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).

Comments

Everyone is getting an MBA

[jfdavis668]

I know so many people who graduated in a STEM field who then go for an MBA to advance their career.

Re:Everyone is getting an MBA

[jellomizer]

As one of those STEP MBA, it comes down to a bunch of factors.
1. Ageism: As a Gen-Xer, I am getting too old to be attractive to the hot new tech companies. They look at skills such as SQL, C, C++, FORTRAN, SOAP, Unix systems as skills of a bygone era. While GO and Swift and No-SQL, RESTFUL Services as the future, Even if I put this new stuff on my resume, it is covered by the fact that I know the Old stuff too, and people think I am just padding my Resume.

2. Skill sets gap: What you study in Grad school vs. what the industry needs is quite different. If you code stuff too advanced then what the others can comprehend, then your code is mostly useless, because you will be stuck maintaining it, and not moving onto the new product, So you need to keep your skill at a level where the others can cover for your.

3. Limited Promotion Chain: As a tech worker, you can only get so far up, until the company decides you are too expensive for what they need. So you need alternate non-tech skills to keep yourself as a valuable asset.

4. Able to Talk the Talk: Having a technically competent MBA on your team is quite useful, as they can often explain things on how the bosses see things. Here is an actual Cost Benefit analysis of making your program run 10x faster, by fixing the indexing, at the cost of an 1 hour downtime. Present new ideas in terms of the company strategy. And being able to isolate the tech workers from a lot of the Executives bad decisions.

5. A way out of tech: As part of ageism, there may get to a point where I will not be able to adapt to the new technology. So with my MBA I can go directly into management even in a different sector all together.

Re:Everyone is getting an MBA

[Lord Kano]

That's the position that I find myself facing. I have a MS in a technical field but in order to advance my career, I'm looking at having to get an MBA that will only open career paths that I don't really want.

I prefer to remain technical but there's a ceiling that's difficult to break through without going that route.

LK

Grad schools discriminate

[Anonymous Coward]

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 do it somewhere else

[drinkypoo]

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.

Not a new phenomenon

[dtmos]

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.