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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?
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?
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
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
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.
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.
Really this is just silly. If 9.8% of US families is considered "the majority", then you'd be right. But you're wrong. Besides that fact, US GDP per capita is several times that of India or China, so by your logic there should be no Indian or Chinese grad students because not only are a majority of Indians and Chinese truly poor, they are much poorer than the average American.
Most Americans don't go to grad school because there is little economic incentive to do so. The US economy only supports so many technocrats. The presence of so many Indian and Chinese students in US science and technical grad programs is a natural function of those nations' evolving manufacturing and services sectors. They simply need to train more technocrats because their sectors are growing compared to those sectors in the US, which are economically mature.
As to India or China "surpassing" the US, what does that mean? Surpassing the US in what? Manufacturing? Good! That's economic specialization that creates efficiencies for everyone. Not only is talk of "surpassing" mere economic scare-mongering (did we learn nothing from such silliness when the Japanese were supposed to "surpass us" in the 1980s? Where are the Japanese today? Economic stagnation), it makes erroneous straight-line projections that ignore very important long term considerations of demographics and other factors. The US economy will be a large and important factor in the global economy for the foreseeable future. But the global economy continues to grow and evolve and the US economy continues to change from its post-WWII dominance (unsurprising since it was the only intact industrial economy on the planet) to an important player in a dynamic specialized global economy.
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.
This actually is true. Advanced societies that are governed by the rule of law and that require complex rules will naturally require more lawyers. Most people think of Law and Order when someone says "lawyer", but that ignores the far larger practice area of corporate and commercial law that governs extremely complex commercial behavior that makes a modern capitalism economy hum. Nobody thinks about the Uniform Commercial Code as a vital piece of maintaining civilization, but it is.
Besides that, medicine and law are recession proof. Hell, they are nuclear-war proof.
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.
As a practicing dentist I can positively say that health care is NOT recession proof. I have seen lots of folks with untreated or undertreated medical conditions when they lack insurance or the resources for treatment. Health care is less and less of a good deal for Doctors of all types because of decreasing insurance payments and increasing hassle.
Elsewhere in this discussion it is being said that the purpose of higher education is to earn more money. This may be true for some, but it's also true that education allows you to do something more interesting or fulfilling.
Regarding the original topic, my graduating class was about 1/3 were asian immigrants with a sprinkling of middle easterners, africans and caribbean types. Of the asians the majority were Vietnamese (incidentally these folks were the most patriotic Americans you might find - they love it here) I don't know of anyone that went back to their country of origin.
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If someone used a tag called "becauseindiansaredumb" or "becausemexicansaredumb", everyone here would be up in arms.
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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.
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.
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.
Yeah I used to say this, until I had to go to court over some serious money. I hired an ex pit bull and when the dust settled I sent her flowers and will never be able to thank her enough. Yeah the ones (lawyers) that go into government, seem to end up jerks IMO. When you just gotta have one though they are worth their weight in gold.
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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
Teachers, not professors ;)
The US K-12 system blows. The US university system is pretty much the best in the world. This leads to lots of foreign students taking advantage of the quality of American higher education. Entertainingly enough, it also leads to lots of professors having to undo the brain-damage the K-12 system inflicted on students.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Problem is dental care is horribly overpriced. And insurance companies and other treat it as if it is a "cosmetic" service instead of a real health issue. Bad teeth = bad health yet dential insurance is the crappiest on the planet and outside of the rich you are hard pressed to find someone with good healthy teeth. I had to spend well over $10,000 on my daughters orthodontics, that is insane for a bunch of wires and superglued on blocks for the wires. at the time I was very much lower middle class ($60,000 a year) and could not even think of affording invisiline or the other upscale stuff.
I deal with construction people daily and 7 out of 10 of them you can easily tell they have a bad infection going on in their mouth as you can smell it in their breath. (yes you can smell it, some are so bad that a mouth full of tictacs cant mask it) That is insanely high, yet the dentists and dental associations really don't seem to care about afford ability to dental care. when a patient is told, $3500.00 to save that tooth and put a crown on it or $490.00 to yank it out. Guess what the poor person ($35,000 or less) is going to do?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
two other factors that i haven't seen mentioned are the steady increase in student loan burdens and the fact that a foreign student dominated graduate culture tends to attact more of the same. students are coming out of undergrad programs with more and more debt, and it's hard for those students to think about anything but getting into the workforce and paying that off now. the fact that they can delay repayment and earn enough money in graduate assistantships to keep the debt from increasing isn't as well advertised as it could be.
the OP stated that he's one of 7 american students in a 90% foreign class which is pretty similar to what i encountered in a CS graduate program. graduate classes are really very much harder than undergraduate classes, and i don't care who you are you're probably going to get stuck on parts of the curriculum and have to work through it with other people to fully grasp the concepts (and, no, i'm not talking about cheating on your homework). in my experience the american and non-american graduate students are two pretty disparate groups, and being a part of the larger of those two orbits has to be a huge advantage when you need to tap those resources. that's setting aside the fact that graduate students effectively live on campus in their study areas and labs, so having a large support group in that environment is huge.
US GDP is pretty badly skewed by the massive amounts of debt created by the US government.
Take into consideration that when a bank has a dollar in savings, it can lend someone some ridiculous amount like 250, and you'll realise that the 500 billion dollars a year Americans borrow leads to some serious green moving around the economy in a very bad way.
I wouldn't be surprised if some country out there, especially one like China, who holds tonnes of US debt, could get some amazing growth very quickly. After all, the US gained it's power by industrialization in the world wars. They became the largest arms dealer in the world, and while countries like Britain became debt ridden, the US became the largest debtor.
Personally, given the circumstances, I'd say the US is entering the perfect storm leading to it's own demise.
It's been a long time.
Wow. I can't get over the number of incorrect assumptions you are making.
First, I have lots of un- or underinsured patients that can't afford perio or endo treatment; this problem gets worse during recessions.
Second, the study proving that periodontal disease CAUSES heart disease has yet to be completed AFAIK it's due in '08. (Either that or the guys at U. Penn don't know what they're talking about) Yes, there are studies showing a CORRELATION between the two, but as we all know, correlation is NOT causation.
Third, who says I wasn't taught about dentures? I do a TON of dentures but if you think about it, dentures indicate a failure of previous dental treatment. My practice suffers because I could earn a lot more money providing perio, endo, implant and crown & bridge services to a given patient. How much do you earn doing extractions and dentures? How much would you earn doing more complex treatments that would preserve natural dentition?
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.