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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?
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.
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.
Probably around the time Christopher Colombus arrived to America.
c++;
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.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
It is a net gain. Look at it this way. The US takes some of the top students from some very large countries, e.g. India and China. They get educated here and most want to stay. If we keep them here, we are taking the cream of the crop from other countries and they add to our GDP. Over their lifetimes they add more to or GDP than we have provided in educating them. Why? Because they are smart and driven to work hard.
This is from personal observation of this field over the last twenty years. The stupidest thing we can do is pay for their education and then not allow them to stay. The second most stupid thing we can do is make it harder for them to come here. We are currently doing both of those stupid things more than we used to.
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.
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.