. There is generally a large percentage of foreign students in graduate programs in general in the U.S. (e.g. 3 or 4 or so of 12 in my biophysics graduate program). However, I've found that the percentage of foreign students increases the more...easy the graduate school is to get in to. I have friends attending less selective graduate programs, and they have many more peers that are foreign students, mostly because there are many more graduate schools in the U.S. than in foreign countries, meaning the competition to get into graduate school is overall much lower in the U.S. Don't believe the hype industries put out--the U.S. already produces far more science/engineering PhDs than it can reasonably employ. This is in large part due to the sheer number of graduate programs. Foreign students are simply taking advantage of this fact to become trained in a field that would be difficult ot get into in their home country.
A lot of foreign students are here on a foreign student visa. If they fuck up in school, they get sent back. So, by accepting a foreign student, the department has a very good idea that that student will be putting in 110% into the degree program, doing shit work for no money, whatever, when a domestic student is more likely to just tell an abusive department to fuck off and die and move to another school. It may also be that the student is less likely to be partying on the weekends (social stigma), and so grades won't be much of an issue if they made it that far.
:P
:)
I thought about going to grad school for Biology as I have a keen interest in various fish and some local rivers & streams ecology that I picked up on my own. I had a sit down with the Dean of the Biology department where we basically shot the shit for an hour or two, talking about various subjects, including programs at other schools. He seemed surprised that not only did I know who the "big names" in my relatively obscure interests, but that I was also reading their papers and applying them. He looked at me and asked me point blank: Why the hell aren't you in my department? And I didn't have a good answer. He went on to explain that there's a ton of people in Biology grad school, but none of them were actually biologists. Instead, they were padding grades and trying to get into med school. While he was most certainly happy that they were going on with their lives, he said finding people actually interested in Biology was like pulling teeth. Basically: he'd pick someone like me, regardless of my GRE scores for the most part, over a mountain of med school hopefuls because it was his job, as far as he was concerned, to educate biologists. It was an interesting conversation. "Man, you could get your doctorate just doing what you're doing now at home on your own dime..."
And no, I didn't go to grad school. Not yet, anyway.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
But they still make the majority of science/engineering grad students in the US? ... Where education is renowned for being expensive.
Deleted
Mostly I think it is because we're all too busy working for a living. Those who can afford college without having to work, do go into medicine and law as you said. Especially law. If you control the law you can control the money.
Most Americans, even if they are really smart and work hard in high-school, still have to work while attending college and have little time for serious study. By the time they've finished four years of University, they have between $60,000.00 and $100,000.00 in debt. They look around and realize that if they go to graduate school, they will probably double that debt.
Now, they've worked for most of the time they've been at University, and haven't truly been able to get all the benefits of dedicated study, and they are faced with more of the same. More debt, etc.
Because they have work experience and because they can take jobs that pay reasonably well, they do so, figuring it is best to cut their losses.
This is somewhat short-sighted, but, it is inevitable.
A foreign student in the U.S. usually (from my experience) attended non-graduate school in their home country and it was a free-ride one way or another (I'm not saying they aren't smart and didn't have to work really hard). They are now in the U.S. attending graduate school, usually on some sort of scholarship (not saying they didn't earn it).
They don't need to work to pay for school. They are not accruing massive debt. They can't just take a reasonable paying job in the U.S. because their student visa doesn't allow it. In their home country, reasonable paying jobs (without an advanced degree) aren't as plentiful. Their choices are, continue in graduate school while not accruing massive debts and yet being able to dedicate 100% of their efforts to learning and mastering the material, or return to their home nation and compete for jobs without and advanced degree. It's a pretty easy choice.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
You americans are so pumped up with "making it out in the big world, big time" that, jumping into the foray to make cash as soon as you can.
its cultural.
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How many times are the nerd, the handyman, and the car mechanic ridiculed as uncool, oafish lugs, while the wall street weenies, the lawyers and the "environmental education" majors held as paragons of success? Despite Feminism, girls are still taught that they "aren't good in math", and now with the emasculating of boy students (no running, no recess, no physical sports), the same extends. When a kid can claim "body by Warcraft" as a reason for not doing physical chores and get away with it, you know that practical, hard, rigorous work is a thing of the past. The foreign families know that hard work and high education matter, thats why their kids get good grades and come here to study in English.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm an engineer. I've done hardware, software, and systems design for over 20 years. I make things that work.
When I was a kid there wasn't any internet. If you wanted information you went to the library. You had to WANT to know something bad enough to invest more than 20 keystrokes to find it out. So you thought about things.
Also, when I was a kid, there weren't computers. There was one (an IBM 1130) in the regional high school. So if I wanted to CREATE something I had to do it with sticks and wires and glue and batteries and switches and light bulbs and motors and things. Physical objects. Not clickety-dragety nice pictures to look at, real physical artifacts.
So kids these days don't value information, and they don't see the point of building things. So our country is loosing out to indians and chinese who DO see the point, and work hard enough to get sent half-way across the world when our kids sit in their basements with engineering schools in the same town, clicking away at their idiotic video games.
I fear for our country.
American Public Education SUCKS.
If the top grad schools had to stick to American only students, they'd go bankrupt in just a few years.
Thanks to "no moron left behind" and "teachers unions" and our dumbass politicians that let myths (aka intelligent design) be taught as science, the number of potential grad students coming from America gets slimmer every year.
I'd rant more, but I'm too busy learning Mandarin.
"I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?"
No. It's not that the smart ones are, in particular, not going into science and engineering. It's that more _people in general_ are going into things like law, the financial sector, etc., which means that statistically more of the really good people will go in those directions as well (although we can, of course, point out that someone who is good at law or finance might not be good at engineering or science, and vice versa). Science and engineering no longer have the draw they used to, particularly after the tech bubble burst.
I don't really know why this is. Could be a lot of things. Could be that we're more materialistic, and that yes, you can ultimately make more money in those sectors (although most of the people I know who graduated from law school are fleeing the practice of law like rats from a sinking ship). Could be that people used to go into science because it was more prestigious and indeed patriotic to do so after Sputnik scared the living shit out of us. Nothing like a hostile nation launching something over your heads for the first time to convince you that falling behind technologically could leave you in the middle of mushroom cloud, momentarily wishing you'd studied more math before you vaporize.
Combine that with the fact that tech is the best way to get out of India and China and come to the US, and maybe that explains the disparity.
Regardless, it says very bad things about our future as a country.
Because Engineering is hard. Our precious little snowflakes are growing up so pampered from real difficulty or challenge that something like a Masters in Engineering is out of their league. Our school systems can't flunk anyone because it would cause the child to feel bad. They also can't strongly encourage the truly bright students, because then the other children will feel less special. The overall result is that our childhood education doesn't prepare our young students for difficult college majors. This is mostly the parents (as a whole) fault. Students from countries where struggling past difficulty is just part of life have been outshining tender American kids for decades now. The proof from Futurama: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recurring_human_characters_from_Futurama#Professor_Ogden_Wernstrom "[Professor] Wernstrom demands and receives tenure, a big research grant, a lab, and five graduate students (at least three of them Chinese by his request)."
We are all just people.
It's simple: For economic reasons, many people complete their schooling outside the U.S., often where they grew up. But since many employers don't know whether a given school somewhere else in the world is reputable or not, many people get one last American degree, to "validate" their education elsewhere (both to U.S. employers, as well as anyone else who thinks American unis are the best). And the Master's degree is one of the shorter ones to get here.
I recently finished my Master's Degree in computer science. Shortly after I started my program completely dropped the comprehensive examinations to get into the PhD program.
The reason?
Comps require months of heavy studying of material from prior classes to do well, and it was severely biased against US students. Most students from other countries are here on Student Visas which forbid them from working (except as TAs/RAs). US Citizens, on the other hand, usually have jobs and sometimes families and cannot devote the same level of time to such a vigorous set of exams.
I hope to see more colleges considering what they can do to make sure their programs aren't biased against US citizens.
First universities can get a lot more money through foreign students since they often pay the full tuition so the universities actively recruit them. Secondly, the students who come here are the people with the drive to succeed since they had to take the risk to make it happen. Lastly coming on a student visa is probably the simplest way to transition to permanent residency if they desire to stay here.
For some reason, Indians are crazy about engineering. Everyone competes to get into the best schools, where they all work very hard. The engineering schools (the IITs and others) are really top-notch. Finally, from what I've heard the engineering degree is so common in India that you need a graduate degree to get a good job. So it's not surprising that there are lots of Indian students in your engineering department. The same factors are at work, albeit to a lesser extent, with the Chinese students.
On the other hand, I have seen very few Indian students in math, which is my field. There are a fair number of Chinese students though. Of course, I go to a public school, and we don't have as much money for international students, which may skew things somewhat.
I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law
Medicine is not the place to go - there is an insane glut of grad students and postdocs. Competition is extremely fierce. If you're thinking of going for any sort of specialty practice- forget it. Everyone wants to be a *insert narrow specialty* doctor; nobody wants to be a general practitioner or go into pediatrics where we really need doctors. So, we have 50 zillion hand surgeons, and a line a mile out the doors of all the family docs.
As for medical research - our lab is chock full of foreign students. The lab director prefers them because they're basically slaves- they want desperately to be in the US, and the lab holds their visa. They'll put up with shit pay, no/little credit for their work, insane hours, and unreasonable demands. They're just happy to be on US soil.
Someone told me once that the lab couldn't attract US candidates because said candidates were going for higher profile, better paying positions.
If you want to be successful coming out of grad school- go for engineering, either mechanical or electrical. Big shortages predicted in both fields, from what I've heard.
Whatever you do, skip research - unless you look forward to flushing several years of your life down the drain to help some professor reel in a research grant, who'll barely care to list your name on the paper. And that's *if* the research isn't scooped by another lab...
Please help metamoderate.
Also, as an American who has a graduate degree, all I can say is, unless you're going to teach at the college level, do research, or need a graduate degree for some professional certification (Law, Medicine, Psychotherapy, etc...), a graduate degree is completely worthless and a waste of time. Want to learn more in a field that you are truly passionate about? Learn on your own. Grad school will just stifle your interest and creativity (playing to professors BS games, is one way they do it) and they'll make you do a lot of BS busy work becuase some bureaucrat with a Ph.D. somewhere thinks that's what you "must" do.
Just my bitter opinion.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
.. only to get outsourced by cheaper foreign labor and be unemployed? MBA's are teh big thing to get and law degrees. These jobs are staying in the us because they are valued more.
Simple economics.
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I know a lot of guys with grad degrees in the tech field who are making as much as guys with BA's (or less in some cases). It looks impressive on a resume, but there isn't an automatic payoff like with the medical or legal professions. Unless someone wants to develop their own product or do research for a major corporation, there's little reason to spend 3-4 more years and come out. Guys with BA's have been out for a few years and already have industry experience under their belts, and that's worth a whole lot more in the consulting business than a thesis paper on "the practical applications of sight tracking optics in regards to voice activated GUI systems", unless that's the main product of the company you're trying to get in with.
But I know a few companies offhand that will hire a PhD on the spot...but those companies don't really make anything nor do they pay very much. They are patent houses.
I don't see where he had a problem with it, either. The difference between you and him isn't that you don't have a problem with it--it's that you aren't curious about why it is. As an academic, it's rather odd for you to assume that curiosity implies anything more sinister.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Philip Greenspun has a very good article on why becoming a scientist doesn't make sense for most people:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
The article is titled "Women in Science," but it basically argues that the preparation costs for becoming a scientist (college, grad school, post doc) are so high, and the economic rewards so low and uncertain, that intelligent people are more likely to be drawn to other fields like medicine.
Hard to get a job in programming these days unless you are Indian, from India, or planning to move there. :P
YMMV
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
"All the students come here to study and there are only 7 US citizens in the engineering program this year. Why is that?"
Less than 20% of the MBA's in India are employable. They skate thru school, sharing test answers and learning little. The system there makes no effort except to get them out the door. The educational system only wants to say how many have been produced, happy to ignore that the certificates are worthless.
The individuals that recognize the travesty and know that the system in the USA is legitimate by comparison, spread the word. The ones that can come over do it for the legitimacy and the true value of an educational system rooted in honesty, hard work and individual betterment.
The scale of the Indian & Chinese populations means that what is a small number over there seems large in comparison here.
Another example of "Race to the Bottom".
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
For one thing, Americans generally don't want to work that hard. They just want the money, like you say the doctors or lawyers
MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Yeah, that's it. People that don't want to work that hard go into the two hardest grad programs for the two professions that put in the longest hours. I'm sure you hit it right on the head there, friend.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's a cultural and job-market difference. In America the most direct path to the top of your profession is to get an undergraduate degree, land an entry-level job at a good company and start climbing the ladder. Unless your industry is academia or medicine, grad school is unlikely to be an efficient part of your career path. There's a good reason for that too: only in academia and medicine are people hired specifically for the content of their academic experience. You don't learn brain surgery on the job, you learn it in school. Same with literary criticism. But the vast majority of high-level, knowledge-specific technical and professional jobs cannot be learned in school. Another part of this is that grad school is usually much more specific than a technologist's career will be. Again, that's not true for academia and medicine. You study exactly the specialty you plan to work in. Technology and most other fields are not so strictly divvied up. In business, programming, engineering, etc. you are going to have a widely varied career. No graduate degree is really going to mean a lot in terms of knowledge or job effectiveness.
For Indian and Chinese students it is different. A US company isn't going to give a rip about your PhD in software engineering when they want to hire a good programmer; they're going to care about your job experience, references and code samples. But an Indian or Chinese firm *is* going to care about the education. The pedigree is respected there, probably to a fault. There is more of a rote ladder system, and education is accepted currency. So your doctorate programs in computer science are going to be filled by foreigners... the Americans are on the job and have little use for specialized, academic knowledge in a highly dynamic, practical profession.
I think that many Americans don't see much benefit in going to graduate school and it's more of a cultural phenomenon than anything else. The long-term benefits don't quite outweigh the short term ones in today's market. One can make up the salary difference in a relatively small period of time. Plus, by the time you're finished with with a graduate degree, you're either too old or the industry has erased your knowledge gains.
Above all, there has been a push towards a management paradigm. Delegation rules the day. Many Americans are unwilling to become cogs in the machine and want to find themselves in a position to manage the machine - even engineers. This is achieved much easily by securing a good job and moving up the ranks than leaving school in late 20's and starting anew. China and India are similar to what America used to be in 40's to 70's - deep specialization. Their students want to assume a single role and do it well. The attention span of American students is somewhat shortened in this regard.
That's my understanding of the problem, if you could call it such.
The US is a nation of immigrants. Even those of us (or more accurately our families) who have been here since it was New Amsterdam have that sense of being immigrants.
Which, on tangential note, is why the closing of the frontier hurt the character of this country.
Now what the US does (and used to do better, but we are still good at it) is brain drain the rest of the world. Immigration is a filtering process. It is hard. You have to have a high level of ambition, "get-up and go" to even make it from your continent to ours (even make it to Canada, which is easier).
The typical 3 generation scheme for immigration is (and you can see this clearly in the Mexican/Latino/Chicano/Hispanic immigrants) 1st generation, works shitting menial jobs, and works them hard & speaks little English; 2nd generation makes soundly into the middle class, proud to go college, speaks both English & their ancestral tongue; 3rd generation fully assimilated, expects to go to college as a right, is kind of comfortable and lazy, wonders why Grandma speaks that funny language.
In the 19th century Europe used to go out and bring resources from the rest of the world back to Europe (the Belgian Congo being the most brutal, IIRC). Now, the US leaves the physical resources (or pays a pretty good amount for them, relatively) but takes the best people.
So, what gets into the US is some of the best and brightest the foreign country has to offer. They of course can out compete the US students. Especially, when Grad School is their ticket into the country and jobs.
Now, what used to happen was that these people stayed in the US. Now with easy air travel and globalization, they are returning to their countries of origin.
US graduate school is not mainly US students because all the bases is belong to us.
Yeah but, to be fair, this is slashdot. Everything has an element of complaining. If I were just curious about grad school stats I'd ask in a grad forum. I'd only ask here if I wanted a bunch of cynical worst-case-scenario answers, some complaints about the American school system, and a side dish of thinly veiled racism/xenophobia.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
It's very rare to see a fictional TV show revolving around an engineer, mathematician, physicist or hard science major of any kind. The only counterexample I can think of offhand is Ross from Friends, but to the extent that his job was mentioned at all it was usually in some ridiculous context. Contrast that with the hundreds of shows there have been about doctors, lawyers, judges, financiers and reporters. Hence, those professions are considered sexy and lucrative, even when they aren't particularly so (public defenders and beat reporters), whereas scientists are considered obscure and arcane at best, geeky and borderline irresponsible at worst. The one looming exception is the astronaut/astrophysicist type on sci-fi shows, but what they tend to do, blast through galaxies and meet aliens, is something so unrealistic that it doesn't lend itself to employment aspirations.
Of course, it's not just Americans who watch TV but the problem particular to Americans is that their real-life experience seems to parallel what they see on TV, they deal with plenty of brokers, doctors and lawyers in real life and have little contact with engineers and scientists. Americans also pay their doctors and lawyers extremely highly. In other countries doctors and lawyers are not quite so highly compensated and engineers have higher social status overall.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The smarter ones are not in school.
They learn on their own, on the job and in the real world.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Aside from any other reason, one thing that I learned while working at a university is that professors tend to have graduate students who are from the same racial and cultural background as themselves. This doesn't necessarily mean that they're racists; it could just be a simple matter of seeing themselves in these students and thus caring more for their academic progress.
For whatever reason, Turkish professors had Turkish grad students; the same went for Chinese, Japanese, and others. Beyond that, these professors seemed to organize themselves along cultural lines, and only approve new professor candidates who shared their background. Thus propagating this way of doing things into the future.
The way I see it, it might be answered by the fact (based loosely on your assertions about public school sucking) that to most young people over the last 10 years or so, being smart is not "cool".
It's way cooler to sit around playing video games, or to be the jock, or to slack off in school and sit with your buddies and disrupt the class, and to generally not succeed in education. The people who care enough to learn and aren't weak minded enough to give in to "cool" and hence actually try and succeed and advance their learning, get bullied and made fun of and harrassed for being nerds or geeks or weird.
The end result is that you get a ton of people who, when you talk to them, clearly had some brains up there, but they've been so dumbed down by their 'friends' that they have no chance of succeeding.
So... going through life thinking that being smart sucks, you're gonna end up probably not going to grad school.
ìì!
I took some courses this past year at Uppsala University (35k students, been around since 1477), Parallel Computing, High Performance Computing and Analysis of numerical methods. More than 50% of the students on those courses was Chinese. Well now of course, foreigners study for free at Swedish universities, exactly like Sweidsh students, so I understand why people would go here. But still the amount of Chinese people are really surprising. And they all speak bad english and amongst themselves only Chinese. (Btw most upper level courses in Sweden are given in English, so it is mostly in those courses you find the Chinese people, they don't know Swedish). (I guess the university could attract even more chinese students (and thus get more money from the swedish government) if they just gave the courses in chinese to begin with. ;) )
Anyhow, when they return to China, because most of them do that, they bring a lot of skills back into their country. It is fascinating what China will be capable of in 50 years or so, with all that engineering talent they are cultivating. It is not only the amount of educated people they are producing now, but also what the current generation will be able to teach the next, etc.
But I think it is also a good thing, more educated people in the world means better lives for everyone, especially in China. Pretty soon people will also probably demand more democracy and so on..
At my university, the vast majority of the grad students are Chinese as well. I suspect a survey would reveal that the story in the same for nearly every university in North America (at least). It is stupid and short-sighted on our part, but most of our policies towards (especially) China are stupid and short-sighted. To dare and state the obvious, China is simply not to be trusted. I know -- where the USA is concerned: kettle, pot, black ... but quite frankly I'll still take my chances with American world domination over Chinese any day thank you very much. And yet we also can't seem to give them our money and jobs fast enough.
Some of the problem, is that North American youth -- like our parents -- have become spoiled and lazy (in addition to politically stupid). The universities are taking students from where they can to keep enrollment up and the money flowing.
"I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?"
:-)
Yes, and dumb ones go to engineering.
Spending your time chasing the next Big Thing that going to make Lots Of Money is the fast track for a mid-life crisis.
Doctors: Thanks to the Internet, x-rays, MRIs, etc... can be sent overseas for a doc there to look at them and make a diagnosis and then email or call it in. And of course, there's medical tourism - which sounds really good!
Lawyers: Guess what? India is also based on English common law, so many of our legal stuff can go over there too, which it is - especially contract law. And in India, lawyers don't have the prestige that they have here, meaning, they're not paid as much in relation to the rest of the population.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
It's 90% Indian because you're obviously at the University of Bombay.
In my experience, most foreign born undergrads studying engineering in the US are unable or unwilling to take advantage of co-op or summer internship programs. Classes at my university can consist of up to 50% foreign born students, but those who co-op are almost exclusively US natives. Without work experience, you're much less employable. Not employable? Go to grad school.
Competition is extremely fierce.
Good. If someone is going to cut a hole in me to fix bits that have gone wrong, I want them to be seriously good at it.
Equally if someone is going to build a bridge or drill a tunnel or design a chip or write a program or defend me in court, I want them to know what they are doing. I don't give a gnat's fart what nationality they are, but I do want to know that they have been properly taught and trained. That particularly applies to whoever ends up teaching my kids.
This means that some of the people who get into college, whether for a BS/BA, MS/MA, or a PhD, are going to fail -- either in the degree, or in making their career. They won't make the grades or they won't get the job, and they will have to drop out of the field and do something else. It's unpleasant for the individual (and it's happened to me), but it's called the survival of the fittest, and it's the way life works. OK, so a few slimeballs make it to the top by greasing the right palm or kissing the right ass, but statistically we have to live with that long tail.
So what's with this idea that you have to try and re-engineer the human race between the ages of five and 18 by not allowing failure? Why have the educational psychologists who dreamed up this Utopia, the dickheads of politicians who funded it, and the lameass school boards who implemented it, not been re-settled off-planet? Because parents don't like to be told their kid is thick, basically. Nor does the kid, especially if it's repeated. In the past, this was handled by funnelling the kids into different ability streams, which is now considered sacrilege by the same classes of bottom-feeders as in the preceding argument.
Competition is good: it keeps us alive and kicking, and ultimately the weakest go to the wall. In a normal modern society there are safety-nets to prevent them getting hurt (except in the US of A, where a deeply unpleasant spirit of "let 'em rot" persists). So when foreign students sign up for graduate school, let them compete and let US students compete against them. Time will tell which ones rise to the surface and which ones sink.
Our problem here in the US is that (a lot of) our teachers don't teach. And what they do teach doesn't prepare the students to be competitive in today's world.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
While patents and copyrights exist, lawyers, not engineers, ultimately determine the direction engineering is permitted to take, what can and cannot get built. They are the rulers, engineers the ruled. You have to really, really like engineering, or have some sort of societal-obliviousness blinkers on, to go into engineering. Patent monopolies inherently destroy any semblance of a free market in engineering services - and engineers provide engineering services. Engineering school is pretty soul-destroying for Westerners in the West - basically, it consists of "here's how to build cool, world-saving device X, oh, and you can't build it because of patents".
Indians these days come over, learn what they can from the once-great west (before the lawyers killed it), and go back home.
Huge drift net, but it works well.
Gloria_Macapagal-Arroyo the 14th President of the Philippines did two years at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Mikheil_Saakashvili 3rd President of Georgia went to Columbia Law School and The George Washington University Law School.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Both masters degrees - one at Johns Hopkins the other at U Maryland, both technical fields (Math and Computer Science), most of my fellow students were American.
There were lots of ethnic Chinese and Indians - ABC and the Indian equivalent - but well under half were not citizens as far as I could tell.
Not that I was performing a census or really gave a rats ass.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This info is a few years old, but probably hasn't changed.
Intel Corp, works on a pay grade approch. Below is the incoming no-experience pay grades per degree. The degrees are BS (Eng or Sci) unless otherwise stated.
Grade 03 - BS
Grade 05 - MS (BTW, there is not Grade 4; don't ask why)
Grade 06 - BS & MBA
Grade 07 - Phd
Grade 08 - JD, regardless of any other degree.
So, at Intel, you can make Grade 5 from 3 within the time it takes you to get a MS. Plus you have earned a salary during that time.
The Grade 6 is a toss up. The money is worth it, but if all they want is an engineer you'll have priced yourself out of the competition. It is really for finance and marketing.
The Grade 7 is the big payoff. Definitely worth the effort.
The Grade 8 shouldn't even be on the list as Intel doesn't hire lawyers right out of law school. But it is there.
So there is your data point.
We educate the people who will eventually cripple this country economically. The next thing you know we'll be giving weapons to people who will eventually attack us.
Oh, wait....
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Most Americans can't afford that much education because they are caught up with materialism and are saddled with taxes (either directly or on the goods they buy or the companies that make them). So now American higher educational institutions are only able to maintain their "high standards" with the money that is more and more going to be available from outside of the country. At least some Americans can afford it. I mean - when you put that much of a country's money into stuff like the military,or the interest on US' massive debt - how much of the money can come from within for things like education?
Cheers, Glen
I'm an engineer. I only hold an undergrad ME degree. However, I was helping my advisor (who was from Pakistan, by the way... he fled the purge of the educated in the 70s... great guy) with graduate level research my last two years. The reason was that there were no American grad students in the department, and those that were there didn't know english well enough to help write papers and, well, research other papers that were written in english. I don't know what those foreign grad students actually did, but I suspect that I wasn't the only person who found them to be relatively useless as TAs or research assistants because you couldn't talk to them without an interpreter. Schools do strange things for money... mine hired a Chinese laser expert hoping to get research grants. Problem: not only could he not teach, he couldn't speak English. Makes for an interesting physics class. I don't mean he had an accent problem; he couldn't speak the language. On the other hand, I had another Chinese physics prof who was great, brilliant optics guy. He had this weird fetish for US warplanes, though. I remember a lecture about the speed of sound including "You have gun... F15 coming... F15 going mach 1.2, launches missile, missing accelerating at whatever, whole building blow up, you never hear plane". Actually, that was part of every lecture now that I think about it. Still, I managed to get a good education even if I do kick myself from time to time for not going to law school. See, engineers get billed out, a lawyer gets the money or at least a cut.
IIRC it was the the lady from Mobile, Alabama who remarked for-the-record that her city's economy consisted in "doing each other's wash", in perhaps the second segment of Ken Burns' "The War". Computer-wise this is a great phrase because it captures the notion of self-referencing, which not only gets your program chasing its tail but is central to the notion of mania-driven-boom-and-bust, folks value something because other folks value something.... Nothing intrinsically wrong with medicine, except that its "value" is so artificially boosted by our creeping enslavement to the welfare-state-concept. So you study law, to conclude that government has become obsessed with routing wealth to doctors, not to mention "home"-builders, sigh...
...go into Medicine or Law?
Then you haven't been to a major hospital recently, or the big law offices that cluster around them.
For both US and the UK, the education sector is a big source of revenue. It could be interpreted as a service, that is traded internationally. There is simply lots of demand for English language education in the world, and the English speaking countries are in the best position to supply.
The reason they study computer science, sciences, engineering and so forth is that they get a highly transferable skill.
The wrong conclusion that too many are ready to draw is that US citizen are dumb and lazy and don't want to do anything hard. I would imagine that the absolute numbers of US citizens getting computer science PhD has remained fairly constant or even increased. Perhaps someone can prove me wrong..
It's my understanding that most of the rulers of poor countries--particularly those who sign off on IMF/World Bank schemes that guarantee the impoverishment of their countries--were educated in the US.
I haven't looked myself recently, but I know this used to be the case during the so-called "green revolution" of the '70s.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
If someone used a tag called "becauseindiansaredumb" or "becausemexicansaredumb", everyone here would be up in arms.
Advice: on VPS providers
Foreign students immediately quality for in-state tuition rates while U.S. Citizens must either live in that state (somtimes up to 5 years) or pay almost twice what foreign students pay. I know it sounds crazy, but that is how the system presently is: So yeah...it's crazy. Additionlly: Students now realize that there are people living in India with Masters degrees that will work for the same wage as a Wal-Mart Cashier. When choosing a career path, logic tells them that they will not be able to compete in an the unfair, unbalance arena of Global outsourcing, because the U.S. Govt taxes U.S. businesses higher than any other nation in the world. Presently it practically makes no sense to run a large business in the United States, but somehow our economy is still standing: Well...more like has fallen to one knee as it is puking it's guts out. Choosing a field that cannot be outsourced IS the smartest thing to do, but I'm sure they'll think of a way to start outsourcing hospitals and doctors...research is already cheaper and as I'm sure you're aware alot of it is done abroad, not only because of the reduced cost, but because other Government's are smart not to restrict things such as stem-cell research and when they do, it is usually because of pressure from that big crazy guy in that red, white and blue stripped suit with the tall hat. Thus research that a corporation would normally fund at a University, might just end up being done in a Malaysian basement. What exacerbates this is a very large percentage (>70% ??) of the foreign students will return home rather than remaining in the United States and becoming citizens, thus further weakening the intellectual strength of our economy. Interestingly enough certain research, such as "Defense," that cannot leave the United States, is highly funded and limited to U.S. citizens with a flawless criminal record. Don't expect to do research on the weekends at Area 51 if you were busted for smoking a joint in your Firebird, driving down Sterling Boulevard. What you then find is that AFTER the research has been declassified, that the technology trickles down to the citizens and in this manner the Government can control which companies get what first, handing out patents to the Good ole boys. Just take a look at CACI, Haliburtun, Raytheon...the list goes on and on. The big picture is Globalization and a secret society seeking a new world order, with one world Government where the freedoms we have today will be unthinkable tomorrow (because of security concerns of course) and freedom of speech won't even be thought of because there won't even be freedom of thought AND if you think such a thing as "Thought crime" is out there??? It already exists! I have witnessed the media brand people as a criminals, simply for what they think and not at all based on their actions. These thought criminals are then sought out by the police for harassment, such as constant surveillance, being pulled over every time you go out, being arrested as a "suspect" every other week. This things are happening with great frequency, but we don't here about them on TV, but occasionally site like Slashdot will bring us the truth, but I suspect the whole Internet will come crashing down soon, much like the World-Trade center, because it threatens the powers that be. Of course the news will report something like, "Radical VWX hackers broke into key TU control facilities and disabled all master VWX routers with the YZ virus." Experts claim it will take months to rebuild the internet." During which time we all all be blind AND the Internet as we know it will be no longer as its doppleganger will be under the complete control of the Globalists' secret society bent on one world order and World Domination with it. So that is why there are only 7% of the students in your class room are americans. Foreign students immediately quality for in-state tuition rates while U.S. Citizens must either live in that state (sometimes up to 5 years) or pay almost twice what foreign students pay. I know it sounds crazy, but that is
It's important to know that I forgot what I thought I knew when I thought I knew it all:Now I don't even know whatIknow.
Engineering goes where the manufacturing is. The early phase of "manufacturing outsourcing", where the design was done in the home country and manufacturing was done in some low wage area. But, over time, the engineering follows the manufacturing. And, eventually, so does ownership. IBM sold their PC business to Leonovo. 3Com is being sold to a Chinese company. That's the future.
smarter Americans??? what smarter Americans?? the ones who elected a lobotomized man trading lives for oil? ah yes... those very smart americans, idd..
Medical degrees are useless outside the country they were obtained in, because you need a license to practice medicine (and law). US in particular has a very strict and somewhat unfair licensing exam for all foreign doctors/foreign school graduates that requires them to pretty much re-take the last 2 - 3 years of their undergrad degree, regardless of how long they practiced medicine anywhere else in the world.
So, you may see less foreign students at medical and law schools unless those students plan on actually working in the US later.
On the other hand you can take your CS degree earned anywhere in the world and take it with you and get jobs.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I am currently studying for a PhD in chemistry, and have found that most of the students are American. However, from talking to people who previously worked in industry, it seems that you really need a PhD to climb the corporate ladder. From what I understand of engineering degrees, it is very easy to get a good job with a BS, making a PhD unnecessary unless you want to go into academia. So yes, it does feel like PhD positions are being filled by foreign students, because most Americans do not need nor want to get a PhD in engineering, but please don't assume it is the same across all the sciences.
Engineering education is in high demand. Medicine, you can learn anywhere, as evidenced by the hordes of doctors in the US HMO medical system who only barely speak or understand English. Law? What would a Chinese or Indian national do with a US law degree? Engineering, though.... the US is the place to get an engineering degree. Subsequently, there is a lot of competition to get into the limited space available. The reason colleges are so willing to fill their slots with foreigners even though their supposed purpose is to educate residents of the state (which supports the school with tax money) is that foreigners are considered "out of state students". Out of state students pay extremely high tuition compared to state residents, originally under the theory that this would limit the number of outsiders coming in to take advantage of a state-supported school and then leave the state to go home after. But over the last few decades, state universities have turned from state subsidized places of higher learning intended to increase the education level of state residents, into state subsidized businesses trying to maximize their tuition, grant, investment, and patent income. They are required to take a certain number of state resident students, but they strive to maximize their profit by taking as few as possible. This is the "greed" motivation.
As a side note, he adds that Indian immigrants are usually under enormous pressure from their parents to succeed in school, and that the Chinese students are scared to death of failing because that means it's right back to China where they'll end up assigned as the Third Assistant Injection Molding Technician in a plastic bucket factory in Shanghai. Subsequently, they have a tendency to vastly outperform "locals" and make up the majority of students.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
" I'd only ask here if I wanted a bunch of cynical worst-case-scenario answers, some complaints about the American school system, and a side dish of thinly veiled racism/xenophobia"
and the most common one... a bunch of jerkoffs complaining about what people on slashdot post.
We are slowly slipping into 3rd world status due to shortsightedness and greed.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have a masters in chemical engineering. I come from a family of engineers: my dad's an engineer, his dad was one, and my father in law is one -- altogether we cover electrical, civil, chemical, and industrial.
Here's my take on why so few Americans are going into engineering:
I worked for Lockheed and several other major corporations as an engineer, and the standard practice is to hire 'em, and fire 'em. One Christmas they corralled us all together and told us they were going to lay off 110 engineers. Being the youngest in the group, I thought I would be going. But no! It was the guys with 20+ years that got the ax. Guys with kids in college, with mortgages, who'd been loyal to the company. I saw my future and got the hell out. I'm in IT now, and even though things have been a little rough since dot bomb, they worst year in IT is better than the best year in engineering.
Why go to school for fours years in a very difficult subject only to get treated like cattle? Engineers make the world run, they make things that absolutely cannot ever break, live up to impossible standards, spend years in training, and get absolutely not gratitude whatsoever in return, either in salary or respect. I think its time they unionize.
I think this has become clear even to the kids. I remember my wife was offered a full ride to a very prestigious school for engineering. She went to a couple of companies in high school to see what engineers do, and turned it down. She paid to go to a state school, got a degree in communications, and is much happier for it.
When engineers start getting treated better, then more people will do it.http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/User:Steve_Ballmer
I'd reflect that there are a number of TV shows and films showing high-powered, highly-paid lawyers or doctors, or that show law or medicine as a dynamic, interesting, even adventurous and sexy job.
Engineering? Well, I guess there's the odd engineer in war films (though never the hero, often dies setting a bomb or fixing something), and of course there's Scottie and Geordie.
Nope, I can't imagine why so many people are going into medicine and law, and so few into engineering. Complete mystery.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
tuition is so frickin' expensive, unless you come from a wealthy family or have a government paying for your degree. If you've heard that IT jobs are being shipped overseas en masse because the million dollar executive idiots say that "IT isn't a core competency" then a sane person who isn't seriously into the subject (IT, CompSci, etc) is going to look elsewhere. The jobs are coming back but I expect prospective students to be skittish for quite a while longer. Accounting is hot right now, what with the Sarbanes-Oxley idiocy that literally doubled the workload for auditors, if you can stomach the tedium.
The wastefulness of the modern American university bureaucracy is a wonder to behold. There's not much pressure to streamline when students can just keep loading up on government-sponsored debt.
Colleges aren't blind to the nationality of their admissions either, nor are they blind to their fully funded no financial aid checks being waved in their faces.
But yes, American students find hard sciences 'hard'. They'd rather flip real estate or be the bankruptcy lawyer for the people who do. Soon we will be a nation of people who do nothing but sell insurance to each other.
I don't know about taxes, but given an average grad student stipend, that's insignificant compared to both the cost of the education and the value of their research. In a grad school I attended, our stipend was about $20,000 a year, and I was told the cost per grad student per year to the institution was about $60,000 a year. (Where does that other $40,000 go? Advisor's salaries, class tuition, IT costs, buildings maintenance, etc...)
PhD programs are not like undergrad, where you learn a bunch of stuff and work on mostly contrived problems and you aren't expected to contribute anything new to the field. It's more like a job where you solve hard problems for the people funding your education in exchange for grant money. Typical funding sources are NSF, DARPA, NIH, and sometimes corporations (IBM, Microsoft, and Intel all fund quite a bit of research).
What the US government gets out of the grant money it spends is better solutions to hard research problems, some of which have significant economic value. In that respect, individual students are a bit of a gamble, but overall I'd say it's a net gain. If it's a Chinese or Indian that does the actual work, who cares? The real idiocy of the program though is that we often don't allow them to stay once they've completed their degree. Oh no, we can't have highly educated foreigners in our country competing for valuable US jobs! Never mind that there really aren't enough PhDs in the world to make any significant difference to the employment statistics.
Through a very painful experience during my Ph.D. work I can say from experience that you should be less concerned about the demographics of your department and concentrate on finding a reliable way to back up your data in triplicate.
Well, as someone who has a B.S. in EE and an M.S. in Physics and then took all of the course work to
get a Ph.D. in EE but left before I wrote my dissertation, I think I could comment on all of this.
First off, the stats that people give could be correct, and it could just be a population thing.
What perhaps amazes me is that this person is in the program, obviously surrounded by indians
and chinese people and he feels that he should not ask them? I talked to countless people
from China, India, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Russia, etc about why they chose to study here.
Interestingly, the Chinese told me it was "for their country". They literally wanted to learn
more and go back to China and better their country in any way they could (build better computers,
electronics, etc). The people that I talked to from India were half and half... half of them wanted
a job in the US, half of them wanted a job _anywhere_ to send the cash back home. Most people from
other countries told me it was due to either fierce competition back home, or the prestige that
the rest of the world still thinks the US has good schools. (this can not be for long as China
will soon have more Ph.D. hodlers than anyone, if they do not already).
So why did I, a native born white american leave the program? After our second summer of me
not getting a job and _all_ of my indian counterparts getting interns at Intel, AMD, IBM, etc,
(we all had the same classes and education, and in fact I had some prior experience to boot)
I had a realization that US companies just want cheap labor. Literally, I had a Ph.D. student from
Lebanon get hired on by Intel for $40k a year. _$40k_ a year for a Ph.D. in Comp. Eng!! What's more this
guy knew his stuff, but he thought $40k was great as he would never get that back home. Me,
they would not even talk to me. Why go on and spend two years writing a book when you will
not get hired on anyway??
US, you keep complaining about US students not going into grad EE or ME or Physics... its
because your corporate america companies will not hire us. Not when Student X from India will
do the job for $30k a year and you claim to congress that you can find no good help.
Unemployment Training: The Ideology of Non-Work Learned in Urban Schools
Insightful, if a little depressing. He gives some pointers on how to counter the trend though.
On average, who is more hungry and will work harder in grad school? Us spoiled americans or foriegn students who want to escape a crappy existence for a better life? As an Americans, I have to say the current generation is being told the wrong message. Instead of being told to work hard and push oneself, what do we tell them? Based on what popular culture presents, we have people like paris hilton and nicole richie, who have no talent and don't work their ass off. Kids are being told they don't have to work hard to be famous or rich, so why would young people slave away? If America wants to survive in this century, we'd better fix the culture and get things in the right direction. to put it bluntly, Americans are getting beat because of desire. It's not because of talent or genetics. It's the culture!
The financials of a PhD don't pay off. Do a 1 years Masters and get your 20-25% premium salary. You'll make more then the starting Ph.D.s by the time they graduate. You'll work less in the mean time. You won't be pigeonholed into PhD type jobs. And you will have started your life 3-4 years earlier then you would have otherwize. Meanwhile those foreign students don't have the same options. You win, they lose.
I worked at a University for a long time and now I work for a bank with friends at all the major engineering companies around, from Microsoft and Google to IBM. The pattern is the same over and over, you see more foreign workers doing engineering in the US anywhere you go.
I'm an American grad student in a top US CS department.
... research and ratings depend on this! Now, as to why the best one isn't always an American ... consider that non-US school systems can be excellent, too ... why should the US school system have a monopoly on greatness?? IT DOESN'T ... and sometimes woefully not. WAKE UP!
... excellent transplants (hopefully) ... excellent American-born PhDs (if we prepare well) ... or no jobs (if we're lazy and uncompetitive). Believe me, good computer scientists and programmers can always find jobs ... it's the uncompetitive ones that can't.
... it's what we like to do, what makes us happy, and what fills our lives. AND the money is probably better.
... get some values!
It's true, there are lots of non-US grad students here, but there are also lots of US grad students here. In my group of 10, though, I'm the only American-born and native English speaker.
But for all of the grad students in my department, US or not, I'm hoping that we can entice them to stay as long as possible. And I'm hoping they'll be happy and productive in our field. They're often great minds and great people with lots to offer here in the US -- isn't immigration what has propelled our country for decades!?
So, think about it. Considering that we taxpayers are footing the bill for these awesome educations, why wouldn't we go out of our way to see these grad students put down roots here?
As to why there are so many here, I promise that it's because the admission committees focus on recruiting the best of the best. They have to
In the end, we Americans get what we deserve
And by the way, the economic argument is mostly wrong. Were the decision about money, there would be very few PhDs. WAKE UP
Jeez, guys
Wait a minute, he didn't tell us that! He told us to just carry on like normal. No rallying the troops. No telling us what we can do. Just carry on. Who needs to go to Grad school for that?
That shows the current priorities of this country as opposed to the time of Pearl Harbor, Sputnik, the 1960's assassinations, and the Energy Crisis. Neither most of the government nor most of the people give a flying flip about little Johnny being much of anything anymore, they just want him to go shopping.
I postulate that even the very long term survival of the United States is now in question, whether we remain a relevant power or not. Can a Republic survive when you have sheep^H^H^H^H^HConsumers instead of Citizens? I think not.
Technical grad schools like computer engineering and computer science are money making enterprises for universities. They aren't handing out multimillion dollar grants for Eastern European Literature. They're handing them out for nanotechnology, chip design, software optimization, computer security (big money!), and computer graphics. Something like 80% of graduate students at good universities are paid for by the university. Many also get a pretty decent stipend. Even for being a teaching assistant at many colleges because it frees up faculty to work on research grants. Some successful programs actually have to turn down grants because they do not have enough staff to dedicate to them.
Sure, you'd be sitting on your undergraduate debt for a little longer, but for engineering graduate school you are not going to lose any more money. There are countless programs that will pay everything and give you spending money to boot. If you want to join a program that makes you pay your own way then you're either rich or a sucker.
We've all heard the saying "Those who can't do, teach", but there's a far darker reality in corporate America: "Those who can do, don't 'manage'".
"Do'ers" might as well be defined as "That lowly breed of people who actually work". As a result it is far more profitable in corporate America to have a vague, cursory knowledge of a subject rather than a deep, applicable knowledge.
When I was in college people used to say "English major? What are you going to do with that?"
Today, I imagine the question goes: "Engineering major? What are you going to do with that?"
ie: "be a worker?" ("worker" should be read with deep disdain).
Some have said that in the US we "don't reward skill". But it's worse than that. In the modern information economy, skill has become the modern equivalent of "labor".
Now consider this: Who wants to shell out six figures for the right to be a laborer?
And sadder yet: Golf is a better skill than math.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
"That's been borne out by my own experience interviewing software engineering applicants. We have a lot of demand, but there just aren't that many good engineers looking to switch jobs. Thus the competition for those few engineers is pretty intense, and companies in our area work hard to retain the people they have."
How many of the applicants were over fourty, and how many were young?
Quite a hot topic, eh? Yet I see over 200 comments and searching says that the word "religion" apparently hasn't been mentioned once? Amazing. It is *NOT* a coincidence that America is the most religious of the rich nations and also the very same one that is finding itself with increasing problems in finding enough people who want to pursue "anti-religious" scientific careers. What the OP is noticing and reporting is that other nations are not unwilling to pick our brains and get the knowledge that is still present in our universities. However, in a few years I doubt we'll have much to offer them in that regard.
At least immigration was mentioned in the discussion. A lot of America's wealth was created by science and technology--and a whole lot of that was created by first and second generation immigrants. Yeah, the same kind of immigrants the current politicians are increasingly determined to keep out of the country. Speaking as a grandchild of immigrants and as an immigrant myself, I believe the experience of moving to and living in a different society is extremely thought-provoking and educational all by itself. No wonder so many ambitious immigrants and their inspired-by-their-parents children have been technical leaders and innovators.
My deeper theory is that the real story of the wealth of America is mostly that land is wealth. That was a great thing for 'creating wealth' when all you had to do was kick a few injuns off the land, but those days are long gone. Now pretty much all of the wealth has been converted, and there isn't any more free land. No 'new wealth' coming from that source. Right now the Americans are mostly just selling their wealth off to clever foreigners, including a lot of the best land.
Or maybe those foreigners aren't so clever after all? They're taking the payments in dollars...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
... 1 BILLION OFF.
"Almost" used to mean something a lot different than it does now apparently.
...grad school is prohibitively expensive if you stay in the 'states - outside of medicine or law, your return on that investment is negligible in acutal salary or career prospects...such are the spoils of american rubber-stamp education inflation, like it or not, and our economy is mostly driven by middlemen scamming for other people's money...
...abroad, however, advanced degrees in technical or academic fields are quite respectable, and offer perfectly viable prospects for paying off one's student loans...
Be sensible. Where is the money? In IT? Don't make me laugh. Look at what you earn as an MD or lawyer, then look at your salary. Oh, don't get me wrong, you do earn quite a bit of money as a master of CS, but compare it to a lawyer and you'll see that the top paying job is certainly not in engineering, it's not even in administration (even though even there you make a lot more), it's in law and medicine.
Now, in the far east it's different. You can't ship your sick to India. You can't ship your legal problems to the court of New Delhi. But you can ship your engineering jobs there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My personal experience is that the Americans in engineering graduate school are extremely smart -- "frighteningly smart" even, is how I would describe. The thing is that engineering graduate school is so difficult and so much work for the relatively small payoff compared to law school and medical school that engagement in it is discouraged by the fact that most people that would consider it could just as easily go be a doctor or something and make 2 or 3 times as much money.
In countries like China and India (most of the rest of the world, for that matter), engineering is about the highest paid and most admired field out there. This is in stark contrast to the USA where people have lived with advanced technology for so long that they take it for granted and seem to be oblivious to where it comes from.
Basically, maybe similarly to math and physics, the brightest minds are as highly concentrated in advanced engineering education as anywhere, but those who do not find as much fulfillment directly in their accomplishment within these kinds of fields itself, are going to be drawn to fields where, one could say, the more easily appreciatable rewards of money and recognition by general public are in greater abundance.
Maybe you could say it goes back to how American mommies and daddies stereotypically want to be able to tell everyone their daughter's becoming a doctor or lawyer. What impresses mommy and daddy has a lot of weight at the age where young adults enter college and determine their career paths (loathe as they may be to admit it). It kind of takes the [i]really[/i] talented ones that stand out as something different and also able to find the kind of intellectual fulfillment in these other fields great enough to offset the lure of America's more obviously rewarding careers, to get through an advanced engineering education.
- The India tech industry is picking up fast, and top graduates from top school can now command very good salaries in India itself. For a country like India, where family ties matter and people, other things being equal, would be happy to stay where they are, this matters a lot.
- The post-9/11 US visa and immigration policy is a hindrance -- other things being equal, it is easier for Indians to study in the UK or Continental Europe, for instance. Getting the permanent resident status to work after a PhD is also easier in many other countries now.
- There have always been top-quality graduate programs outside of the US, but these programs did not use to cater to foreigners -- instruction was in the local language rather than English, and the application process for foreigners was not straightforward. Both factors are changing fast. Universities in many countries (The Netherlands, Switzerland, of course the UK, places across Scandinavia, etc) are now catering to foreign students with graduate courses in English, scholarships, and feasible application process.
Taken together, these things mean that the US graduate programs are slowly losing their worldwide pre-eminence and appeal, and the US will more and more be just one player among many. I do not think that US people should be happy of this, but in a sense, it will lead to a more pluralist and democratic world...This is beneficial for to the United States. Do you honestly think all of those foreigners come to school here, get a degree, and then leave? Of course not! A good amount, of course, stay here and enrich the US in many ways, but especially economically. It's called brain drain, and right now it's in our favor.
Because Americans are going into Business School or Law School, because they want to be rich. They want to be Gordon Gekko.
Americans don't want to make anything concrete anymore, they only want to make money.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I've found that American Employers don't really care how much education you have. They care about your skills and experience. I have been programming for 11 years in the SF/East Bay Area and am rarely asked how much education I have. (a two-year AA degree)
(usually it comes up in conversation after I am hired)
Regardless of how educated you are, I still think you need to know someone to get that first job. After you have been working 2+ years nobody really cares as long as you can do the job.
We make it hard for them to become citizens. These are the people we should want most.
Having them leave, then compete with us, is not good.
I think the poster answered his own question. Why would you want to be a scientist when 90% of your competitors are from China and India? Science has been globalized. American research scientists have no job security and are poorly paid.
As a result it is far more profitable in corporate America to have a vague, cursory knowledge of a subject rather than a deep, applicable knowledge.
I really don't think so. I think the US of A is still the land of opportunity for the highly-skilled. It's a place where the niche markets are huge. You can sell robots, you can create highly specialized software - by domain specialists - and practically dominate the world market if you make it in the huge American market. Etc. I mean, the EU still has a tough time creating a nurturing entrepreneurial environment.
OTOH, yes, the US environment actually is a safe haven for the mediocre. One gets the impression that the opportunities are so huge even the mediocre survive, whereas on other spots of the world to merely survive with a business involves a very skilled and savvy type of person. But the mediocre are everywhere. In fact, not every business branch needs a genius. Sometimes, all you need is a bakery, and it's just perfect (not demeaning bakers, ok? - check the etimology for mediocre, if in doubt).
I watch flummoxed the current myopic debate about immigration in the U.S. If anything, the U.S. should make it extremely easy for highly-skilled workers. Yes, this will have an impact on your elite, because then you compete with the elite from other countries (and contrary to popular redneck opinion, other countries have smart people, too).
Globalization. Tough it out.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
Part might be expected salary discrepancies. And part might be the movement of jobs to other countries, where labor is much cheaper. Many students aren't interested in a career that includes decreasing salaries, and them having to move out of the US to make a living.
It may be that a larger fraction of foreign students than domestic students come here paying the full non-resident college fees (no scholarships, loans, etc.). This brings more $ to the schools.
Grad school is a ticket for the Indian students to come to the US.
The reason is truly lack of need. For an Engineer or Programmer, there really is no reason to pursue anything higher then a bachelor degree unless you are interested in becoming a faculty member or going after government funding for your research. Take computer science for example and compare it to Biology. In Biology, you really don't get into the practical aspects of biological work until you hit grad school. Only big research labs have the equipment, money, and expertise to give you experience in things like Mass Spectrometry, Microarrays, etc. Computer Science, on the other hand, your PhD level work is no different then your undergrad work except that you are working on something you're interested in and you get to dedicate your time at it. You're definitely not learning how to be a better programmer anymore than someone who takes a job is learning how to become a better programmer...That's why engineers and programmers can get a Bachelor's degree and have very successful careers while Biologists on average require significant graduate studies to reach the same opportunities...
Clearly in dire need of psychiatric help...No health insurance, huh, dude?
Yeah, I know, "the globalists"...
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
YMMV indeed! Where I live and work, I know of three local companies in desperate searches for skilled software developers. Area is Santa Monica California (it's a sane part of the greater Los Angeles area), pay is $100k+, relocation covered. Indian, Chinese, USian, Canadian, European, doesn't matter (they'll sponsor H1B for foreign nationals). But you have to be able to demonstrate that you're way above average and do so in the interview.
All three companies have been searching for months. They get lots of resumes, but almost nobody who can pass a basic phone screen (Know what polymorphic means? What's ACID mean re: databases?). The issue isn't a lack of jobs. My theory: anyone with brains is already in a job and isn't looking right now.
Most Americans are probably happy with just an undergrad degree and don't want to go to grad school.
Exactly. Americans find perfectly good engineering jobs with "just" a bachelor's degree. There aren't enough jobs which require advanced degrees in engineering to make it worth the time to give up 2-3 years of engineering paychecks, pay for college, pay for books, pay for living expenses, and earn those advanced degrees. More than likely, you'd graduate with a master's or a PhD and work at the same job you could get with a bachelor's degree.
On the other hand, foreigners looking to immigrate to the United States work under the assumption that if they go to school here and earn one of our advanced degrees, then we'd be more likely to allow them to stay once their studies are complete. THAT is why foreigners outnumber Americans in these topics. It's not because they're smarter, not because they love engineering more, and not because education is better in their country. It's because they want to immigrate here.
My observation is that the percentage of American students in graduate engineering programs is directly proportional to the quality of the school. You will find the American students at Berkeley, MIT, and the like.
My niece and I both go to the same Big 10 university. I'm a PhD. CS, she's a law student. The university gave her a full ride scholarship that does not require that she work. I am required to work 20 hours a week for my stipend. The university gave me a desk in an office. I am the only English speaker in the office. There is a computer on my desk (one that nobody else wants anymore), just no display, keyboard, or mouse. If I want to work in my office I must bring my own personally purchased laptop. So I work from home where I have dual monitors, a mouse and keyboard. The university gave my niece a new laptop when she began law school. The question should be why do universities treat their domestic engineering grad students like crap.
I am an undergrad math major here at UC Berkeley. While I havent checked enrollment numbers it seems to me that a high percentage of the graduate students in my field are from other countries. But is this all bad? I wonder how many of them stay in the US and join our workforce. Anecdotally, I know alot of people whose parents were born somewhere else and came over to the United States for school and liked it enough to stay. It would seem to me that the strength of the United States' universities allows us to "steal" some of the best and brightest from India and China and all the rest. I think this is a huge advantage for the US and reason for much of the innovation done in the last century in America.
as engineers and CS types, like $40/hr and define their own shifts/flextime/etc. As far as doctors go, I understand there is a real need for family physicians in rural areas. In the cities they are a dime a dozen.
An American-born student has an automatic legal right to live here and work, and enjoy the richest economy ever seen in history without expending any effort. Oh, don't bore us with a few numbers about some little place somewhere else. It is indeed the richest country in the world and you know it. A foreign born student needs a pretty good excuse to get a visa and stay here.
And even though it's fun to trash our politics, this place offers the closest thing to freedom, economic, social and political, than anywhere else. We have no political police and no religious police. And our ethnic rivalries are punk compared to anywhere else.
The best students in the world go to the best Universities in the world. The Universities in the United States consistently dominate the top universities in the world.
Considering that graduation in the USA is a big business, any claim that universities from that country are the best should be treated with suspicion.
Now what is this site you're linking to? I've never heard about that.
That thing looks like made by someone who just learned to create html pages.
The about page is hosted in what looks like being from a Chinese university.
If you want such argument to be taken seriously, try at least to provide some reliable sources.
With all the outsourcing, especially in engineering I can't help suspect that is a contributing factor (all the Indians is a clue). We also live in a country that is full of religous nuts (40 some odd percent or something think the world is a few thousand years old). Science is probably not high on the list for these ignorant folks. Another factor is with all the outsourcing, we have developed an attitude in the industry that somehow its better to get an MBA or be a manager than an engineer. They actually think they are smarter (this was always the way). The fact the business programs in university are far simpler than science makes it more tempting for the lazy. Americans are going to pay in the long run for this, especially when we see the Chinese land on Mars or something first.
I'm a grad student in the chemistry dept at UC Berkeley (arguably the best school in the world for my field). My department is mostly American; it's much harder to get in as an international student.
For public schools, US citizens are cheaper to pay for (since, in the sciences at least, the dept/your advisor pays your tuition. US citizens can get resident tuition, while international students can't). This is one of the major reasons that UC Berkeley has so many American students, followed by the top of the top among international students.
Undergraduate research is also really important in the admission process in Berkeley's chem dept. It's assumed that you have done research before coming here, and a lot of international schools don't push their undergraduates toward research experience. So again, US students have an advantage in the admissions process.
Anyway, this probably varies from school to school. Public/private is one divide to consider. Top 5/not top 5 is another.
In the humanities grad school departments are full of citizens of the USA. In my department there are as many people from Europe as there are from Asia and combined they make up less than 10% of the department's graduate students. There are just as many from Korea as there are from China (one each at the moment I think) and there aren't any from India. In my Master's program at a different school the only international graduate students I ran into were from Canada and that was mainly because the school was something like 3 hours away from the Canadian border.
Just because there are a lot of non-US citizens in some departments doesn't mean that there are in every department. Now why certain departments are more likely to have international students than others is a different question.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Because Americans are masters at self-whoring and self-promotion. And people believe the hype!
The worst part of having about 50% of our grad students being international is that our immigration and labor laws make it very difficult for them to get jobs in the US.
I work for a major Midwestern university and I know lots of grad students. Of the international students, maybe half can get jobs in the US, but a lot more would like to work in the US.
This means about 25% of our best educated students, their knowledge and expertise are leaving this country.
That's huge.
We have a great university system but for how long? We keep kicking out the best we educate because they are foreigners and I don't know how we can keep the top schools here.
Yes, my "evidence" is anecdotal but the trends are clear.
Someone once told me that the easiest way to cut through the BS and find out what a society really values is just to ask the question, "Who would you want your daughter to marry?" (flip it if you are interested in what society values in women)
If the answer comes back an educated scholarly PhD scientist with a love of learning, then trust me, you will find a lot of men clamoring to be PhDs.
If the answer comes back a doctor with lots of disposable income and spare time to spend with his family, then that is what men are going to aim for.
I'm an undergrad working on my CE degree. I really don't want to go for my masters or PhD. Why? I've got an internship, and I know the things that I need to know to be successful in the industry that I want to work in.
Part of my schools program (Kettering University, formerly General Motors Institute for Engineering and Management) requires us to have a co-op job, and work that 6 months out of the year. All the theory is great, but I'd rather be out doing something. Staying in school isn't going to get me my BMW.
That being said, finished finals today. It's time to get the fuck out of Flint, and back to the real world.
It's not just engineers. I'm a PhD student in the Animal Sciences Department at Purdue University and for a while I was the only American in my lab. My department is roughly half internationals students. They are a mix of Nigerian, Korean, Chinese, Indian, and others. All of the one's I've spoken with intend to stay in the US if they can. I'm sure others can correct me if I'm wrong (be gentle) but I think after graduation international students have 12-18 mo to find a job in the US or else their Visa expires and they need to return to their country of origin.
Plus, in a lot of jobs, especially with bigger companies, you can get a job with a BS or MS degree and then go on to study later with the company's help. That's probably the best way to go about getting an advanced degree and getting decently paid at the same time. Unless you study physics. Then, you absolutely need a Ph.D. and you should get used to poverty
Similar to the upcoming US election results
I'm a freshman at Ohio State(one of the largest uni's in the country), and of the 6,075 first year student, 1,500 are enrolled in the college of engineering. I'd say a good 90% are american. Actually, I'd say about 75% of the university is from the great state of ohio.
Back in the 60's when I graduated from high school, I had two interests, electronics and archaeology. It didn't take a lot of head scratching to figure out where the money was... Engineering. I don't regret the choice I made. I did take some elective anthropology courses and now I'm involved in archaeology as part of a foundation that my wife and I helped get off the ground to support some archeological work that wouldn't get funding otherwise.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I am assuming the poster is refering to a technical trade. My mom is back in school for a M.A. of Management, and I doubt there are (m)any non-americans.
I am going to use this opportunity to rant a bit. I am currently a Junior studying compsci at a very large university (2nd-4th largest depending on the year), I'd say that around 40% of my classmates are from Asian countries, including Russia and India.
It really pisses me off to see the "becauseamericansaredumb" tag on this article... I'm american and I'm not dumb. I work hard too. This article is fucking flamebait. America has some of the best public Universities in the world. Not THE best, SOME of the best. Education has often been a metropolitian type institution, attracting scholars from all over the world. So why is it shocking for a country that represents like what, 3% of the world's population, to have a lot of people from countries with a billion people?
I've heard from Asian friends that Asian countries value formal education much more so than the US. A big degree is a status symbol in Asia, and people flock to those with such status. The US is more concerned with raw merit regardless of degree. A PhD is not an automatic ticket to status. Also, the US tends to specialize in cutting-edge technology because commodity technology tends to go overseas. University knowledge is often too out-of-date for the cutting edge. My courses (4-year-degree) were about 7 years behind industry practice. Getting yet more stale knowledge by staying in school wouldn't be of much help, but it may be in other countries where they keep old technologies a bit longer because the cost of living differences make them harder to replace and cheaper to pay for repairs instead of replace.
Table-ized A.I.
More importantly, 90% of American engineering students realize that the only reason for getting an MS in engineering is to teach. I'm yet to find someone who thinks he learned something worthwhile in post-grad engineering school.
Getting an MBA has actual value. Working and gaining real-world experience has actual value. Meaningful research is a noble task, but... there isn't that much of it going on in most programs from what I can tell.
Contrast that with India or Germany, where you basically need a PhD to get a job flipping burgers (yes, sarcasm), and it is easy to understand why Americans are a minority.
Also, it isn't a recent change; it's been true for the past 20 years.
Well that and the fact foreigners get all kinds of incentives, scholarships, etc. Especially if they stay in the US and work for a US company.
It's not very fair though because we are leaving our own people behind.
The most famous engineer in the US is Dilbert.
In my mechanical/Aerospace engineering classes (I'm working on my Ph.D.) they are dominated by white students.
I believe a big part of that is due to the fact that most aerospace jobs - in defense, virtually all, some (not many) at NASA - require security clearances. So why start what you can't begin? There were a lot more indian students in particular at the undergraduate level.
I'm taking a CFD class right now, 8 students, 1 Indian student, 1 oriental student. Don't know citizenship status. Rest of us are caucasian. The semester before, Hypersonic Aerodynamics, all caucasian and african-american. Semester before, Aerothermodynamics, all caucasian and african-american. The same trend was readily apparent for my graduate work as well.
I know there are a lot more foreign students in the CS department. I don't think its an american vs. foreigner thing, I think it is a type of engineering thing.
They accept those who apply. Most Americans are probably happy with just an undergrad degree and don't want to go to grad school.
Part of the problem with an college education has always been working on something which will allow you to earn a decent living after graduation...as well as doing something which will make you personally satisfied.
For instance...thought about working on a Master's in education to become an elementary school teacher. After talking with several teachers & doing quite a bit of research...found out working 50+ hours a week with no financial reward to make the Master's degree worth going into debt for. The worst part with being an elementary teacher is having to deal with parents who have no idea their little angels are actually the exact opposite. On the other hand...also found out that working as a sub...you will usually work around 30-35 hours a week...don't usually deal with the parents...& able to go home at the end of the day. The drawback...dealing with students who have no business being in school...administration & teachers who will leave you hanging when the class gets out of control or you need some help/guidance & having days you may not work nor are paid benefits or holidays.
Being that many of the jobs in the US are service related...don't need an education to work at many of the slave jobs at slave wages which are becoming the norm for many people. With many teachers leaving the field after three years...why would a Master's degree be worth the hassle of spending the time & money on?
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. - Charles M. Schulz
As a current PhD student (and an American studying in America), I learn with dozens of colleagues from abroad. Not necessarily 90%, but certainly close to 60%. (I'm also in humanities, so that may change the experience.) However, in watching the drive and the commitment that so many of these students have, I see a huge chasm between them and the American students. The American students often (though not always) have an aura of entitlement about them, while the internationals really fight to achieve. I think the biggest difference between emigrant students and domestics isn't ability, but willingness to see something through that requires that much diligence and commitment.
It used to be true that foreign students that completed advanced degrees in the US would stay in the US. Now more and more of them want to go back to their home countries after completing their training (which usually includes 2-4 years of post-graduate work). In my experience many foreign students are here with their governments support and have jobs waiting for them at home after they successfully complete their US-based training. The US actually has a long track record of recruiting bright people from other countries. We've done very well importing brain power. What's changing now is that foreigners are going back to their home countries and taking our training with them.
Can't teach with a masters. At least, not at the university level. A masters of computer or electrical engineer is useful. You can't learn everything you need to know to be a practicing engineer in a 4 undergraduate program. Most of the engineering recruiters I talk with are looking for masters grads. An average bachelors degree gets you essentially a technician job.
First, a PhD will enter a company at a much higher level than someone with a BS, and generally will have far more advancement opportunities than someone with a BS. I work at a major chemical company, where I would guess we have eight BS-holders for each PhD, yet nearly half of the management has a PhD, including the CEO. PhDs generally have more respect, more flexibility, and more independance. They also have the opportunity to switch to academia full or part time, which BS-holders generally do not.
That being said, it is a hard road. A BS engineer entering my company at 22 has a HUGE financial head start on someone like me, who entered at age 31 after PhD/post-doc. I have estimated that I will be around 50 years old by the time that I have the same sort of assets as that hypothetical engineer of my same age cohort. Yes, I will RETIRE richer than that engineer, but I had to spend my mid-to-late 20's working 70h/week for $20,000 a year to achieve this. Many people rightfully choose not to make this trade-off.
Additionally, MD's have similar training periods with a higher payoff, and lawyers and MBAs have a shorter training period with a similar payoff (and are more likely to hit the big-time upside). Since it is more difficult for a foreign student to enter these fields, their wages can stay a bit higher due to the lack of competition.
I saw this as well when I was in graduate in the mid 1990s in a technical field (CAD software development). I would attribute this to the fact that we are now in a worldwide economy and that economy recognizes that the United States is where you go for a technical graduate degree. I think that this says much more about the quality of U.S. graduate degrees.
Work as if you might live forever, Live as if you might die tomorrow.
Without reading through all the responses, I would venture that a factor in this is student visas may be easier to come by than companies that will pay for work Visas. Many foreigners I know in the US are here on their student visas, and are comfortably riding them while they earn their graduate degrees. It's win-win: they get to stay in the US and enhance their labor value at the same time, without yet tackling the hassle of switching to a new type of visa. American students, on the other hand, are able to go into industry with no entry hassles, and will tend to choose it over more school when in demand by industry.
God forbid! If enough foreign grad students go back home, we might run out of education!
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Clearly, most of the American students have already figured out that spending 4 years to get a degree in Engineering and then trying to pay down the study debt with a burger flipping job a McDonalds just doesn't work in practice.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
- John Adams
The number of US students going into Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) careers dropped in the 1994-2004 period ( http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/abstract.php?rptno=GAO-06-114 ).
It's time to wake up and do something! Help pre-college kids have fun with technology - the USFIRST program has kids in Kindergarten-High School building things that move, from simple machines up through 25 kilo semi-autonomous robots. Team oriented so the kids learn more than just technology - teamwork, competition and professionalism to name a few. See http://www.usfirst.org/ for details.
That's easy. Anyone with a modicum of talent and an undergraduate engineering degree from a U.S. college or university can find just as good a job as they would with a graduate degree.
With an engineering degree from a non-U.S. institution, that's not true, especially for jobs in the U.S. Hence, people from many other countries come to the United States to get a graduate degree so they can open the door that a U.S. undergrad degree would open.
The only jobs where a graduate engineering degree is required or will help are teaching positions and very high-level technical jobs which also require unusual talent and decades of experience.
In a study of the seven leading industrialized nations, the United States scored dead last in mathematics. However, the students involved in the study ranked first place in how confident they FELT about their mathematic skills.
They keep lowering the educational standards in order to keep kids passing through the system. This system, however, keeps focusing on making sure the kids feel good without ever having them accomplish anything. Compounding the problem is that everyone gets an award, so the ninth place trophy winner is just as good as the first place trophy winner. You take the kids that really do have talent and try hard and tell them that they're just as much a no-talent bozo as the kids who ride the short bus to school. They learn nothing, but damn if they don't feel good about themselves. The education system's modern bubble-wrap mentality of no losing, no disappointments, no harsh reality checks has provided a surplus of of girls who think dressing like a slut somehow empowers them, guys who have been beaten down into spineless wimps and that the whole world stops if any of them are ever offended.
I'm seeing these kids enter into college where their brains are mush. They're not stupid - they've just never been challenged. They expect to get a C grade for simply turning in the assignment, and an A for effort.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I was going to flame you, but instead I'll just say dude, you need to get some friends. No one is particularly interested that some random dude on Slashdot goes to such-and-such school in whatever degree program and what the requirements are for it, that you finished finals today, what car you want, and ohmyfuckinggod any other mundane details about your personal life right now. This is not Myspacebook.
I agree. Americans on the east coast will gladly take up a DoD contractor's job and work around DC (where I'm at) rather than go for another 2-5 years of studies on a stipend, because we live in the culture of cars and houses and hot dates. Other students from countries abroad will on the other hand clearly see the benefit of being able to enroll - for free i.e scholarship - in some of the worlds top schools of higher education. You need MAs to work if you're a humanities person, but any 16-year old today can get a website up and get paid for it.
In secondary school and even college, schools abroad can compete quite easily with a strong teaching staff. When it comes to research and worldwide academic reputation, however, the US rocks. Here at Georgetown most of the American students in CS grad school are doing it part time, the internationals are actually a minority (it's a small program anyway), and science and math are on the rise in developing nations.. it should come as no surprise that given the scarcity of interest in technical/math oriented research, the worldwide supply of students would find their way here.
At least support your statement by alluding to what you feel is mentally unsuitable.
It's important to know that I forgot what I thought I knew when I thought I knew it all:Now I don't even know whatIknow.
I was a manager of a VLSI lab in California many years ago. I hired this MIT graduate with a Masters in Semiconductor Engineering. I fired her a week later because he had no clue how a FET worked! How can MIT graduate a person with a degree in semiconductors that doesn't know how a basic semiconductor works?!? I had asked her to put some probes on a chip test circuit and to measure the rise/fall times of the transistor. She didn''t know how. Bye Bye. I never hired a graduate from another top university after that and my teams achieved some outstanding designs and concepts. That was in the 80s and 90s. I guess things are still bad when it comes to the quality of education in US graduates.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
It can be harder for engineers and scientists to get into a highly-rated law school, since admission is based on a combination of grades (engineers and scientists' tend to be lower) and the "LSAT," which is partly like the verbal section of the SAT and partly logic puzzles. Once in, though, the classes are MUCH easier than anything an engineer or scientist would have before, mostly open-ended discussion in class and studying summaries of old court cases for exams, and one can earn $180,000+ right out of school at many big firms. The work is not very exciting, mostly preparing documents, but the hours are not as bad as rumored - 50 - 55 or so hours per week actually at the office. The legislatures allow the courts to regulate admission to practice law. The courts generally require a *US* law degree to practice law - lawyers tend not to have their jobs outsourced or face much competition from outsourcing.
Because in the US, we prioritize sports, history and "english" before math and science. Check the "regents" requirements (I don't have a link because I just lived through it:)
Math: 2 years
Science: 2 years
History: 4 years
English: 4 years
PE: 2 years (4 years, half time)
Art / Foreign Language / Music: 4 years.
Don't get me wrong, we're a country full of obese, non-creative people...but THAT'S why. We don't stress it's importance, EVER.
Have you talked to many CE or CS Masters (or even PhDs)? Most of them can't code - or at least not like guys who have been galvanized in the fortune 500s. Now if you have both - more power to you.
Most US citizens with PhDs are underemployed.
The Ph.D. Glut Revisited
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
1) China is already attacking the United States electronically. They're hacking into our military systems and developing anti-satellite weaponry. An anti-democratic hyperfascist dictatorship that harvests its own prisoners for involuntary organ donations is not the kind of country any sensible person wants to surpass us technologically. Especially when they're attacking us on the sly. Documentation: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9dba9ba2-5a3b-11dc-9bcd-0000779fd2ac.html
2) Japan has surpassed us. Have you seen the high tech gadgets they have, as compared to us? Hello, bullet train? If Japan were to militarize right now, we'd be in a heap of it up to our necks. Oh and let us not also discuss how Japan has utterly gutted America's automobile industry. Japan, surpass America? They did that long ago, economic stagnation or not. Do you need me to provide you documentation on the superiority of the Japanese automobile industry, and the insolvency of America's once dominant counterpart?
3) Go look up China and "sterilization accounts". In short, they are preparing to be able to sell off US debt and dollars without themselves being harmed (whether they'll actually do it or not is another issue). In fact, China has threatened to do just that to America.
Documentation: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/08/07/bcnchina107a.xml&site=1&page=0
If China surpasses the US, they clearly intend to wield their power over us in a very hostile way.
But you being a greedy capitalism-at-all-cost fanatic cannot grasp the concept of national security. Just wait until oil is traded on the Euro. Then you'll understand.. the hard way.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I think it's because, in Computer Engineering, a BEng is a professional degree. Whereas some people have to get a PhD+postdoc in biology to call themselves a biologist, engineering (or law, or medicine, or nursing, or pharmacy) is an undergraduate affair.
Most North American students in Computer Engineering go to work straight out of university; most of those who go to grad school are looking to become academics.
As for folks from elsewhere: some value education for education's sake, some want to become academics, and some may just want to get a Western degree, which could make it easier to get a job in the West.
> They accept those who apply. That's not true when I applied for a PhD program in CS a few years back my entry was denied because I didn't have all the points in the GRE (like 600 - 600 - and whatever). Interestingly the same year association administering the tests pulled out of India and China because there was some cheating. Any correlation? The next year I lost my job and started working in the lab of an Indian professor -- I applied again for the program but after three months of not getting paid I found a paying job outside the lab. Interestingly I never got an acceptance letter nor a rejection letter. So when the program was about to start I inquired about my status and was told no decision had been made yet. The next day I got a rejection letter. I learned later that this was due to me abandoning the lab because I actually couldn't work longer for free. However the industry partner I worked with during this time was pretty mad at the department that they didn't accept me because my work was PhD quality (and I think consequently pulled funding). The school is one of the Top 10 computer science programs in the US (it's an excellent school!) and my wife was enrolled in an MD/PhD program at the same school so another school was not really an option (unlike you enjoy distance relationships:-) Ok, to be honest, I am pretty happy with my job... so it was probably ok for me not to attend the program but it leaves a bad after taste...
One of the major reason is that jobs in this area are going to India and China. I worked for a large fortune 500 company. I am an American born citizen. More than half of our team was located in India and China. When contracts were bid, American companies were not even allowed to bid on the projects. I experienced active discrimation from my manager from India. I received less interesting jobs and less pay than the Indian counterparts in my group. I was also told by HR that it was OK to discrimate against non-minorities. Or another way of saying this: You will experience the same thing in the real world that you are experiencing in graduate school in the engineering and computer science areas.
First, a PhD will enter a company at a much higher level than someone with a BS, and generally will have far more advancement opportunities than someone with a BS.
Most companies are not looking for PhDs. So, if you find a company that you want to work for and their only requirement is a bachelor's, they're not going to pay more just because you have an advanced degree. You'll come in at the level of the posted position for the amount of the posted position, depending on experience. Considering you have no real-world experience, you're not going to be making more than the engineer with the bachelor's degree who earned nine years of experience while you were in school. In fact, the company may see your zero years of experience, consider you underqualified, and not hire you at all. Or, you may run into a company that actually values your PhD and they'll consider you overqualified for anything less than research - and heaven forbid you actually want to do something other than research.
Either way, getting a PhD in engineering these days is just plain stupid. You give up years of earnings while spending a small fortune for a degree in a field where every employer wants to give your position to a foreigner, either here or overseas. You don't necessarily get to do what you want to do any more than if you had only the bachelor's. And if you enter technology, you're still considered old and over the hill at 50, far before you make up the opportunity cost and monetary loss for those degrees.
Actually, I don't know that a master's is really that useful either. When I hire (software) engineers for my company, 2 years of real-world engineering experience far outweighs 2 years of academic experience in terms of performance and ability. But I'm not a recruiter. A recruiter can use the Master's degree as a nice checklist item to screen for. More degrees = better engineer, right?
MBAs are not cheap. They are not really a good investment for the engineer undergrad who can get around a 60k starting salary with just an undergraduate engineering degree. Of all my engineer friends who have gone off to get MBAs, they've all done it in order to facilitate a career change out of engineering not to simply increase their salary. I did the calculations for myself and found that if I went and got an MBA without working for 2 years, it would take more than 10 years for the degree to start paying off assuming my salary as an software engineer will not increase. There are MBA programs that allow you to work 30 hours a week and take night classes but I'm not so sure I'm up for that sort of torture.
Engineers in the US are actually paid really well for their degrees. I also find that most of my social science major friends need to seek other forms of education (real estate license, tax license, MBAs) in order to even come close to engineer salaries.
I think the real reason is that engineering is boring for most Americans, they'd rather take something either "harder" like physics, chemistry, meterology, etc., or "softer" like biology, psychology, or linguistics, or into an abstract field like mathematics or computer science. This is particularly true for someone interested in research - why would they want to do research in engineering when they could have a much more significant impact in one of the other fields?
Honestly, the only graduate degrees that are really worth it are law, medicine, an MBA, and people who want to be professors. A master's or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or the related does not yield enough additional income to justify the cost (both tuition and opportunity cost) of getting the degrees. Most companies view each extra year of school as being worth about a half a year of experience. If you're going to be making $100k regardless of the degree you attained, the only reason to get the advanced degree is for personal satisfaction, and personal satisfaction just isn't a driving force for most people. Of course, another thing to consider is that many american companies won't hire students from China or India who only have a BS (unless it comes from a really great school like IIT). These students wind up having to go to a master's program in order to have any hope of being hired.
You sure as hell can teach with just a masters. You won't get tenure or anything, but most major universities suck in people from industry to teach. I know at least 2 people who have a masters that teach part-time. One of them even published a text book on security.
I know of two reasons. First, foreign students are drilled and drilled on problems. Undergraduate education in the US is not as intense. Foreign students work together and build up problem books to cram with,(I know I have seen them and they are available from China on Amazon).Also all the solutions manuals to the basic texts in my field, Physics, are easily available in India and China, (once more I have seen them).US students compete in a rigged game. But who cares? If you are good you'll do fine, if you are average you will not advance beyond an MA.
Another reason is that foreign professors actively recruit their own nationals for US schools. American professors couldn't give a rat's ass. Research assistants reflect the nationality of the professors (as well as their sexism). US grad students get relegated to teaching physics 101 to 300 freshman because they speak comprehensible English.As far as I am concerned who cares how Harvard or MIT spends their money on graduate assistantships, but for state schools to fund foreign nationals at the expense of their own residents betrays their very charters as public institutions.
This is a good thing, right? Simple economic theory should state having medical care being as cheap as your pet's veterinarian or hair stylist. So just why is it so damn expensive?
Life is not for the lazy.
I guess it depends on what you are doing. I'm a professor of computer engineering, specializing in computer architecture. Most bachelors that go directly into industry would have a very difficult time getting anywhere close to an architecture job. In fact, they would have trouble getting a position as an RTL designer. A good student from a ranked 5-10 school and an average student from a top 5 school might get a verification position.
The people from top processor/system companies who come to me looking for students are almost always looking for masters students, sometimes PhD students.I guess it depends on the school. At my university, we have a couple of adjuncts with masters but they are all very senior, either having taught for a long time or headed up major projects in industry. A senior person doesn't require any degree. Bill Gates doesn't have a bachelors, but do you think there is a business school anywhere that would not give him a full professorship if he asked for it?
I have not seen a new adjunct who does not have a PhD. And, I have never met anyone who got their masters with the intention to teach at the university level (I'm a professor, so I've met a lot of masters students.)
American retard culture.
"Look at me and how useless I am!" only guarantees you a future with similar idiots.
I think the very fact that you are asking such a question ("Do the smarter ones really choose medicine or law?") shows how misplaced your perceptions are. What someone chooses to study has nothing to do with how smart they are. It's a matter of what you like. Having gotten a graduate degree myself here in the US, I cannot just imagine myself in any other profession. I think your questions stems from the lack of exposure or a distaste that you have had to the engineering field. Some of the most brilliant minds choose science and technology - because it is so intensive and math and logic.
If getting some extra money can make people go either way (engineering or medicine/law) then I can only regret that they don't really like what they are doing - they are doing it just for the money. Education is a matter of self-advancement, the very fact that this has some up in such a question as the above, is deplorable.
Stop asking such questions and enjoy your work - otherwise the smarter ones will overtake you.
Pulled out of China and India on some cheating?
You got your facts totally screwed up; While you big-talk about PhD, your obnoxious trumpet blowing identifies you as only eligible for some burger flipping.
(quote: my work was PhD quality)
For your kind information, There is NO PhD quality 'work', only PhD quality 'RESEARCH'. And the difference is huge.
The New Computerised testing methods were put on hold and paper based examination system for GRE in India and China was brought temporarily to ease TIME DIFFERENCE glinches when students taking examination in US could be easily tipped by CHinese students taking the same examination way ahead in time due to the obvious time zone difference.. Now its all synchronised and the exams are On in China and India.
Aw great. More chowderheads complaining about complaining.
You know, I come to Slashdot hoping to read about the latest tech news, and all I get to hear are a bunch of slackers complaining about all the bitching going on.
Thanks a lot. You've ruined my evening. Ass.
It's been a long time.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf07312/
Foreign graduate students make up 29% of all enrolled graduate students in science and engineering (S&E) fields.
First-time, full-time enrollment of Computer Science is 56% foreign, Engineering is 51% foreign, Math is 39% foreign, Biology is 23% foreign, Social Sciences are only 21% foreign.
The purpose of public education is to create good citizens. Good citizens are patriotic and believe that their country is the best country in the world and if anyone attacks them, then they are willing to join the army and defend their country. Good citizens think the same things other citizens think. Independent thought is discouraged. Good citizens can read well enough to follow the newspaper headlines and read a ballot paper.
Consider that thinking the same things others think is simply parroting the headlines from the newspaper and 'independent thought' is simply thought and you will realize why what your professor wants children to learn and what the state wants the children to learn are incompatible.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
... I can lay down three reasons - 1. Higher education institutions are modern America's Ellis Island - the calling and promise of a new land to young future immigrants. 2. Higher education usually works out to be a mutually acceptable financial proposition for smart, enterprising students. Through financial aid, schools get students that are willing to sweat it out and most students do not perceive any drop in living standards. Sometimes, there may even be an elevation in the standards. 3. For many students, American education followed by employment and eventual naturalization is a irresistible mix of professional fulfillment, wealth and living standards with a good dose of nerd factor thrown in.
I'm a PhD life scientist. None of my colleagues are Americans. Heck, at conferences people automatically assume that I'm a sales rep, not a scientist. The really bright Americans know that they will never be able to buy a home with a scientist's pay. They would rather divide wealth rather than build it, because it is easier and more profitable to do so.
To answer your question, ask how many old engineers you've met. Generally, an Engineering career lasts how long? When I got my Masters' in Computer Science people were talking about "structured programming" and things like OO and XP didn't exist. If you're going to go into Engineering, you'll have to spend a lot of thought keeping current. This probably true of medicine and law, too, but it seems that the human body and human nature are pretty much the same as they were a thousand years ago.
You don't hear as much about age discrimination, but I figure it's real in Engineering (illegality notwithstanding) more so than other professions. Given this, it makes more sense to invest the extra time and money of post-graduate education in something that'll pay back in a longer career.
Having a great university system is the main force slowing outsourcing. Many of the most talented foreigners come to the US for education, and most who can stay, stay. Imagine how outsourcing would be galloping along if all the foreign workers and foreign professors in the US had stayed home and built up the tech industries in their home countries instead of coming here.
Thats nothing, I once worked at the ESL (English as a Second Language) department at my college for a semester and the restrictions were ungodly. The students were REQUIRED to be sponsored by a full-time working U.S. citizen family member, was NOT allowed to work even part-time themselves, and subjected to weekly reviews which would result in his expulsion from the program if his grades slipped too much. This was for green card students already in the U.S., not foreign students applying while still out of the country. Oh and naturally, if you get leave the program for any reason, you don't get your money back.
Only a fool of an engineering undergrad goes straight to business school. You need a few years under your belt to get more than the "duh" factor out of it.
Starting grads in engineering are paid amazingly well for the work they produce. It used to be that an employer would need them to stay for 1-2 years to break even on the investment in them; today it is closer to three years unless you get someone exceptionally committed. Too many people don't stick around or in the industry to make the equation work for the long term.
A new grad we hired for a bargain that is smart and puts in more effort than he should have to produces only 65% of his actual salary (including O&P), and he is really doing well!
Per
First-world students don't have to kill to get their education.
In most non first-world countries, education is the domain of the wealthy. The most education your child can get in 75% of the world either comes from the School of Hard Knocks, or some form of education mated to religion.
All those commercials you see on TV showing those little kids in schools sponsored by charities usually come with a substantial does of some kind of religious indoctrination, with all the subsequent hang-ups that engenders. Just look at what comes out of many Massadras?
And even if they don't come from some religious group, or don't have an agenda of some sort, most children can only attend school until they're old enough to either work in the fields or in the factory. When was the last time a 5th grader in the US had to make a choice between learning or supporting their family?
So when some Indian/Asian/African/South American kid's parents spend 90 hours a week, killing themselves by scrimping and starving to put their kid through a PRIVATE school, you can bet your sweet bippy that child is going to do everything in their power to get those good grades and excel in every way. Because if they succeed, then they can eventually bring mom & dad to live with them, along with the rest of the family.
My friend from Colombia taught me that. He grew up on the streets of Bogotá, fighting for every peso, beating up other kids so he could take their jobs as a runner for the Cartels. He spent every bit he could spare on school for himself and his sisters. When his sisters became eligible for adoption, he was educated enough to bargain with the agency to not only get his sisters adopted, but himself as well.
They are now living the American Dream that most of America has forgotten.
[End Of Line]
You made $60,000 a year and considered yourself lower middle-class? I feel ill.
My parents are both ex-military, currently working as civil service (well, my mother's still in the Reserves), and make a little more than that, combined. I'm twenty-five and am pulling in around $10,000. My girl asked me to marry her, and I told her that I couldn't do it because I can't financially support her. What planet do you live on?
where the comment ends and sig begins
I'm a grad student at a well-known school. International students account for maybe 20-30% of my class. I would argue that it should be more. The U.S. has some of the best schools, yet great people exist everywhere.
Look at your professors! Most of mine were foreigners with what appeared to be severe commitments to bringing their "little buddies" from the "homeland" over here... Gotta bring them all!
Call them aliens; it sounds even creepier
I have a doctorate in music, my wife is finishing her medical degree. Both of our experiences are similar - mostly foreign grads in our graduate programs. Having been a college professor, I've seen a bit of a paradigm shift in the last 10 years. Several years back, universities were actually pushing foreign admissions to make their campuses more "multicultural." Nowadays, many have changed their tune, realizing that the American workforce is having a bit of a brain drain problem. Of course, in the big picture it may not be as troublesome as it first appears. If we look at it from a Kurzweilian sense, maybe these are the growing pains towards some kind of singularity or world government situation. Or maybe it's because the natives are lazy. I taught at a Big 12 school that was 90% white during the daytime Monday through Thursday. Evenings and weekends and the library were about 20% white, most of whom were just using the facilities to check Facebook.
The political strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett suggested that "side effects" of American policies with respect to the rest of the world in many cases may dwarf the explicitly observed and worried over effects of an explicitly defined problem like Al Quaeda or the resolution of the conflict in Iraq.
It looks to me like the foreign graduate student influx into the US graduate study system is one of those "side effect" processes. Question: how many foreign graduate students become permanent US Residents or immigrants every year? What is the net flow of people into the US?
The slashdot postings here have brought out an anecdotal explanation of why the grad student influx exists and what are the effects it causes within the US.
The recently proposed and rejected Immigration Bill in the US Congress explicitly favored providing immigration preference for graduates holding advanced degrees.
As reported here: We are pulling bright well educated people from around the world into American employment.
I have been recently trying to understand: Why does the US continue to be "wealthy"? How does the influx of bright well educated people contribute to the "wealth" of the USA?
There are factors like the US trade deficit and US military spending that suggest "wealth" (as cash flow to overseas destinations) is flowing out of the country.
Any suggestions for further reading on this "wealth" and "influx of grad students" issue?
....because Americans don't care enough to use the proper part of speech, speaks volumes.
Your query SHOULD have read....
"Why ARE US Grad Schools mainly non-US Students?"
The fact that someone such as yourself, hasn't learned when to use IS vs. ARE, is absolutely inexcusable. You can't even form a sentence properly, and you've been going to school for how many years?!?.
People who learned English as a second language may not be able to speak it as well as you or I....but they must be doing something on their application that makes them look like a more attractive education prospect that you. I wonder what that could be?
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
That sounds terribly shortsighted by the insurance companies. I have understood that dental care is one of those areas where you can save a lot by early treatment before the problems grow bigger. Or do they not cover even serious dental problems?
It is way too easy to let your teeth go unchecked even if it does not cost you that much to visit a dentist. Last year I finally visited a dentist after 7 years since the last visit so I know that from personal experience. And that did not cost me more than a nominal price (12 EUR or 17 US$) in public dental care (I live in Finland). At that time I promised to myself that I would get my teeth checked yearly, but this was year and a half ago...
The question you have to ask yourself is how much more money you'd be making if you got that master's degree, and if the extra cost is equal to the additional amount of money you'd make over the course of your life.
That said, I think the reason a lot of us avoid going to school for additional degrees is because of the substantial debt we accrue while in college. I, for one, am going to be in the hole 17k when I'm finished.
How do the foreign students pay for their schooling?
SRSLY.
I still graduated with honors. CS was in the Natural Sciences so the GPA for honors was inflated by all the idiots taking Interior Design and other cruft.
When I worked at a startup in Silicon Valley, one of my Chinese co-workers gave me the back handed compliment that I was pretty smart for an American.
The truth is that for CS, you are more likely to learn out-dated information rather then cutting edge stuff. When you get out into the real world, you pretty much have to stay on the cutting edge or start working on a career in management.
It's just a piece of paper and mine is framed and hanging in the garage.
Grad school costs way too much.
Living in the US costs too much.
Non-US students are getting a better primary education.
They teach their children math and science, while we argue about god.
They're using their grammar skills there.
You most certainly can, one of my comp sci profs in college had a master's in CS as his highest degree.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Simple as that I think.
In US, there's a huge demand for undergraduate degree because basically everyone's expected to have a college degree in the US now a day. Many come out of high school are expected to go to college. So university don't actively look for applicants oversea, except for few exceptional cases (I know a single case of a prodigy from China that was recruited, having demonstrated his ability in international high school competition). Most non-US undergraduate student I know are short-term exchange student (just like you can go oversea to some other country).
For graduate advanced degree, the at-home demand is a lot lower. Most US students don't want an advanced degree because they think they'll be making more money with a real jobs few years down the road. But professors still need phd students to do their research, so graduate department actively seeks foreign applicant to fill the spaces. As for why a particular country/ethnicity, I think it's just global economy. China, India, Korea, Japan has huge CS/EE industry, so many study the subjects as undergraduate, so naturally they will apply to graduate school in the same field.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
... that there is only one story on Slashdot since tagging was introduced that relates to becauseamericansaredumb? Fascinating stuff.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
The reason that most medschool grads want to specialize is that the pay is much better. HMO's have shifted most of the risk of being an insurance company onto the primary care physician (internist, family doc and pediatricians). Most specialties are procedure based and have been able to avoid things like capitation, staying funded mostly of a fee for service basis.
The good news for patients is that most medical specialties require 3 years of training in internal medicine before applying for a specialty fellowship. And the surgical specialties...lets just say you are better off not having most surgeons as you primary care physician.
The shortage of primary care physicians would dry up in less than five years if the reimbursement for primary care actually paid the bills. Most medicine specialists can do primary care, it just doesn't pay for them to spend their time on it.
If I wanted to answer retarded rhetorical questions and debate on pointless things, I'd go to http://answers.yahoo.com/
So, you could say that a Ph.D. at Immigration Services is equivalent to a +5 Insightful on Slashdot...
The collapse of the Computer Science Degree in the U.S. via H-1B.
I suggest you look at a couple articles that tackle the same issue from different view points. First, Half Sigma has a post called Why a career in computer programming sucks he describes:
The foreignization of computer programming
I'm sorry about using a word that doesn't exist in the dictionary, but foreignization best explains what's happening in the computer programming industry.
First of all, there is the familiar outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries, mostly India. Because of this, the computer programming industry within the United States is an industry with a shrinking number of jobs, although as a worldwide phenomenon I'm sure computer programming will grow at a brisk rate. Would outsourcing of computer programming and other IT jobs be such a big trend if the industry were more prestigious? I think not. You don't see lawyers being outsourced. In fact, by law, only members of the bar are allowed to practice law, so it would be illegal for foreigners to do American legal work.
The other half of foreignization is the near abandonment of the domestic IT market to foreigners. This is a trend that is accelerated by the issuance of special H1-B visas that allow extra computer programmers to come here and take jobs away from American programmers. Computer programming (along with nursing) has been specially targeted by our government for foreignization.
Foreignization creates a vicious circle effect with the low prestige of the profession. Because the profession has low prestige, employers balk at the idea of having to pay high salaries (while it seems perfectly appropriate if a lawyer or investment banker is making a lot of money). Thus the demand for more H1-B visas so that salaries can be decreased. In turn, Americans see an industry full of brown people speaking barely intelligible English, and this further lowers the industry's prestige. Computer programming and IT in general is now seen as the foreigner's industry and not a proper profession for upwardly mobile white Americans. [The Indian and Asian people I've known in the IT industry are nice people, and normally I don't pay attention to their different appearance, so this should not be taken as a racist dislike of non-white people. I am only accurately describing the fact that the typical white American thinks negatively of a profession that's predominately non-white. And I stand by my belief that people born in this country have more rights to the money being created here than foreigners. Asian countries feel the same way about foreigners. Asian countries are, typically, a lot less open to foreign worker immigrants than is the U.S.]
Because there is no reason to think that the trend of foreignization will reverse, this will ensure that the future of the industry will be lower salaries.
And Bill Gates himself has noticed the problem within the Computer Science programs within the United States, though he places the blame not on the H-1B process, of which he is a strong supporter but upon the Computer Science programs themselves. In a article from the American called Revenge of the Frosh-Seeking Robots, Bill is quoted when asked who is his greatest competitor:
"Goldman Sachs," was Gates's surprising reply.
Gates went on to explain that he was in the "IQ business." Microsoft needed the best brains available to make top-shelf software. His primary rivals for the smartest kids in America were elite investment banks such as Goldman or Morgan Stanley.
"Microsoft must win the IQ war," Gates said, "or we won't have a future."
The article continues on discussing the current trends in U.S. Universities:
Recent enrollment figures are o
in 1992-1994, we had 75 Computer Science graduate students. 85% were from China (mainly), India and Vietnam. They were in graduate school to land a job in the USA. Over the next 13 years, my CS graduate degree has:
- helped me get a few corporate interviews I would have missed
- cost me about $35,000 in forgone earnings (1992 dollars - $70k today)
- initially made it harder to get a job. I had 2 years commercial software development experience after the BS in CS then 2.5 years in grad school. Once out of graduate school, I was classified as having 2 years professional experience instead of 5 had I not gone for a MS
I'd skip the graduate degree if I had to do it all over again.
A corollary is that I will not get a law degree, medical degree or MBA because I'm gambling $120,000 in lost money (40,000+ in school expenses and at least $30,000 in lost income after taxes for each year) plus losing out on the investment from it compounding for the next 40 years.
At some point, with the US college graduate competing with lowest cost 3rd world labor, an undergraduate degree may not be worth it (forgoing 4 years of income, the expense of school, plus the forgone compounding of investments made in those 4 years).
How come racism/xenophobia are mixed together so much when it comes to developing other nations technological base VS the United States? If you want to help stop racism, at least identify it correctly. I mean you are talking about foreign nationals here, many of which are on a U.S. taxpayer grant. All Americans, regardless of race have to pay these taxes yet there are very few American citizens in graduate school for engineering and science. It is alarming to see folks trained to compete with the United States using our very own homegrown technologies. If the idea was that the foreign national was applying to be a U.S. citizen, most Americans would have no problem with it and your thinly veiled accusations of racism and xenophobia do not carry any weight, but instead your lumping everyone who is concerned with this trend of America losing out in the long run, with racists. America is a melting pot, not a place for someone to be trained in to take back home with them, a place that looks nothing like a melting pot in man cases.
Why, because they don't believe the same thing you do? I have found that religious beliefs generally don't affect the quality of a scientist's research. It doesn't matter if they believe in higher truths as long as they do good science and don't try to use faith-based arguments to justify their research results.
If you don't agree, you can vote one it.
While I wouldn't be at all surprised for graduate departments in the USA to be majority non-USA citizens, it sounds rather off for any given department to be 90% Indian. There are certainly many very bright Indian computer science students who attend USA universities (as well as many in other departments, probably more in technical than humanities areas), but it's not *that* skewed towards India only. Many other nations also provide excellent candidates to USAian graduate programs as well; making most a healthy mixture of national origins.
As to the question itself: my reaction is *so what*?! It's great for the USA to have the best and brightest from other nations study here. Many of them will choose to stay in the USA longer term; those who don't will contribute to the intellectual development of the rest of the world, which is an equally excellent thing. Students who happen to be USA citizens are hardly being rejected on those grounds from US universities (though the lackluster quality of US education at lower levels than grad school certainly contributes to an underrepresentation of USA citizens at the top of intellectual achievement.
Buy Text Processing in Python
A non-deranged mind would have the sense to break things up into paragraphs. QED.
A little known--nay, virtually unknown--fact is that career officers in the U.S. Armed Forces cannot advance beyond Major/Lieutenant Commander (O-4) without a graduate degree. And there are just not enough slots in the graduate schools run by the Department of Defense to meet the need, so many officers do their grad school in the "real world"; I certainly did--on my own time, while working as an aviation squadron department head. My MS in Systems Management qualified me to be a Computer Systems Management Subspecialist. I have many friends and acquaintances who are now Colonels or Captains (0-6) who have two or even three graduate degrees; one my classmates, who is an astronaut, has 2 Masters, an MD and a PhD (but he is a bit of an overachiever).
But look, if you want to go somewhere for grad school in a computing field where you won't be in classes with a slew of foreign students, take a look at the Civilian Master's Degree Scholarship offered by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Go to school in one of America's most beautiful cities, get a $34,000/year salary while enrolled in the program, with guaranteed employment upon graduation for a two year payback working in a civilian position for the Federal Government. And while in that job, you normally will get a security clearance, which is worth $10-30,000/year in additional pay in industry. But only U.S. citizens need apply.
No, I'm not a shill for the Naval Postgraduate School; yes, I am an alumni, but I teach information technology somewhere else--where 70% of my students ARE from India. I'm just trying to make a point and advance the discussion.
From my experience on both sides of the academic hiring fence, it is very difficult to get a teaching job today, even a part-time one, at a major university if all you have is a masters degree. It's tough even with a PhD. The last adjunct we approved to teach a single class has a PhD from a top university and is a well known researcher in the field he would teach. Obviously, my experience only covers the universities I know about, but I am quite familiar with several and expect that many others are similar.
With a masters and a stellar industry record, you might be able to get a adjunct position teaching what you do in industry. But, then I would argue its your industry experience and not your masters getting you the job.
I agree there are faculty at major universities that only have masters. But, they tend to have been hired many years ago when the academic climate was different.
Thus, getting a masters with the intention to teach in the near future at a major university is a long shot proposition and not what I would recommend to a student who wants to teach in such an environment.
"There aren't enough jobs which require advanced degrees in engineering to make it worth the time to give up 2-3 years of engineering paychecks, pay for college, pay for books, pay for living expenses, and earn those advanced degrees."
My dad works at Ford in the science and research department, and every single engineer there has a phd or ms. There are lots of positions to fill for people that continue higher eduction.
"More than likely, you'd graduate with a master's or a PhD and work at the same job you could get with a bachelor's degree."
Um.... no.
An important factor that I don't see mentioned.
Even at the undergrad level, very few Americans tend to get science and engineering degrees. IIRC the fraction is something like 15% if not less. Most of them get various pseudo degrees like liberal arts, african american studies, etc.
On the other hand, half of all Chinese or Indian bachelor degrees are in science or engineering.
Unsurprisingly, foreigners will be highly concentrated in physics, math, and CS departments and absent elsewhere.
The other reason is that the grad school is a path to immigration and better life for many of them. An Indian student who gets a Ph.D. and then lands a post-doc job will easily make 2 times more than a well-paid professional in the same field back in India. Besides, he will apply for a green card as soon as he gets that job. By the time he's 30 he will be a permanent resident with a professional degree that pretty much guarantees him a $60,000+ job. 60,000 may be not much for an American, but for an Indian it's vastly more than anything he can earn legally back in his country.
Contrary to your belief, a Masters in Engineering in India, from India, even from IIT is considered a disqualification instead of qualification. Generally (not always) those who couldn't find job after Bachelors or didn't complete bachelors from say top 20 institutes go for a Masters.
In the Internet age once you've been initiated through a bachelors degree, you can easily learn advance topics on job as and when required.
Dear Grad student, Please do not think that the legal profession is draining away smart people from your area of study. It most likely is not. People. People. Please, don't assume that lawyers are smarter than you because they speak secret squirrel pig latin. It has been my mission of late to explain to everyone why law should not be a graduate course of study. It should be taught to everyone in high school or undergrad at the latest. In most states you aren't required to go to law school to be a lawyer anyway. It is a scammmm. A scammmm. The lawyers got jealous that doctors were doctors so they simply changed their degree from the LLB, or bachelor of laws degree, to the JD, or Juris Doctorate degree overnight. The three years are spent basically goofing off, and most lawyers are privileged slackers who could afford the outrageous expense of law school. There are of course exceptions. But most of the lawyers you meet, and over 90% of the lawyers licensed know less about law than high school student with a good social studies teacher. What looks so complicated is only the "fizbin" element of law (ala Captain Kirk), it's not intelligence beyond yours, just intellectual dishonesty. The average thirteen year-old playing Magic the Gathering or any RPG is using a system of rules more complex than our real legal rules. If they taught law to kids the kids would wonder what the big deal is. By teaching it to post-grads, particularly post-grads with degrees in soft majors, the Bar maintains the smoke and mirrors illusion that their discipline is necessary. Just as we don't need scribes to write for us, we don't need (most*) lawyers either. But for the fact that their team controls the judiciary, they would be an obsolete profession. And don't forget, law is the only subject where a student is encouraged to BS the answer. Here is one of the examples I posted on Rent Wars about bankruptcy law: "What if a firm of CPA's had never heard of taxes? What if a carpenter had never heard of wood? Or a plumber, pipes? What would you think if you went to the doctors office for a check up and the doctor didn't know what a heart was? Or had never heard of aspirin? Would the term "Gross incompetence" even begin to describe that doctor? That CPA firm? That carpenter? Or that plumber? Incompetence of this level is routine for modern attorneys and judges." Full article with examples at: http://www.rentwars.com/discus/messages/136/382.html?sd Ronin Amano, Court Monitoring Scorecards.
I think the importance and power of a PhD in USA is different in USA and India. India is just an example here, you can easily say that the same argument goes for Turkey, Hungary, etc.. When you get back from USA with a PhD, you certainly have an advantage compared to others at your own country. If you can find a good position as a researcher or a developer etc in USA, that's probably better than your lifestyle in your own country. If it does not work out after the PhD, just go back, and your PhD will provide you a substantially better life at home.
For well developed economies, the competition for various fields is relatively at a different level. I'd like to hear comments about the difference in the quality of life of an American engineer who goes all the way to the PhD, and one that does not bother to do so. Believe me, in some parts of the world, that grad degree creates huge advantages, which may not be true for USA.
It's not about the quality of education (I had the chance to compare grad school in my home country and grad school in US, I'm an alumni of Georgia Tech, and I can tell you they can compare in every point) ... And it was also an occasion to discover and visit USA.
The point is how do you find a job in the US, if you're diploma is not known outside your country/continent and you're not from US.
Besides, from my point of view, having a diploma from a US grad school is just to show that I'm able to tackle issues like working in a foreign environment, being able to adapt a new culture,
Stop thinking people are coming to US university because they are better, and try to understand it's because USA are the lead economical and cultural power in the world.
Just some thoughts though.
most the brilliant get killed in Iraq :-)
This question keeps coming up on Slashdot, in one form or another, and my answer is always the same: Economics.
For most students who intend to enter the commercial sector, getting the "one up" degree just doesn't pay that well. Speaking about engineering specifically:
1. Graduate with a BS/BA. Get a job, work for two years, and you'll be on just about even ground (salary-wise) with the guy who got his MS/MA. And you won't have picked up the debt/costs associated with getting the MS/MA. I ran the numbers for me, and the payback on this is about 6-7 years.
2. Graduate with an MS/MA. Get a job, work for three years, and you'll be on even ground -- or often better -- with the guy who got his PhD. And you won't have picked up the debt/costs associated with the MS/MA. I ran the numbers for me, and the payback on this is about 15-20 years.
And the kicker: Anyone smart enough to get a graduate degree can run those numbers. This doesn't even include the opportunity cost of delaying starting a family while you pursue the degree.
However, foreign students have an added sweetener in the pot: it's easier to stay in America to make the big bucks if you have a graduate degree. And this tips the equation significantly.
I just want to puke whenever I hear US firms bitching and moaning about how there aren't enough American graduate scientists/engineers. It's simple economics, you bunch of whining douche bags. You understand them, because when demand for your products goes up, you're quite happy to raise the price. But when the shoe is on the other foot? You whine, bitch and moan about how employment costs are out of hand.
Again, it's simple economics, supply and demand. Supply short? Pay more. If it doesn't, don't be surprised when supply stays low.
Also they outnumber americans by a factor of almost 10 (if you add the population from India and China alone), so all those guys you see are just an insignificant number of the engineers there, but the best one probably.
Finally, education is different in these countries and children learn to work really hard (too hard, actually) and be very competitive since they are in the basic school. So the hard work of a PhD will not prevent them to apply.
With respect of the possibility to stay in USA as the ONLY reason, I don't agree. Maybe then years ago that was true, but nowdays people form China and India want to go back home a start their own companies.
Its really just that US folks are not smart enough. As this one US senator keeps telling on CNN: "US people are getting fatter and dummer".
Università della svizzera italiana - Lugano, Switzerland
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=lugano+CH&ie=UTF8&z=12&iwloc=addr&om=1
composition of the faculty of informatics (Professors + P.h.D)
50% USA
20% Italy
5% Switzerland
25% Rest of the world (mainly East europe, Brazil and India)
Simple economic theory should state having medical care being as cheap as your pet's veterinarian or hair stylist. So just why is it so damn expensive?
There still aren't nearly enough doctors to properly serve the population. When you look at medical school application records and see 250 people applying for one seat, what should that tell you? Probably that we need more medical schools.
The problem is that a smart guy with lots of money can't just start up a new medical school to start raking in the cash - there are all kinds of barriers to entry. Essentially the medical profession has worked to ensure that there remains a shortage of good doctors in order to prevent a total collapse in pricing (you can't charge $100k for medical school if people only make $50k/yr as doctors).
I was told elsewhere on this site that doctors are essentially forced to see people every 10 minutes to keep costs down. However, that is only one way of looking at it. Doctors get paid by the patient. Insurance company cuts amount of reimbursement per patient. Doctor has a choice: He can continue to give the same quality of care and get a paycut, or he can turn his practice into a body shop and see 10 people an hour and make just as much as before the cut. Now, part of the problem is that the doctor sunk huge costs like medical school thinking that he'd be making $200k/yr and now he is faced with making $80k, and malpractice bills don't get smaller just because the doctor chooses to take his time with patients. So his choice is essentially made up for him.
Medical education doesn't HAVE to be so expensive though. Having more schools would automatically lower prices (supply/demand). You can also tailor your classes and modernize - a general practitioner probably doesn't need to know how to use a scalpel, but probably could stand about 4 more semesters worth of pharmaceutics and related coursework. A few courses on bedside manner probably wouldn't hurt either. A less traditional approach could probably greatly reduce the time spent in unproductive classwork and at least get doctors into intern positions where they can offset their costs with productivity (ie pay). The intern program could probably be greatly reformed as well (for starters get rid of the long shifts - there is no reason that doctors should have to work more than 8 hours per day except for long procedures - and reducing hours will probably greatly increase safety - it seems like we regulate truckers more strictly in this regard).
If you turn medicine into a profession that pays reasonably well but without the huge recipe for burnout you'll get a lot more people to go into it. And I'm talking about qualified people who otherwise end up doing something else. Tort reform of some kind would probably be good as well (to go along with procedural improvements that actually fix the medical quality issues). Any time I hear about a doctor's lifestyle the first thing I think is that you couldn't pay me enough to live it - you work yourself to death and then reward yourself with a very nice vacation. I think most normal folks would prefer to simply live a decent life year-round.
Mod parent funny. DC is locally known as "Hollywood for ugly people."
I kid, I kid. The trend towards graduate school really depends on the school which you attend. I presume that the pressure to do so at G-town is not so much since a number of students go into banking/finance/accounting, where an MBA might come in handy but only after a few years of work. Even at engineering programs at, say, Maryland and Hopkins, a good number of students do want to at least get masters degrees. Some of the more advanced R&D work does require advanced degrees, regardless of job experience (mostly heavily theoretical stuff which it's hard to get trained for while doing design work). Not everyone wants to go into R&D, though, just as not every finance major at G-town wants to become an IBanker (probably a terrible analogy since I'm sure the vast majority do), so there's a pressure keeping some people away from grad school.
Internationals are a minority at G-town since many international students go to grad school in the US to be hired and then get sponsored for a Green Card. Many of the positions requiring very specific skills (the ones where it's easy to show that just any American citizen wouldn't do) are recruited from schools like Cal, MIT, CMU, etc, so the small department makes it less attractive to foreign students.
The subset of those who happen to be grad students are sometimes even MORE stuck up, you'll be surprised to know. I thought knowledge humbled the spirit and cleared the mind.. not with these dixies. Also, no matter how much they exercise they can't seem to get their bodies in attractive shape. You can be fit as hell, babe, but genes are a blessing you *haven't* got. It's pretty sad really. An incredible number of grad students here work out/jog/exercise in some way though and internationals are almost always genetically superior without all that. I don't know if it's the water, or the ugliness of politics in the air (we're a breeze away from ground zero after all), but despite all the pretty faces in academia here, you are somewhat correct.
In my graduate CompSci program, it is older white guys (late 20's and up) part-time on the company's dollar and younger indians full time on whatever they can scrounge up.
Personally, I wouldn't bother getting a graduate CompSci degree if my company wasn't paying for it.
Blar.
If you ask a question like this, you're unlikely to make it:
"Why Is US Grad School Mainly Non-US Students?"
But in all seriousness: why not? They come, they pay, they want to learn and they've picked the best schools they can get into and afford. In fact, they put up with ridiculous visa regulations and bureaurcracy just to get there, and when they do, they probably realise the value of the eduction they're getting, study hard and do well. Ideally, selection should be on merit only (I know in practice it isn't always, but I suspect in the US it's better than in many other countries), in which case no-one should have the right to complain. Having bright students around you is likely to further the quality of your own education as well.
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, available from Packt Publishing.
and, of course, education is more expensive.
From what I have seen, companies used to offer education benefits all the time. Now, it is unusual.
I wouldn't be expected to be paid more because of my PhD if I applied at McDonald's, either. If a PhD, out of some sort of desparation, applies for a BS level job, than that is exactly what he or she will get.
That being said, most of us do not apply for BS-level jobs. We apply for PhD level jobs, which have starting salaries higher than those that a typical 30-year-old engineer will make, with more upside potential and more inroads into management, where the real money is. We are expected to have zero "real-world-experience" but instead have expertise in some particular technical area, for which we are hired. Guess what? After a couple of years, we have that "real-world-experience" as well. PhD hiring is generally quite different than BS level. For the latter, large companies just hire a cohort of smart kids and then sort them into various openings. For PhDs, particular people with particular skills are hired to fill particular critical needs of the company.
Oh, and most engineers are paid to go to grad school. There is a huge opportunity cost, but you need not spend "a small fortune" or even run up any debt at all.
But when I went to college to be an engineer it was preceded by decades of emphasis on science. The Apollo missions where number one on the TV. And it was considered cool to be an engineer. You could actually get dates!
Fast forward to my teenage kids. Being someone which technical knowledge about anything gets you labeled a Nerd and Ghey. This negative peer pressure, combined with the complete lack of any emphasis on people actually learning technology does little to encourage students to even pursue a BS degree in Engineering or any of the Sciences (except for psychology which might be considered a soft science).
There's no emphasis for it. Look at computers and computer technology. People don't have any clue what anything actually does and they have an absolute aversion towards learning about it. Why? Because Marketing has told them it's all so difficult and dangerous that you should buy their product to take care of all your computer needs. Marketing leads to fear and fear leads to hate and hate leads to the dark side.
Do you really expect a useful answer here? I'd start answering that question with searches at the Chronicle of Higher Education website and move out from there to other education journals, especially engineering ones. Now I'll take off my faculty hat and put on my /. hat to say: the foreign students I've met--in general--work harder. It's easier to get more motivated students if you're drawing from a global pool. I'll also add that basic skills levels of entering college students are declining in many states, so it may be that international students are getting more competitive in relation.
MBAs are not cheap. They are not really a good investment for the engineer undergrad who can get around a 60k starting salary with just an undergraduate engineering degree. Of all my engineer friends who have gone off to get MBAs, they've all done it in order to facilitate a career change out of engineering not to simply increase their salary. I did the calculations for myself and found that if I went and got an MBA without working for 2 years, it would take more than 10 years for the degree to start paying off assuming my salary as an software engineer will not increase. There are MBA programs that allow you to work 30 hours a week and take night classes but I'm not so sure I'm up for that sort of torture.
There are several things to consider:
1) If the programs you are looking at have 10 year paybacks you're looking at the wrong ones and your math is off. Let's assume you are making 7K/month by the time you start school. For 20 months of school that is 140k of lost salary, plus lets add in another 8k for a pay raise forgone during school. Next is tuition - 40 to 80k at the high end for two school years. Add in another 2k for books and you are at 230k of costs - then take out the internship salary of say 10k so you have a nice round 220k investment. That's a 22k per year salary differential for a 10 year payback, or a starting salary of about 100k. Considering that is the average starting salary and you can tack on another 15k or so in bonus the payback is less than 10 years, probably more like 6 or 7 before you factor in raises. For some schools (To[ schools with salaries+bonus in the 140 - 160 k range) the payback is more like 3-5 years. You may notice I did not include living expenses - you'd pay them in either case so they are irrelevant.
2) The differential is life long - you get the extra cash over a career, which is a significant financial gain.
3) The salary potential is much higher for an MBA than an engineer - your plateau is higher and you have the opportunity to move into fields that would be difficult to enter with just an engineering degree.
While I realize there are exceptions to every case (Gates, the founders of Google, the many people who run successful small business and only have a high school education) in most cases an MBA (from a decent school) will result in a lifelong salary differential that more than makes up for the investment, especially if you get the degree at 26 years of age rather than 40.
You can argue the true value of an MBA, but the fact remains it is a powerful signal to employers which results in them being paid high salaries out of school and significant pay increases relative to their pre-degree salaries (44% per GMAC). In the end, the MBA degree can be viewed as an annuity rather than a bond.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Hi, It seems that you are just late. You should have went to Europe where you could have gotten a better education. America is now where the poor Asian go. The rich ones head for Europe for the quaility education. So why you ask are there only a small number of Americans in you class? Simple. 60% of Americans are "illiterate". Yes, that is correct. 60% of all Americans can barly write their name and say hello in the English language. 99.9% of the U.S. population has zero education in culture. That is why you should have went to Europe. Unless of course, you are a poor Asian. So, you are late. You missed all the smart Americans. So you have to deal with the dumb ones. Why is this? Because over the past 50 years the educational system in the United States has been trashed by every single President and Congress that has existed since that time. This is OK though. Because what you are witnessing first hand is the disintegration of the most powerful nation on earth. Fun isn't it. Being a part of history. Observing the last days of a great nation. You should be proud of that. It is like watching the disintigration of the Roman Empire. Exciting. So you should enjoy it. Have a nice day!
Not flipping burgers... pizza delivery (in 30 minutes or less) is the way to go!
A simple example of this. Compare the Ten Commandments and how simple and clear they are. Now compare the human laws covering the same situations.
If everyone wanted to be governed by laws? Then the world wouldn't have the problems and inefficiencies it does.
Getting an MBA has actual value.
C'mon, quit trolling. You almost made me spit my coffee on the keyboard! An MBA has value in the same way that a pre-1982 US penny has value - Society may view it as worth something, but you'd get a lot more out of it if you melt it down and recycle it for its base.
Okay, anti-beancounter comments aside, I can answer the FP. Why don't more Americans get higher degrees? Because not only don't they don't pay off, they often harm your job prospects in a weak market. We have an amazingly anti-intellectual attitude here in the US, compounded with a pro-cog view that all drones must have interchangeable skill-sets. If you can do more than your replacement, your corporate masters will view you as a liability rather than an asset.
After the tech crash, I spent some time unemployed. Of all the jobs I applied for, I can't even count the number that rejected me for overqualification (I had a BS (two, actually) and about 10 years (if you include interning) experience in software engineering at that point). Now, obviously, companies don't really object to hiring someone "too good" for the position. They care about having to pay for that experience (or education). And even if you would gladly accept a low-paying tech position out of desperation to make your next car payment, they would still rather pay an idiot-cog to do the job, since no one wants an underling capable of eating their way up the food chain.
So, if you want to find yourself unemployable, by all means get a higher engineering degree. If you just want to put in your 40 and retire (the American Dream - Give a company your best years, then go home and die when you have no more to give), stick with a BS in a practical field, perhaps go for the fluff MBA halfway through if you feel inclined to go over to the dark side.
As for why people in other countries want them - Some cultures value education for its own sake. In India or China, whether employed or not, people will treat you with deference simply for having a PhD. In the US, it will more likely get you spit on as an academic elitist than treated deferentially.
Sure, American's are the wealthiest, but we are also the most wasteful and least efficient, which likely is an attribute of long term wealth itself for most people.
The majority of budding minds (if they are still that way after our embarrassing k12 school system or our equally useless private school system) cannot afford education no less extended eduction.
Just think about it, American's are pressed more than anyone to hurry up and get educated so we can start paying back a small fortune. Where is there time for grad school, demanding science careers, high end medical careers. All that amounts to lower return on your educational investment by extending your education or reducing the chances you'll get your degree.
I'm all for cheap education, but what we are getting expensive education of low quality. Between no competition private markets and government regulation we are the least efficiency of the major industrialized countries.
Yeah, I'm studying for the GREs as we speak so I can go back for my MS on my employer's dime.
But a couple other things to take in consideration, the fact that perspective employees with a Masters or Doctorate usually are asking for more money means its often harder for them to find those first jobs. Its not enough to just get that sheepskin, you need to be able to prove that you deserve the additional pay your employer will be giving you. Otherwise you won't be stuck with the low paying job that BS grads get, you will be stuck with no job at all and a lot of student loans.
In addition, its not fair to compare the starting salaries of someone with a Masters with someone with a Bachelors, as by the time the MS student graduates the BS grad will have two or three years of work experience under his belt. Its very likely that a BS grad with 2 years of work experience will make more than a MS new grad. From an employers view, which would you rather have? Someone with 6 years experience in academia or someone with 4 years experience in academia and 2 years experience in the workplace?
In short, don't get the advanced degree because you want more money, do it because you love the field.
BTW, many of the Indians and Chinese immigrants I know in the field got their BS in their home country and then came here to get their MS. I'm guessing that often they need those Bachelor degrees in order to immigrate here, so that would help explain why you see so many foreigners going for advanced degrees.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
The US accounts for less than 5% of the world's population, yet accounts for ~10% of this graduate program. Sounds to me like US representation is very healthy indeed.
I am usually highly skeptical of the USA, but this "Americans r dum" business is simply wrong,and ignores the complexity of the problem.
Firstly, American universities are usually regarded as the world's best. They are expensive and are funded to a degree with fees paid by students and to a degree by government and public grants for research. As far as I understand it, a lot of American students thus take loans to get through University with the goal of using that degree to earn a good salary and make a decent living afterwards. The system tends to discourage students studying purely for the love of learning, I would think, at the best universities at any rate. The universities, dependent as they are on student fees and government grants, will therefore tend to be very competitive in order to raise their standing in oder to attract the best students to produce the best results in both exams and research. I might be somewhat off here - I don't really know - but judging by the way universities are ranked (Nobel and other prizes and research papers published), this setting seems to support that kind of setup.
The result, however, of this system seems to be that fewer American students will study for advanced degrees in fields which offer a lower financial return afterwards, since the cost is so high to get to an advanced degree. Foreign students, mainly from somewhat less well off countries like China and India, see the advanced fields exactly the same way as their American counterparts do, but the degree of perceived wealth is different for them, as earning 40% less than a Lawyer or Doctor is still extremely wealthy for them and worth the burden of having to go highly into debt to pay off their studies. In addition to this, a lot of foreign students will want to study in English which is the current lingua franca or international language.
This contrasts with the general European (which is changing towards the American system, btw) which tends to favour free or cheap higher education. Firstly, the level of competitiveness amongst uiversities obviously drops off in this system which can be seen in their rankings, coming nowhere near American universities. However, the system encourages more young people to study, and, more young people to study in fields which are less financially rewarding. (Note that this is an utter generalisation, and should be treated as such). So, in general, the European system might favour the mean level of education and the US system seems to favour the most competitive (this is of course, totally ignoring all the state universities and colleges in the US). Not only that, but the fact that most Europeans universities do not teach in English means that Indian or Chinese students will probabaly be less inclined to study there, and, since tuittion is not free for foreigners, they get more value for their money at a major US university than they do in a European model one.
In the medical field, it's always been "cut-throat" competition to get in. The "Conventional Wisdom" is that those that can't make it into medical school go to dental school. The reality is that the hardest school to get into is veterinary school. Those that don't make the grade there try med school.
Any health science school is going to have steep requirements to get in. I know that some engineering schools are tough to get into, but I haven't heard the stories that I've heard and SEEN about things pre-med students do to each other.
And no, I didn't want to get into vet. school, I chose my career when I was in first grade - that alone makes me suspect!
Don't mind me, I have more fun this way!
I was a electrical engineering grad student recently.. The grad schools are dominated by foreign students, because the schools have bias for them. It's very difficult for a US citizen to gain admittance. The program I was in ran the minimum required number of US residents required by state law. It's not because of law or medical school. There are plenty of US applicants to the programs. Unlike undergraduate programs, individual professors get to choose the students in the program. The real reason is foreign students are more profitable to the grad school program. 1. If they are not RA/TA they pay more tution. The Chinese students I did research with paid more than I did. 2. They are like indentured servants to the professors they are working for (Profs love this). 3. Most of the Profs are foreign and tend to accept students who are of their nationality. 4. There is no quota on student visas. If there was the Grad schools would have to accept more US citizens. 5. A masters degree in engineering is globally portable.. A medical/law degree is only good in US. 6. There are provisions in US visa law that allow graduates of advanced degrees from US schools to get h1b/green cards easier. An ms/phd is a faster ticket to a US green card. If US corporations would like to end the shortage of tech talent they should be asking congress for a quota on student visas.
Quite simply, US postgraduate education programs are the best in the world--so much so that their pool of applicants is representative of the ethnic makeup of the entire world, rather than of just the United States.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Its not a money game. Students who come to the US are exposed to our society and get a different view of the way this country works (or doesn't) and learn a lot about the real people who live here versus what they see in their local state sponsored media outlets. That is the real value to Americans, because knowing each other engenders respect and that is the best foreign policy result you can get. Of course, this assumes that the student here comes from a society that respects the rule of law over the rule of religion.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
"Advanced societies that are governed by the rule of law and that require complex rules will naturally require more lawyers".
Advanced societies are also governed by vast numbers of computers, and they require even more rules that are even more complex. That means we need large numbers of very highly skilled programmers - but do we get them? Hell, no.
So much for the market. Sure, it does allocate resources to some extent. But if every manager in the land is convinced that lawyers should be paid five times as much as programmers, why, that is how it is going to be.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
This post should not be "4: Informative" -- everything this person says is wrong.
A real MS in Engineering, where you actually have to complete a thesis, is probably 4 times more educating than everything you learn in your undergraduate curriculum. That is assuming you don't retake all the graduate-versions of the introductory courses. If you got an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering, for example, you should not take the analogous introductory courses in the Computer Engineering graduate program because you should already know that material. Instead, you are supposed to skip ahead and take the really advanced courses. The introductory graduate courses are there for people who have a BS degree in some other discipline. Sadly, most people don't want to challenge themselves and take the advanced courses, they just want the credits so they can get a diploma.
Secondly, an MBA does not have actual value. People with MBA's are a dime-a-dozen. There are business consulting firms out there that hire PhDs and teach them everything they would have learned in an MBA program in 2-3 weeks. Why? Because MBA material isn't what you and everyone else cracks it up to be, and because someone who is intelligent enough, and mentally rigorous enough to earn a PhD can learn MBA material as if it was no different than reading the back of a cereal box while eating breakfast.
As a former CS grad student at the University of Central Florida (UCF), you are asking a very loaded question. In the engineering areas you will be dealing with a very diverse environment. It can be very difficult because of the high expectations placed upon you. Therein lies the problem (for US individuals as a whole). From what I have seen, a lot of Americans want the quick and easy answer to work/life/money. Unfortunately, they do not want to work for it. This is not to say that all Americans are lazy, just the vocal ones pushing you to take the easy way out. Thankfully, I did not listen to them.
Now that I am working in the commercial industry, those individuals that took the easy way out are easy to spot. It is not that they are bad at what they are doing, you just realize that they will never do anything else that what they are currently doing. In general they forgot the most import thing while getting an education: the ability to learn on their own. This can apply to individuals with a bachelors degree, but I have not seen an definite trend. However, it is definitely preferred that that an engineer obtain a MS degree. The reasons are varied, but a 'good' MS degree usually shows commitment to excellence. That is the individual wants to do the best that he/she can.
Pay wise, you probably will not be rich as an engineer. However, with a commitment to excellence and a drive to succeed, you will not be barely surviving in most areas. And I must say, if you feel that you cannot make enough to live comfortably, move to a market in which you can earn a comfortable living. I did, and I rejoice each and every time that I think about where I would be if I had not moved (half way across the country) to better myself.
I also have relatives working in law and medicine. I do not agree with most of the previous comments as to why individuals go into these fields. Yes, some individuals do go into it for the money, and some go into it because they feel it is easier than some of the more manual intensive occupations. But let me tell you, that a layer or a medical doctor will VERY VERY RARELY do well in engineering. It is not that they cannot, it is just that they are not very good at it. From what I have seen, the best engineers are ones that have always wanted to do something engineering like (for me it was work with computers), and have the drive to make it happen.
Now as for the individuals from other countries that you will meet. Talk to them, get to know them. Do not view them as wrong just because they are different. Take this opportunity to expand your view of the world. Now expanding this view does not mean throwing away your current view, it means taking the positive things that you learn from them (ex. different ways of accomplishing tasks) and altering your current view. Diversity is a very good thing.
Why Is US Grad School Mainly Non-US Students? Would it instead cost the oriental governments too much to conscript all their lead paint sniffin' 18th Century factory serfs to build a bit of a reputation of their own damned universities, or is this just another method of allowing all 'em Cold War era Grads to come spy on our military secrets, & sending the operations & maintenance bills to the local taxpayers?
Help out with this punch-line, by closing down the borders today!
If funding and spots are the troubling parts of higher education, why do we continue to penalize our own citizens in obtaining it?
Before we allow these people in, we need to first build our own by getting every single citizen that wishes to have such an education to be able to work towards attaining it. That means removing the ability to refuse citizens by any means that possess any desire to further their education; even if it means it takes a generation or two to restore what has been lost by selectivity and expense.
Nationality does matter when we end up paying for it in some form. Holding citizens back with funding games (MIT for example) and prestige building (the usual New England suspects) is what is holding the US back. When the complaints are in the other direction, then we can start seeing if there is any surplus - if there is some, then we can start importing as long as the surplus exists.
There are some things that have value beyond exorbitant cost, and education is one of them. Remove the obstacle for citizens, remove the problem.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Dude, you are SPOT on!
The Canadian government released a report a few years ago concluding that we train more PhDs than we "get" in a year. More of the foreign students that we train go home than students finishing degrees elsewhere come in to replace. They also noted that if foreign students apply to become a landed immigrant they're likely to stick around. In response to the outcry from industry (which is funny since they don't seem to hire all that many the grad students...) there's a funding initiative based on the number of Canadian and landed immigrant students at a university. Apparently if we pay the Canadian students more the foreign students won't leave...
I think you're right on the money with this. I spent this summer interning at a top tech corporation where a white, US-citizen was a minority. Nearly, everyone came from India or China and earned a grad degree here. From time to time I would here them say things like, "I could go back home and live in a much larger house with a maid, but then I would still be in India." I got the feeling they like it hear. Also, one of my friends, working on their undergrad, was greatly limited in their job search due to citizenship. They knew that with a graduate level degree several companies would be much more inclined to sponsor them for a work visa (or however that works). Further, among my friends, I agree that Americans are "satisfied" with an undergrad degree, at least to start. Companies will hire them at a good starting salary, and then the company may pay for their grad school.
China and India account for billions of people. The US counts for mere millions. Since we offer our excellent graduate level education on the global market, it is not surprising that there are ten foreign students for every one domestic. I see nothing wrong with this.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Not only do most Americans with bachelors' *not* go to grad school, many don't go to school for engineering. My MBA program was mostly-American. My girlfriend's Masters of Professional Writing program was mostly-American. My ex-girlfriends' JD program was all-American. My friend's PhD in Psychology program was all-American. My other friend's Master's of Education program was all-American.
The interesting question is not "why are there so many non-Americans in grad school," but "why don't engineering programs want/appeal to Americans?
Lawyers should NEVER be allowed into any legislature, nor in any position where they administer law, nor in a position to judge the law.
In all of these positions, they are positioned in a conflict of interest. As legislators and administrators, any law they pass or rule they create carves off a slice of the GDP for their profession.
As judges, any decision they make that increases the complexity of the law does the same.
These forces account for the very great increase in the size, scope and complexity of the law during the last 100 years. This increases the "Total Government Burden' of taxes and regulations, and inevitably results in lower economic growth. (The London Economist publishes a big review of this literature every few years.)
As for the Uniform Commercial Code, we need neither legislators nor lawyers to handle this. In fact, more and more companies are writing contracts that move such disputes into private courts and arbitration precisely to avoid lawyers and the standard legal system's high costs and long delays.
Lew
Interesting indeed.
UgaBuga!
Graduate students in engineering are usually paid to go to school, not the other way around (whether you're from the US or not). I don't know where you're going to school, but I'm going to come out ahead after undergrad... but I work =)
I would add to this and suggest at least in the programming and coding side of engineering there isn't a lot you're going to learn in a grad program that you can not learn on your own. I remember hearing a student at my current college telling me how developing AI programs would be something a grad student would do...I almost laughed since the school I goto now only does an overview of AI programming and no actual coding! I had already written several AI programs including a genetic algo by then...and these guys were telling me I have to wait until I get into grad school to do that kinda stuff.
It makes sense in other fields to require a masters or higher level degrees because you are limited in your resources to research those other fields...but in programming and some hardware development...as long as you have PC...you can do it on your own time. Why pay someone to give you permission to do something you can already do yourself?
You're all missing the point. The fact is that the careers of MOST foreign students are heavily subsidized by their respective governments. In contrast, in the US the careers of most students are heavily financed by banking institutions and parents.
...for their next vacation.
Here a filling is around $20, extraction about the same, removables from $150 to $250 and implants are around $1000 per tooth.
That is what most dental-conscious-abroad-living Bosnians do during their summer vacations. Have their teeth fixed and pulled.
No wonder they only come to visit their family once a year.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I have a BS in math, and am nearly done with my MS in CS. I had 8 years of experience writing software before starting grad school and I can tell you a couple of things:
An MS doesn't mean you know how to write code at all, but it can help you get a job.
I had several graduate classes with a guy who couldn't write code for anything, but got a great high-paying job right out of getting his MS.
I haven't learned anything in my MS classes that I wouldn't have learned getting a BS in CS.
I learned much more by actually working in my field than by going to grad school.
Am I going to get paid more when I have an MS degree? I sure am. Do I feel that value has been added to me as an employee? Nope.
All of this experience is from CS grad school. I have no comment on engineering grad school.
The study in question is Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities. The Wikipedia page notes it's been cited by The Economist, and that the authors have presented the methodology in international academic forums. I first heard of the study when a European university I was looking applying to cited it.
The problem is that you're going to start seeing shortages of professionals in certain fields in the US. When there's a shortage of good programmers we programmers think that's a great idea because it means our salary goes up, but when there's a severe shortage of pharmacists or obstetricians, that's more of a problem.
I worked for a small medical university a few years ago, and it also had a very high percentage of foreign students. Why? The answer is simple: they could afford it. With tuition over $45,000 a year, few Americans can just cough up that kind of cash. On the other hand, there's a whole world out there to search for people who want to go to medical school and can afford it and qualify to get in.
If the US wants to continue to have high numbers of qualified professionals available to fill societal needs, we're going to have to start doing something about cost of education.
I graduated with a BSE in 1973 and later received an MBA. In my wide experience an engineer has about 15 good years before the $ increases cease and the juicy assignments start flowing to new grads. The terminal phase of an engineer is management and he will never equal his law and medicine alumni in wages earned. There is no respect for engineering in America, you will never see a 'Marcus Welby, PE" show on TV. Until one actually has to have a PE license to practice engineering this will not change. Corporate America has always controlled the engineering salaries by manipulating supply and demand. Now there is unlimited supply from India, China, and the like. So the "smarter" Americans go into Law and Medicine so they can make money from those newly minted foreign born engineers. As an aside I would recommend that the new grads go into international finance and move to London.
Cheers,
Old Engineer
cursethedarkness
My professors advice, and its definately true.
As a White Christian Male, I find the higher education environment to be not only openly hostile but also stacked to benefit minorities and foreigners - money, positions, and opportunities are all set aside and reserved. No matter how talented you are or how hard you work - it doesn't matter, those are not for you.
I did my time in higher ed and was basically just glad to get my degrees and get out onto a more fair and level playing field where race and gender didn't matter. By the end of it I was just so tired of being told I was responsible for most of the world's problems, an oppressor, and inherently bad person because I was a white male that I started to feel the whole system and culture of higher ed. was too absurd to even participate in.
Affirmative action in free software is basically side projects I can just ignore (Linux Chix, etc...) and focus on working on making useful contributions. It's not that I don't want projects like Linux Chix to be successful - I wish them the best of luck. I just don't want to be distracted by forced participation or suffer disadvantage because of them, and thankfully I don't. In graduate school for CIS - there's a different story.
My two cents worth is that with American schools increasing their fees and tuition, fewer people can afford to go on to grad school. Maybe China and India Finance the tuition of their citizens, America doesn't!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
This is very industry-specific. When I'm looking at a resume for an IT candidate, I don't pay too much attention to the education section. If there is no college degree, then I want to see some real stand-out work experience. But I don't even look at where the degree came from.
I have some friends who look at more business-type resumes, and for them the schools matters.
So, yeah. Industry-specific.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The opportunity cost is much higher for US students who can directly enter the high paying US workforce after a Bachelors. The opportunity cost for overseas students is lower. Graduate school is a ticket to get into the US and stay in the US for some foreign students.
As a thumb of rule most engineering students get scholarships. I am in a business program where scholarships are less and we pay way more than American in state students. But its students like me (no scholarship) that the university makes money from. If they put a cap on student visas as some dumb wits have suggested, the American government will be losing millions of dollars a year. Go figure.
Lord of the Binges.
Your jaded cynicism betrays a lack of experience with the people you deride. I've worked in engineering, computer science, and finance — I studied math in university — and in every one of those fields the concentration of intelligent people has been overwhelming.
The stark difference, though, is one of respect. I work in finance now, but I spent almost 10 years programming professionally. My current coworkers, who are no less dumb than my previous coworkers — often smarter, in fact — never talk about how dumb CS people are. In fact, they greatly respect my background, because a lot of what we do is algorithmic in nature. But when I worked in IT, I constantly heard self-important blowhard programmers bemoan the stupidity of anyone who wears a suit.
The funny thing about all this — or maybe the sad thing, depending on your perspective — is that really, programming is not that complex. Engineers are perhaps better deserving of their arrogance, but let's face it, doing software development doesn't require a whole lot of smarts for 90% of projects. Despite this, nearly every programmer thinks he is the smartest person on the whole entire planet. He has somehow deluded himself into thinking that management doesn't do "real" work, that it's all golfing and rides in private jets.
The reality of course is that managing people is very difficult, and that most people do not do it well. And when you work at a software company — even one that sells software as its core competency — writing the code is only a small part of what needs to be done to make the company run. How exactly programmers justify their self-important attitudes is beyond me. Perhaps it's because they've never tried their hand at accounting, for example, and seen how difficult it is? Or capital budgeting? Or marketing, for that matter? A great product isn't going to make you any money if you can't convince people to buy it. What about sales, since we're on the subject? How many of you have worked in sales? It's bust-ass work, and it requires a great deal of talent (talent that I know from experience I do not have).
Sitting in your cubicle reading Slashdot and thinking about how much smarter math and science types are than anyone else is all well and good until you actually go out into the world and meet some people from other fields. America is filled with smart people, and many of them opt to go into other careers. But that doesn't make them any less smart, it just means they don't know the same things you know.
At my job every day I interact with people from tier-1 universities, many of them with advanced degrees in mathematical finance, economics, business, and management. 90% of my coworkers are ivy-league and graduated at or near the top of their class. They are smart as hell and we rely on their smarts to beat the market and generate returns for our clients. We rely on the people in marketing to make sure our instruments get into the right funds, because not every portfolio is right for what we sell. Our marketing people use advanced calculus and statistics in their day-to-day work. When was the last time the average programmer used calculus for anything?
I never hear them say "CS people are nerdy, stupid, cubicle-drones who can't get dates." Maybe that's because they're smart enough to know a stereotype when they see one. But I constantly hear techies who, let's face it, do most of their coding in PHP or VB and went to DeVry for their education talk about how stupid suits are.
It's pathetic, really.
For instance, let's say my daughter is complaining about her ears. Please explain why it's necessary to have someone who went to college for 12 years say, "yup. ear infection." Personally, I don't think it is. What's worse, because doctor time is so valuable, I have to wait in a goddamn waiting room for an hour, and then a goddamn doctor office for another half an hour, just so he can deign to see me.
But the public is starting to wake up to this problem. Convenient Care Clinics, where all appointments are walk-in and you see a nurse practitioner instead of a doc, are starting to sprout up to handle routine health matters. That way, you have someone who can say, "Yup, ear infection", "no, not ear infection", or "this looks weird. Go see a doctor." and you can get that answer at 1/3 the cost and in 1/4 the time.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I probably earn way less now than I would if I had chosen to do an MBA directly after my BSc degree (not really BSc, we had a bit different system back then). For that in return, as an academic you get the flexibility to follow your (changing) interests, as long as you keep the output going of course. If your heart tells you to be a manager or consultant, then do it. If you're only following your current path because of the money, think it over. You will be spending most of your conscious hours in life working, better make it an enjoyable time. Money will buy you a bigger car and a bigger house, but how often do you get to enjoy them?
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I am an European immigrant myself. US guys are smarter, they go for an MBA,MD or a law degree and cash in afterwards.
A PhD in science/engineering takes time, tremendous work and dedication. And if your PhD is not in computer science you will be very likely have difficulties to find a job.
Nice comics:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd090707s.gif
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd091207s.gif
I have a biotech/nanotech engineering background (MS, PhD) and was not able to find a job and now I took a low paying job. Years of my life, wasted for nothing. My current plan: Since I won't be able to afford a house here and save for retirement I will just try to pay off my debts and then go for the pacific region. In the long run I will have better options there.
PhD? Waste of time!
There are tonnes of (as we are told to call them) "International Students" at my school (here in Melbourne Australia), and we are not alone. They all come from Asia, and it begs the question: why do they come over to Australia to complete Year 12 and University? Is it because they can't afford it back home? Is it because it's not up to scratch? What's wrong, and why are our schools clogged with International students?
At best, they only get the same incentives as the Americans. How is that leaving our people behind?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
A professor (from China) in my grad school program (who holds a PhD in library science degree in China AND in the US) once told us (3 years ago) that about 8% of minorities go beyond an undergraduate degree. I have to disagree with your numbers nationwide. Plus, you're talking about an engineering program, which tends to attract a lot of minorities. Math+Science tend to be fields minorities go into because nobody gives a crap if you're yellow, brown or black as long as you can apply math into practical fields. But a minority (including women) lawyer, exec, or a predominantly white America field? Some consider it more trouble than it is worth, while others are just nagged to death by our relatives to do something more practical.
Major Tangent:
I believe this is a great thing. Foreigners come here, and make connections here. Then they take these business connections back home and start businesses. China and India and these US/European connections to build world trade industry. Russia is in a huge stale slump. Great educational system, but no world connections. Heck, they don't even treat their foreign students very nice either... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_modern_Russia
The reason our grad schools are filled with non-american students is that ethnic groups from other coutries work together and cheat off of each other ALL THE F'N TIME - thereby keeping their GPAs high without having to learn a lick of English. Also, most come from other countries where their grades have been bloated and their undergrad work can't remotely stand toe-to-toe with American undergrad programs. But mostly, its the cheating.
You've got most of the answer. Here's the missing piece:
At many universities, when it comes to handing out financial aid, the grants, research and teaching assistantships are only given to foreign students and the US citizens can only get loans.
This is apparently because the faculty administering the departments have a set idea of people from other countries as poor and the US citizens as rich. They hold to this fixed idea even when the US citizens applying are actually living hand-to-mouth with no help from the family while the foreign applicants are the children of the the upper classes (especially the royals or the dictators' inner circle and the owners of the major industries - often the same families). The latter may be wearing rolexes and driving sports cars. Yet they get the paid positions, while the US citizens who aren't already independently wealthy must accumulate a crushing debt load - to be paid off, with interest, once they've left school and found a job.
The result is that such US students tend to leave school once they have enough credentials to start paying off the loans, rather than stay for grad school and accumulate more debt.
The issue is particularly accute in engineering schools. Students rich enough to afford to pay their own way gravitate to law, medicine, and business. Those in engineering tend to come from middle and lower income backgrounds.
Phil: You might want to check whether your school is one of those with such informal discrimination in hiring.
Further, engineering students tend to come from families with certain cultural biases. These often lead the parents to expect the children to work their way through college - which means they may not provide much support even if they could. Financial aid qualifications take into account how much the parents COULD pay, not how much they WILL. So they get little or no aid from the parents, yet are ineligible for most aid programs.
Meanwhile the children tend to feel responsible for their debts, which means they avoid accumulating them and try to pay them off as soon as possible.
So it's hardly surprising to find an engineering school where the graduate student population is composed almost entirely of foreign students.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I have a degree in Chemical Engineering. The difference between a BS and MS (or PhD for that matter) was 2-3 thousand per year in the late 70's and early 80's. I don't believe anything has changed.
At that time, many of the foreign nationals were 'sponsored' by their respective countries. They have the foresight to determine how many engineers they need and sponsor them accordingly.
The US, particularly the current administration, are retarded. They don't have a Plan (i.e. Clue). Energy, infrastructure, you name it, they don't have it.
Why do I get the feeling George W. Bush was one of the guys making fun of the nerds/geeks and that nothing has changed since his undergrad years.
Just FYI, I'm particularly bitter because my oldest daughter is in Chemical Engineering (Go, Yellow Jackets!) and will graduate with more debt than is reasonable. I don't need to get into a discussion about why we need more Chemical Engineers (energy, plastics, food, clothing, just about everything you use on a daily basis)...
-Paul
You meant 'Ja!', right?
OK, its sad, but look at it this way. You can go to school for years and years. A PhD. will cost you at least 8 hard years of university, or more likely 10. You then work hard, build your reputation, save money, then start a company with a great product called blackberry. Along comes a group of lawyers. They don't know anything about technology. They went to university for 6 years max. They spot your invention, sue, and get $700,000,000- of your money. For what? Being lawyers of course! Do they know what to do with it? Advance it? No! But they will sit on it and stifle innovation with it till they have wrung every last penny out of it. Fuck society, become a lawyer and get rich! ...and so they have (oh, and to be fair, a hundred thousand other lawyers did too).
My experience has been that in engineering, people only resort to using your education as a metric to measure you by if you have no relevant experience to use instead.
/work/.
3 years out of school, and nobody cares where you went to school. They want to see the results of your last 3 years of
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I started grad school in a Computer Science department and switched over to the Computer Engineering department to finish my degree. I went for a specialized MS computer degree and that program was still relatively US citizens - although we had many foreign students attend some of the classes.
/CE have the potential to make more than professors within 3-4 years. So, unless they really want to teach, there's no monetary incentive to stay for advanced degrees. (BTW, I'm 2 years out of MS classes and I make about 40K more than an Assoc prof.) I guess I should get off my butt and finish that MS degree also.
Yes, the CS departmen had two non-foreign graduate students, including myself. The reasons I think there weren't more US citizens were:
1) The MS program was geared towards the PhD program and was mostly theory. Very little could be applied to the workforce.
2) Students who were there just for the MS were treated like dirt. They got the assistantships that no one wanted - if they got one at all.
3) Many students with a BSCS
4) Some foreign CS students go to grad school to be able to be in the US and look for jobs. They can stay on a student visa and then start sending out resumes. I knew of one students who said he was going to the PhD but left after 2 years with his MS to work for Microsoft. (of course, many say they are going for the PhD so they get the assistanships they want and then leave with the MS - which was their goal anyway)
5) Many grad schools seem to rely heavily on the GRE and it appeared that some foreign students spent extra time learning how to pass these tests - even if they did not have the practical skills to back them up. I knew of many who had perfect 800's in the necessary sections. So, if a department bases admissions on the GRE scores, they may select a higher percentage of students who are good at passing tests.
6) Plus, people in the workforce may actually be going for their MSCS / CE degree but you just don't see them because they are taking their courses online, distance, etc.
you stupid americans are too fool to study engineering. Look at your math and physics level, a 6th grade elementary school student in china or india can beat a high school white trash in math contest. america is a dying country, believe or not...
One word to all of you "BULLSHIT"
Smarter Americans stop after their Bachelors, because they can get out in the real world and make good money. Its these "Intellectual Morons" that inhabit our Liberal Universities.
Makes perfect sense to me - as long as they can prescribe medication.
In the US it is illegal to trade in most medications without a prescription from a doctor. Hence, even if you're very confident you know what is wrong you still end up seeing a doctor just to get a piece of paper saying its OK to buy some ear drops.
A tiered system seems like a decent compromise.
Yes. That's the best part. These Convenient Care Clinics are attached to pharmacies. The NPs can prescribe antibiotics for your ear infection, and you pick it up right then and there. No separate trip to the pharmacy.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
If you want people to read what you write, don't write something so fucking stupid in the second sentence. Slightly oversimplified, the current Reserve Requirement is 10%. That means for every $1 in liabilities, a bank can lend out $0.90.
I'm sure you wrote something brilliant in your comment, but when I see something like that, how can I assume anything other than that you are a first class moron?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
...yes, I can confirm that is true. Market rate at top law firms these days is $160,000 plus a $30,000 bonus for a first-year associate. Three years of law school, heavily subsidized by government grants and payed with government loans locked in at a sub-3% interest rate via a loophole that has since closed, made it an exceptionally good deal for me. It would be a good deal even if I paid with credit card debt.
No wonder the engineering department always smells of currry
It's 12 months, AKA "Optional Practical Training", and if you can't get a job in that time, you'll get kicked out. In reality, though, you'd need to get the job before or at the very beginning of that period, or the employer won't even consider you. I was so lucky that the Department of Homeland Security messed up and didn't get me my work permit until about half the time was over; no chance of getting a job in the US then.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
The simplest reason people in that field are from those countries is because unlike Americans when they finish school they'll have a job waiting for them.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
... the system that everyone comes to America to enjoy, including the educational system in question, was founded by Native Americans. Oh wait no it wasn't.
It's true! The U.S. despite their rhetoric does NOT value scientific degrees - heck, this admin doesn't even respect science - in any form.
Here's the most accurate response you'll get...
Most of these other countries TRULY value science/engineering. They don't have a huge salary disparity between engineers, doctors, and lawyers. From what I'm told, an MD in India or Asia "might" make about 50% more than an engineer. It's more like 500% in this country.
If you are bright and could handle a scientific degree, medicine, or law then why not take the profession that will pay more, especially if you have a valid interest in the other disciplines. I find that many engineers like medicine so why NOT head there. I find many engineers like patents so why NOT become a patent lawyer. The salary difference is ridiculous!
I have family members in medicine making 5-6x what I will in engineering. I hope to get my PhD in M.E. very shortly. I _almost_ became a doctor and sometimes regret not going to med school. All nighters have NEVER been a problem...even in my 30s.
I'm still waiting for ASME to create an IP department whereby they provide lawyers for ME members for IP reasons. That way, we'll get paid for our ideas and ASME can license the ideas to the corporations - like the universities are doing. Why work for a corporation if you're the creative type?
Anyhow, just about anyone makes more than an engineer with a PhD (where you cap out around $100k)
The following START at about that...
- Doctors
- Lawyers
- MBAs
Being an Indian myself, here are some reasons why Indian students enroll for grad courses in US univs:
1) To get a job in the US so that they can make more money than similar job profiles in India.
2) To actually study Computer Science because they love the subject (quite rare)
3) Because entering India's premier technical institute - the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) is very difficult and the GRE/GMAT and TOEFL are almost childs play compared to the JEE (Joint Entrance Exams for IIT).
4) Some women simply enroll because their husbands are working in the states and they have nothing much to do at home (I have seen more than one such case while at university myself).
I actually studied for a good 2 years in a US university. But I had absolutely no intention of settling down there. So I returned to India immediately after my studies whereas some of my friends, in an attempt to linger on and preserve the validity of their visas, actually took on a Ph.D. program. Dunno how many of them actually completed it and how many ran away as soon as they got their work permit.
And in many communities, its a matter of pride to say "my son is working in america". It helps further the boy's or girl's matrimonial prospects.
Well, then - I'll be the first. Grad school has DEFINITELY made me a better engineer!
I actually have gotten a chance to DIGEST the material; the usually rigorous engineering undergraduate curriculum hardly allows time for that.
Let's see...we're managed by idiots with MBAs, we are underpaid by idiots with MBAs, our jobs are outsourced by idiots with MBAs, our deadlines are set by idiots with MBAs. Gee, I dunno why no one wants to be an engineer any more.
Coming this fall, on NBC!
He's a Ph.D. student in accounting; she's a Ph.D. student in molecular biology.
They find love while struggling to publish an interdisciplenary paper in an obscure journal about unexpected correlations between asset valuation in 1934-era companies and the production of azurophilic lysosome granules.
1. Pick something to design.
2. Each side chooses an engineer and comes up with a design.
3. Jury of engineers picks the best solution.
4. Profit!
Infuriate left and right
H1B visa holders do push wages down. These people are nearly slaves.
I'm saying offer citizenship to the best and brightest.
Some of these people will create start-up companies. They might even hire you.
What self-respecting Time Lord *wouldn't* be a doctor?
It's as simple as IQ & Numbers. The Chinese and Indians have 10x more than our population. They have 1.2 Billion plus 1 Billion. We have 300 Million. (OK, maybe 9x) Out of our population, maybe only 1% - 10% of our society is intelligent enough to go into engineering. So, 1% of 300 Million is 3 Million. IQ distribution is about the same in any population. So the same goes for Indians and Chinese. So, 1% of 2.2 Billion is 22 Million. We have 3 Million, they have 22 Million. Simple math. Also, since they have so many more to compete, with they are more aggressive at their education.
It could be possible that most Engineering graduates are so sick and tired of the Bachelors system in college, that they feel they must go and work for a bit before they waste any more of their money on a potential Master or Ph.D. path on which they would not want to actually work at. That's what happened with me, by the time I attained my BS, I was sick of school and eager to get applying. I still hope to go back to school at some point, once I figure out a niche that is worth pursuing.
We (Americans) don't have to apply to grad school to keep up the rate of higher-ed citizens, because half of all those foreign students will end up being Americans anyway.
American isn't an ethnicity. We are the Borg. You are assimilating yourselves.
IMHO, you better go-for that Phd. and hope you get tenure somewhere. The reason these students are in engineering and C.S. is because your local University recruits them. Reason: these students are usually from a higher if not better caste and/or their social and economic status. And, they are usually from the more upper crust of their host country. This means revenue for your Universities that are pressured by American corporations and business to enroll such foreign students into their respective engineering and science programs. The American companies win with this arrangement because ultimately the American corporate management does not have to compete with brainy techies that could endanger their jobs. Additionally, the language differences are such that it is much easier to control and manipulate engineers and techies that do not have a very good command of the American language. The entire: foreign-student-to-employee-cycle is at a minimum a symbiotic relationship. If you are wondering why there are so many foreign (middle-east to far east) students in the University engineering departments just look at the number of I.T. and engineering departments of a very many American companies employing majority numbers of foreign workers!
That's part of counter culture dogma. If you're mexican though, and speak a european language, have european laws and culture largely european, then you can be native. Also, if you're white and feel a tremendous amount of racial guilt for things you never personally did, you can be accepted, but your skin color will always mark you by many.
Ain't political correctness grand?
But a couple other things to take in consideration, the fact that perspective employees with a Masters or Doctorate usually are asking for more money means its often harder for them to find those first jobs. Its not enough to just get that sheepskin, you need to be able to prove that you deserve the additional pay your employer will be giving you. Otherwise you won't be stuck with the low paying job that BS grads get, you will be stuck with no job at all and a lot of student loans.
BS (no pun intended). If the company can't afford to pay the going rate, they'll just lowball you and hope they get lucky. Having a Master's degree in hand means the company won't have to pay for you to go back to school and means you should be productive faster than someone without one. More than that though, it is insurance against someone who is incapable of progressing beyond a Bachelor's understanding of the material. If anyone is going to be stuck flipping burgers, it will be the bottom of the crop of BS grads and the guy with the Doctorate in Practical Application of Heated Meat Dynamics in an Accelerated Serving Environment.
In addition, its not fair to compare the starting salaries of someone with a Masters with someone with a Bachelors, as by the time the MS student graduates the BS grad will have two or three years of work experience under his belt. Its very likely that a BS grad with 2 years of work experience will make more than a MS new grad. From an employers view, which would you rather have? Someone with 6 years experience in academia or someone with 4 years experience in academia and 2 years experience in the workplace?
Of course, you're ignoring the impact that a Master's degree has on raises and promotions. A two year difference in experience (which is largely imaginary to begin with because most Master's programs involve a good deal of "real" work) quickly becomes irrelevant. The Master's degree is always a factor and, more importantly, not having a Master's degree can prevent you from getting promoted.
That might be true for grad school tuition, but out of curiousity, do they pay for their accrued undergraduate debt?
My GF's phd canidate (in biochem) stipdend wouldnt nearly cover her cost of living in addition to 60-100k in student debt. For example 10 year loan at 5% on 60k of debt runs $636.39.
I think that is the point the parent poster was trying to make.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
You hit it on the money. I have had job offers in the past based simply off I went to school and these offers werent from fellow alumni, rather people in industry who recognized the rigorous education.
People totally forget the networking factor as well.
What one actually learns might be exteremely similiar between a public/private institution, but the other factors in terms of networking/name recognition are invaluable.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
I assume it's the same in the US but that's how it is in Canada. The university I work at has seen a drastic increase in the number of asian students. Considering foreign tuition brings in about 3x more than domestic students (due to government subsidies and tuition freezes) is it any wonder we're seeing such an increase? Then our graduates (yes, I know a few personally) go over there for a year to teach them English. Only thing is they should teach them BEFORE they come here to study...
It depends on the discipline.
My dad is a PhD chemical engineer. He "retired" about a decade back. However, there's more demand for his consulting time than he's willing or able to provide. (He'd rather spend time with his wife and grandkids.) He regularly does work for the National Research Council on the safe disposal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons -- hell, I don't have the background to understand most of what he does. He's not doing as much work for the private sector, but it's not for lack of demand. He just doesn't have the time.
Maybe not in mechanical engineering, but in software engineering what he says is true. Most SEs, who go straight to grad school will be working for a guy who got his BS and has 4 years of real world experience. Classroom doesn't translate that well to the real world for computers. The only place the grad school degree matters is in those companies who mistakenly think that people with a MS or Ph.D. are "smarter". More school does not mean smarter. It means someone who spent more time in class and less time solving real world problems.
As for your dad... sounds like a top-heavy department... another reason why US automakers are failing.
One of the major reason is that jobs in this area are going to India and China. I worked for a large fortune 500 company. I am an American born citizen. More than half of our team was located in India and China. When contracts were bid, American companies were not even allowed to bid on the projects. I experienced active discrimation from my manager from India. I received less interesting jobs and less pay than the Indian counterparts in my group. I was also told by HR that it was OK to discrimate against non-minorities. Or another way of saying this: You will experience the same thing in the real world that you are experiencing in graduate school in the engineering and computer science areas.
"BS (no pun intended). If the company can't afford to pay the going rate, they'll just lowball you and hope they get lucky."
Oh no, companies really do avoid hiring "overqualified" employees. Even if they get lucky by hiring them for a lower wage than they would normally get, they know you will leave for a higher wage as soon as you can, and they usually want to be able to keep whoever they hire instead of having to hire a replacement every year or so.
"Having a Master's degree in hand means the company won't have to pay for you to go back to school "
They don't have pay you to go back to school even if you just have a BS. You might want to go back, but they are not in an obligation to pay for it. And hell, you might want to go back even with that MS, there are plenty of people who go back again, either for an PhD, MBA, or even another technical Masters.
"and means you should be productive faster than someone without one"
I would like to see how you intend to back up that assertion.
"More than that though, it is insurance against someone who is incapable of progressing beyond a Bachelor's understanding of the material."
Now thats just being naive. There are plenty of incompetent fools with a Masters degree out there. In fact, they may make up an even higher percentage of MS grads than BS grads because of all the people who go to graduate school because they can't get a job with just a BS.
"Of course, you're ignoring the impact that a Master's degree has on raises and promotions. "
No, I'm not ignoring it, it is just virtually nonexistent. Once you get in your career, the thing your employer is looking at is your performance at your last job; your education quickly becomes irrelevant (just as your BS becomes irrelevant once you get your Masters). Employers are looking at your most recent activity, not what you did decades ago.
"A two year difference in experience (which is largely imaginary to begin with because most Master's programs involve a good deal of "real" work) quickly becomes irrelevant."
I'm not saying you are not working in a MS program, but the work you do there is fundamentally different from the work you do in your job.
"The Master's degree is always a factor and, more importantly, not having a Master's degree can prevent you from getting promoted."
Not in most engineering fields. The only degrees that you might need to move up in our discipline would be a MBA (if you want to move in the business side of things) and a PhD (if you want to move in the research side of things). And neither of those are absolutely necessary; I've met rising execs without an MBA and stars in research departments with nothing more than a BS (though all of them would suggest you get those degrees if you want to do what they do).
And this isn't coming from someone who hates academia and thinks its useless. As I said, I'm planning to go back for my Master's myself. I have nothing against people continuing their education. But do it for the right reasons, not because you think that piece of sheepskin will automatically make you more money. And if you are puzzled as to what those "right reasons" could be, graduate school is not for you.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
We'll all be making our money by selling houses to each other. We'll keep the bubble going until the sun explodes or the vehicles are left unmanned. Either way, it'll be a good run.
I'm not really sure. Maybe they feel that they can make a better living over here than in their country. Smarter people want to be lawyers and doctors. We definitely need smart people for that.
Everyone says that computers is the future and that is where the money is, but I figure not everyone is made to deal with a machine all day. I guess that the smater Americans can do something else. We can leave that to those without personality.
Because for non-US born, graduate skool is a ticket to an H-1b visa and then a green card, or perhaps an American wife (bonaza!). In other words it's a way out of the turd world and into the US. For the rest of us, it's just a way to do some professor's scut work and pay tuition for the privelege. Riley
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Don't let your kids grow up to be cowboys...I mean programmers. Think about law
Unfortunately the career length of a programmer is about the same as a major league baseball player, but as a rule the programmer does not get the multi-million dollar contract.
Programmers need to transition to management, or maybe sales, to continue to be of any value after their low to mid 40s.
Doctors work well into their 60's or 70's. Of course with looming threats of socialized medicine in the air, the next generation of doctors might come entirely from 3rd world countries.
Go into law. Our congresscritters are lawyers. Don't expect socialized law anytime soon.
You can't teach at most public K-12 schools with a masters of engineering. Or even a PhD in engineering for that matter. You need a masters of education and a teaching certificate.
A very good point! ;)
thank you.
It is likely that neither of us can convince the other regardless of how much we type. However, we can understand each other's point of view. It may be that our disagreement is less strong than it appears. I am sorry if I am prolonging this discussion past its useful conclusion.
The history of the universe seems to be within the realm of science. I'm not so sure about the origin. Suppose the universe was created six thousand years ago, but it was created as an old universe, dinosaur bones and all. We would have no way of knowing. The universe may have been created fifteen minutes ago, and we wouldn't necessarily know it. In that case, it may be less true but more useful to say that the universe is, for all practical purposes, 13.7 billion years old and move on. Also, keep in mind that the big bang theory doesn't say much about why the universe even exists in the first place, or what (if anything) preceded the big bang. Maybe someday we'll know what came before, but that won't tell us much about why the universe exists or what exactly we're doing here. Those are metaphysical questions, not scientific ones.
To me, a scientist is someone who uses the scientific method when it's appropriate. In daily life, science can be useful to understand some things (such as trying to figure out why a car won't start), but it won't tell you what to do. It won't tell you that a working car is better than one that doesn't work, and it won't tell you where to drive when you get it fixed. If you already have some goal in mind, science will help you get there, but it won't tell you what that goal should be. For this reason, I don't think anyone can truly live exclusively by the scientific method, and if they think they are, they're fooling themselves.
No, I haven't read that one. I think it's great that he's enthusiastic about science and has been able to share that enthusiasm with others, and misplaced superstition can be (and has historically been) more destructive than misplaced science. To be a scientist, you need to believe the scientific method is useful, and that implies that you believe the universe is at least mostly predictable (you don't look for miracles around every corner). I don't think being a scientist means you believe that universal truth can only be revealed by science.
Sometimes, science and religion overlap in unfortunate ways. Before orbital mechanics were understood, the rising of the sun every morning seemed miraculous, and before fusion was understood we didn't know where all that light came from. But it's important to realize that just because the world seems less miraculous than it did in the past, does not mean that religion can be completely replaced by science.
They accept those who apply. Most Americans are probably happy with just an undergrad degree and don't want to go to grad school.
When I was finishing my Undergrad.in Mexico and started looking for information for a postgraduate degree I went to see a professor at my university which I estimate a lot to ask him about his point of view on the different post-graduate possibilities (studying the post in the same Uni, studying in another Uni in Mexico or studying abroad). He told me something which I believe is one of the best pieces of advice I got about the postgraduate. Paraphrasing him it was something like this:
"When you go to the postgraduate, you usually do not go just for the 'quality' of education, but you go for the cultural baggage that the place where you study can provide you. If all you want is 'good' education, you can go the Mexico's UNAM, which is very prestigious and has really good quality. However, what you want is a combination of good prestige [for a PhD], a completely different culture in which you can learn and a different place which you can know. Therefore, if you can go to Japan [figuratively, the other side of the world] you should do it"
And hence, this is partly why I am doing my PhD in the UK and as he said, I have learned quite a lot in the 3 years I have been here. I have met a lot of interesting people and I have seen places and known issues I would have never known if I had stayed in Mexico.
Therefore, I would suggest any of the USA postgraduates to try and go to another country to study their postgraduate, even a Master. There are some countries where the postgraduate studies are cheaper than in the USA (for example, France). And if they do not speak English, you could even learn a new language.
Overall I think it is not a bug, but a feature (as we like to say), even in my department in the UK for example, in my office we are about 7 persons (big office =o)) there are Syrians, Chinese, Americans, Sudanians, etc. And there are very few English PhD students in the Department (I believe the rate is about 70%-30%).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The problem is that American higher education favors minority and foreign students becuase they can get more government subsidy from minority status students.
Those from Indian and China are granted minority status ( historical minority not actual, actually there are more Indians and Chinese then there are on any other "kind" of people ) and thus favorable treatment with regards to quotas and access to financial aid. Furthermore India and China among others have huge subsidized lobbies in Washington that maintain access to free education for their people and they have financial aid programs in addition to those footed by the US taxpayer.
If you really care to look up EOP, Equal Opportunity Professional, INAPAC, the list goes on.
I'm with you on this one. I've been working on a PhD in EE for the last 5 years, hoping to finish early next year. I'm intellectually way beyond where I was when I finished my BS. I'm hoping to eventually get a faculty position at a decent institution. The grandparent post was way off base.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
More importantly, 90% of American engineering students realize that the only reason for getting an MS in engineering is to teach. I'm yet to find someone who thinks he learned something worthwhile in post-grad engineering school.
I'm going to guess that you don't know anyone who studied Electrical Engineering. A BS degree means someone knows how to integrate a function and what truth table is. How to apply these things to do complex stuff is NOT taught in undergrad classes. (At least not to the level where someone could go and fully create the thing on their own).
Frankly I think people from the United States (I'm one) expect too much to be handed to them. Yes, ~4 years of college is not always easy, but it is not exactly always enough in industry. We're too content to start making the big bucks and buy that first nice car.
Others come from other countries and fought much harder to get where they are. They faced more competition. They know what they need to do. And many actually do it. Others learn to how game the system and do extremely well.
Yes, most academic research is bogus. But the techniques in use are extremely useful to know. The understanding gained of a topic/field is extremely valueable. It allows once to technically be more versatile.
(laugh. why aren't you an engineer anymore?)
I think it is a perfectly valid question as well. I am CS grad student and I notice the same thing. I am along the same lines of not being concerned about the having a lot of foreign students, but instead about having too few American students. The worth of a Bachelor's degree today is the same as a High School diploma in 1950. Too many people do not see college as an opportunity learn, and see it as more of an opportunity to escape life at home. As soon as their four years are done they take an often meaningless job when they are capable of more productive work. The fact that people do not graduate in four year regularly anymore means that people should not go straight into college from high school either, and instead should work some form of service job, e.g. military, foreign relation, etc.
I'll respond to your glib comment frankly:
Good detective work. Seriously. Is your company hiring people with three-quarters of BFA in Graphic Design?
I mean, I would've sold the iPod if I thought it could've bought myself out the situation I am in. But it was my most valuable possession, and, anyway, it died the other week. Not a scratch on it, I might add, but the HDD lost its will to live.
Further Information: I won the iPod in a drawing at the school cafeteria. It only cost me eight bowls of soup to enter, I could live off a bowl of soup in the morning and a small snack at night for eight days for my chance to win. I love music and really wanted an iPod. I justified eating only two (small) meals a day with the hope that I would win.
In the end, I only won because I was the last person to turn in my ticket. The cafeteria workers didn't shuffle the tickets, and drawing from the top, I was the lucky(?) winner. Now that my 20Gb iPod is dead (it's been my constant companion for over four years), I'm forced to further narrow my musical selection down on my (five year old) laptop.
[Continued discourse.]
where the comment ends and sig begins
Our government keeps letting all these foreigners in.
...welcome our better-educated overlords.
Now, I have no education to speak of, and this is not particularly unusual for the US born; Nearly all the H1B holders I work with have a masters. Many of them are really, really good. (others, of course, prove that holding a masters doesn't neccisairly mean you are educated.)
Personally, I think that if the US wants to maintain it's economic dominance, we need to offer everyone graduating above a certain level from US accredited universities a path to citizenship. Right now, we are siphoning off the best people in the world, but many of them are on temporary visas- for many of them gaining citizenship is quite difficult (assuming they want to be honest about the marrage laws) If the dollar continues to fall against other currencies, the work required to work here might not be worth it anymore.
I love how you take the phrase "teach at a university" and automatically inflict your snooty prejudices on it, altering it to "teach at a MAJOR university" and further go on to espouse an elitist ivy-league approach to selecting professors as though it were the standard way of doing things.
Way to go, sparky. Good job!