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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure ... I might want to stay here as well, depending upon where I was from. That isn't necessarily what their government wants, nor is it necessarily what we want, and in any event people don't get to just enter a nation, go to school there, and just decide to stay because it suits them. Well, that's not how it's supposed to work, anyway. Generally speaking, the folks that were there first (in most places in the world, they're known as "citizens") make laws regarding who they want to have as neighbors.
Where did the idea start that America is just some vast smorgasbord of cool stuff that anyone can just take for themselves any time they please?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
(all that chemistry and physics that supports evolution would be wrong).
What chemistry and physics would that be?
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)