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.

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.