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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.
Boss doesn't have one and he's a VP. Why should I pay for one?
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
The cost of education has skyrocketed to the point that it may have just become a bad investment. The cost of graduate degrees if one is required to get student loans to complete leaves you with years and years of debt. If you aren't lucky enough to land a high paying job as soon as you complete you degree you are left struggling to make the investment in education worth it. Basic economics-high cost means people won't buy. Numbers will most likely continue to fall as cost rises.
Sent from my TARDIS
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.
Education is no longer about advancing human knowledge or you making a contribution to that unless you started out independently wealthy. Getting a higher education is largely about being more valuable in the job marketplace to obtain more income. The value proposition of a PhD or a Doctorate in this context is suffering due to the Law of Diminishing returns. The cost of college education has increased dramatically due to the high availability of student loans and the amount of additional income you get from having such a credential is not proportional to the cost. It seems to me, some people depending on their needs consider a Bachelors Degree or an MBA to be the sweet spot in terms of garnering the income for their life's needs.
And you know... college is not the uber source of knowledge. If what you really seek is knowledge, you will always learn more from self-directed, focused study on the areas that you want to know more about. College is actually not the best source of information in my experience. Those with self drive will accumulate more knowledge faster without the college curriculum getting in their way.
We'll make great pets
Let's say you're in China/India, and want to work in the US.
You get your undergrad degree locally, and then come to the US to get a Masters. You then get to work for a few years on a visa (I think OPT-1), after paying for just 2 years of school. They could come as an undergrad in the US, but then you have to pay for 4 years of US school, which is not as good of a deal. This is the cheapest way to get a guaranteed work visa in the US--I would expect for some students, the schooling itself doesn't really matter, they are basically paying for the visa. And schools love it since they can get these students to pay full price for their Masters programs. The article itself mentions this visa program at the end in passing--but they miss the whole point.
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.'"
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.
If I got a CS Masters degree, it wouldn't significantly affect my pay or my ability to get another job. If I got a PhD, it might, but the odds are not all that good.
So why get one? "Love of learning" is handled by side projects that don't require sending off large tuition checks, and I can do that on a schedule that fits with the rest of my life.
Want more STEM graduate students? You're gonna have to pay them more when they're done.
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.........
It's just economics: Grad school has become an export commodity. Since it's one of the few areas where the US has a positive trade balance with the world, I wouldn't complain too much. From my experience, foreign grad students are frequently paid for in their entirety by their government. Meanwhile as a US student, funding grad school was entirely my responsibility.
It really depends on whether we are producing enough grad students, and if we feel grad degrees are important for our economy going forward. Foreign governments obviously feel American grad degrees are important to their economic growth and are willing to invest in them. If we agree, then we have to invest as well. If we don't, then we can consider grad degrees as mostly an export product, which is the direction we are headed in.
Completing a Master's or Ph.D. in a STEM field at a reasonably accredited U.S. university should guarantee a near-automatic offer of citizenship. To analogize to picking teams on the playground, these are the "ringers" you want on your team. They drive growth, and they're almost guaranteed to be net contributors with respect to taxes vs. social benefits.
Fixed it, thank you so much. Sincere apologies for the error.
One of the main causes is that overseas transcripts are often outright lies. Bought and paid for, no questions asked.
I have had many classmates and colleagues over the years whom I trust who were originally international transplants. Each any everyone of them when asked about the credibility or overseas transcripts of resumes has simply laughed and indicated they have no credibility. One of my friends recently had an issue with someone he hired from his own school back in India. The resume turned out to be fake, and the person who interviewed and showed up on day 1 were different people.
I'm an IT guy with a background in science...got a BS in chemistry way back in the day. The problem is that science is losing a lot of smart domestic people to investment banking, web startups, management consulting, etc. Foreign students come from places where scientists are revered, and that just doesn't happen in the US. When I graduated, there still was some room for a good career in the sciences, and I did consider it. But ultimately, I was kind of done with school at that point, had relevant work experience and chose to go with IT -- rather than slog through years of Ph. D. work to maybe possibly get a tenured faculty position.
Tell your average 22 year old that they have the choice of spending years as a researcher and a tiny sliver of hope for a permanent position, OR, go spend 2 years getting an MBA, work for Goldman Sachs and never worry about money again, OR, go work for Facebook/Google and devise new algorithms for getting people to click on ads, OR, go work for Accenture/PwC/other management consulting firm and get paid handsomely to deliver PowerPoints to executives. Which would you choose?
The only thing I can think of that might change this is a major world war with China or India that cuts off the supply of scientific talent willing to pursue this path.
The job market is rather abysmal for grad school graduates right now, particularly if they go to grad school with the ambition of some day being faculty somewhere with their own research lab and a teaching appointment. There are plenty of good jobs in industry for those who finish their master's or PhD but a lot of grad school advisors look down on those positions and encourage their students to do the same (for both the positions and those who take them). On top of that grad students - at least STEM PhD students - are paid on average $20-35k / year as grad students at most US schools which is terrible pay. Few students are able to live on that kind of pay for the amount of time that it can take to earn a PhD - and it doesn't get a whole lot better as a postdoc either (for those who want to make an attempt at the academic route).
And on top of that a lot of grad schools conveniently forget to tell their students that junior faculty - not that many grad students make it that far - are averaging eighty hour work weeks at the big research universities right now when they are getting started. 40 hours goes in to the tasks you associate with junior faculty - teaching, research, assembling and running a lab - while another 40 hours per week goes in to preparing grant proposals. At many schools the junior faculty who don't pull in a substantial grant by their third or fourth year are promptly shown the door.
The money isn't there, the job security is nonexistent, the job prospects are slim. Not many Americans are masochistic enough to go that way any more. Plenty of job tracks exist for those with 4 year degrees (or even less) that pay better and have better job security than those that open up for those with advanced degrees.
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"Harvard's idea of diversity is to have everybody look different but think the same" -- Harvey Silverglate
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
In the current GOP Tax plan, they are seeking to tax Grad students on the Tuition waiver (usually in the range of 25k to 50k). This would wipe out the meager stipends that middle-class and disadvantaged students require to live.
My son a Grad Student has a stipend of 20K at a school where the tuition waiver is worth 50k. He will have to pay taxes as if he were making 70K. He will have to drop out because he can't make it.
https://twitter.com/ClausWilke...
They are attacking the middle-class and education all the while giving the rich a huge tax break by repealing the Estate Tax.
So the premise of this post is that the US students couldn't understand the foreign accents but somehow all of the foreign students (for whom English was a second language) could magically understand it since students from Beijing have a magical ability to understand English spoken with an Indian accent or something like that?