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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Probably around the time Christopher Colombus arrived to America.
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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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Don't blame the poor chap - he was obviously using Excel 2007 for the calculations.
Your sig says I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
The mod points seem kind of unnecessary:
As a practicing dentist...
Infuriate left and right
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.
We sold weapons to Iran before and after the Shah. We just concluded a massive weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. To be honest, I don't think Saudi Arabia or 90's era Liberia are any more democratic than North Korea. Don't claim the moral high-ground unless you can justify giving 20 billion USD in advanced weaponry to a tyrannical theocracy known for sponsoring terrorism.
And as for China's willingness to invade democracies when it suits their self interest, see what the US did in 1956 to Iran(Check out Operation Ajax on Wikipeida), and what the US did to Guatemala during the Cold war; Or what the CIA did in Chile, or the Congo, I could go on.
Of course, every country with power and influence has black marks. See France's activities in West Africa and Rwanda, their current activities in Niger, to say nothing of their history in Indochina and Algeria; Or see the UK's actions in Uganda, Former Rhodesia, Iran, and Suez. Don't even get me started on Russia or Israel.
The truth is, governments are rather soulless entities, which by design act in their own self-interest. To ascribe personal qualities to them like evil is idiotic and counter-productive. Instead, we have to understand the pressures a nation's leaders face.
China is an ethnic powder keg teeming with religious and ethnic strife, Jingoism, and hyper-Nationalism. They have massive inequalities of wealth, and a population schooled in Marxism. In the meantime, rapid economic, political, and demographic trends have made most government and societal institutions irrelevant.
Faced with this, what do you think the Chinese leaders want the most? Stability. Every single action they take, from supporting dictatorships in Burma and North Korea, to propping up the US economy with bond purchases, to refusing to float their currency. China has no urge to pick a fight with America, not now and not ever. They have their own problems to worry about, and the last thing they want to do is add another.
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Your problem is most people don't see dental care as health care, it's seen as an elective cosmetic and vainity thing. We know the the kind of havok periodontal or endodontic infections can have on the patients health, but tell the average person on the street that a gum infection can cause inflamation that can and does lead to heart attacks and kills people and they'll look at you like your stupid. The other problem is your dental school glossed over something and that's removeables, removeables are booming right now, monday I'm going to have to order more articulators. I've got so many dentures in the lab that I've run out of articulators friday, and the complete and partials are expected to just keep growing until 2025, yet most dentists just blow off denture patients, yet they refer out almost all of their extractions to OS and the majority endo all without get a referal fee from the specialists. If you want to make money, learn removeables inside and out, start doing your own extractions and endo except the really difficult cases, and do Medical billing whjen ever possible. Medical billing gives you bigger fees, less writeoffs and saves the dental maximums for dental care.
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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?
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