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

Cost

[sqorbit]

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.

Re:Cost

[Goldsmith]

Ah, this misconception keeps being put out there. I agree that graduate education is generally a poor investment, but it's not because of the cost.

A PhD in STEM typically does not require any student fees paid by the student. If your university is requiring you to pay fees out of pocket to do graduate research, you're at the wrong place. Run away very quickly. Not to put to fine a point on it, but in the US, the vast majority of STEM grad students are paid to go to grad school. More than that, if you're a potential immigrant to the US, the visa you need to be a student is much easier to get than what you need to work, and is almost always sponsored by the university.

There is a cost to getting a PhD, though. You'll spend 3-8 years making a very low salary, working on a project that may not go anywhere, for a degree that in the end you may not get. Your experience will not directly translate into marketable skills, and may not translate into a higher salary.

I have a PhD, and employ many scientists in PhD and non-PhD positions at a company. Our good junior scientists don't go to grad school because 1) they're paid at least double what they'd make as a grad researcher and 2) they see that in the real world, having a PhD does not translate directly into a better job.

There is a societal cost to subsidizing STEM grad students. First is an over-supply of labor. Again, very simply: we have too many PhDs. We produce many more PhDs than there are PhD level jobs available. This has been discussed many times on Slashdot in the last few years. Second, universities gain extraordinarily cheap labor that is generally paid for by external sources (grants). This creates a strong downward wage pressure. It's very easy for a company to go to a very good university and pay a research team a fraction of the market cost for performing a study. I have to justify the value of keeping our IP in house to maintain our internal professional science team.

The result is a job market that disadvantages higher education, and a higher education system that values grant winning more than job skills. In my field (physics) we've been on this downward spiral of growing disconnect between market and academy since the 1970s.

It's the visas

[kent.dickey]

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.

No surprise there

[damn_registrars]

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.