4 ms·

This is quickly spreading into the corporate sector. I recruit occasionally and even at top tier schools, 90%+ of our applicants and career fair participants ar

This is quickly spreading into the corporate sector. I recruit occasionally and even at top tier schools, 90%+ of our applicants and career fair participants are foreigners. I've counted the resumes. I don't have anything against immigration per se, and I don't want to be accused of xenophobia or any such nonsense, but this is not ok. We are catering to international populations while essentially leaving our countrymen behind. It isn't just some blind nationalism that fuels my concern; if you don't fix your domestic problems, soon foreigners won't have any more incentive to immigrate...plus, in addition to the pitiful devaluation of the degree, there's already a glut of grads in almost every sector, including STEM. Something has to change. We will also see wages rise as the employee pool shrinks and locals are less likely to work for lower wages because they're not escaping third world poverty. It's high time to limit foreign students attendance. And maybe after that we can raise standards to recover what little prestige our schools had because between this international cash cow and diversity initiatives I can easily explain why so many people are graduating college today with minimal competence. Lowering standards makes us all worse off in the long run, even if your metric of "national college graduation rate" improves.

geebee 7y ago
Elite US students scheme to get into top law, MBA, and medical school programs, but they don't show nearly as much enthusiasm for graduate engineering programs. This is probably rational market behavior, the result of opening engineering up to international competition while sheltering the professions from it. As policy, the US government gives the bar and AMA tremendous power to exclude foreign degree holders and greatly limit the number of foreign nationals at US med and law schools. At the same time, the US government created a visa program to bring in hundreds of thousands of competitors in STEM fields, and created special exemptions to the lottery that encouraged US graduate programs to fill their classes with students from overseas. People can agree or disagree that this is good policy, but it seems pretty clear to me that the US interfered with the markets and created policies that encourage people who would like to live in the US but don't have that right to study engineering, and it encouraged people who already have that right to do something else, like law, medicine, or other protected fields. Even if you agree this was bad policy overall, there's a tremendous amount of room to disagree about how to solve it. Restrictionists might say that we should restrict all professions equally. Libertarians might say the problem isn't that engineering is wide open, it's that law and medicine and everything else aren't open enough.

geebee 7y ago

Elite US students scheme to get into top law, MBA, and medical school programs, but they don't show nearly as much enthusiasm for graduate engineering programs. This is probably rational market behavior, the result of opening engineering up to international competition while sheltering the professions from it. As policy, the US government gives the bar and AMA tremendous power to exclude foreign degree holders and greatly limit the number of foreign nationals at US med and law schools. At the same time, the US government created a visa program to bring in hundreds of thousands of competitors in STEM fields, and created special exemptions to the lottery that encouraged US graduate programs to fill their classes with students from overseas. People can agree or disagree that this is good policy, but it seems pretty clear to me that the US interfered with the markets and created policies that encourage people who would like to live in the US but don't have that right to study engineering, and it encouraged people who already have that right to do something else, like law, medicine, or other protected fields. Even if you agree this was bad policy overall, there's a tremendous amount of room to disagree about how to solve it. Restrictionists might say that we should restrict all professions equally. Libertarians might say the problem isn't that engineering is wide open, it's that law and medicine and everything else aren't open enough.