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The Disappearing American Grad Student (nytimes.com)
There are two very different pictures of the students roaming the hallways and labs at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering. At the undergraduate level, 80 percent of the students are United States residents. But that number, The New York Times reports, falls below the 20 percent mark when you move to the graduate level (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled). From the report: The Tandon School -- a consolidation of N.Y.U.'s science, technology, engineering and math programs on its Brooklyn campus -- is an extreme example of how scarce Americans are in graduate programs in STEM. Overall, these programs have the highest percentage of international students of any broad academic field. In the fall of 2015, about 55 percent of all graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences and engineering were from abroad, according to a survey by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board. In arts and humanities, the figure was about 16 percent; in business, a little more than 18 percent. The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master's programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association. In comparison, only about 9 percent of undergraduates in computer science were international students (perhaps, deans posit, because families are nervous about sending offspring who are barely adults across the ocean to study).
I know so many people who graduated in a STEM field who then go for an MBA to advance their career.
Grad schools discriminate in favor of international students.
Two key factors why:
1) international students generally pay more money to the schools
2) the people selecting admissions for grad school think "if I admit this unfortunate international student then they won't be sent back to their home country where conditions are much worse than the US"
I have heard that second one straight from the mouth of an Associate Dean in a large US university's CS department.
It's cheaper to go to Germany and get it than it is to get it here in the USA, for example. And there's universities all over central and south america that are also excellent and maybe a goddamned order of magnitude cheaper. Maybe back when our schools were the envy of the world, it was worth it, but they were also a lot cheaper then, and that was also a long time ago.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More than just full price...a lot of these students pay a premium, in some cases as much as 3X what the average American student would pay. And a lot of these students are on a full ride, whether it's paid by their nation of origin or their family. It's enough of a financial incentive for the education institution that they actively reserve slots and recruit students into these programs.
It was enough that a close friend of mine had to shut down a very successful paid internship program for a defense contractor because they could not find enough candidates who would pass even the most basic government security because they come from China, India, Pakistan or Russia.
This ^^ and, a number of people Iâ(TM)ve worked with used it as a means to get a degree recognized in the US. Their original school in their home country may be decent there but has zero name recognition here. Or the educational standards are different. So they get into a masters program here to get the visa and to get a degree that is marketable here.
When I was in EE grad school, back in the early 1980s, I was one of six US-born EE graduate students, out of 102 grad students at my major state university. When a friend of mine went through the same program in the late 1980s, he was the only US-born Ph.D. candidate in the same EE department.
As a rule, the foreign-born graduate students with which I was familiar were smarter than I was and worked like dogs, frequently sleeping in the lab to avoid wasting the time needed to travel back to married student housing. They had and have my complete respect.
With so many foreigners in the hard sciences, and the graduate students in charge of classes and labs, it makes it very difficult for US students to learn because they often can NOT understand what the grad students are saying!!
This was a problem even way back in my college days. I had grad lab students and even a couple of professors trying to teach me that had accents so thick that I couldn't understand a fucking word they said.
Its bad enough when you're on the phone with tech support and can't understand them, but when you are in a class trying to learn some very difficult subjects (this really killed me in physics) and you spend most of your time just trying to translate what they are saying into Engrish, it is hard to learn the concepts.
I know it frustrated me in so many ways. It is even worse today in schools due to the situation mentioned in the article where the overwhelming majority of grad students and instructors in US colleges are foreign.
It's a vicious circle.
I won't even go into the cultural differences that often make things even more difficult.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'm working full time while pursuing a PHD. As a result, I'm getting paid significantly more than the cost of attending school but trading off a complete lack of time. I may not survive to graduation but so far the experience alone is worth it.