4 ms·

According to the chart in the article, >75% of grad students in EE and computer science at American colleges are international students. That is a shocking num

According to the chart in the article, >75% of grad students in EE and computer science at American colleges are international students. That is a shocking number to me. Entire grad programs are in serious jeopardy if the worst case scenario plays out.

nine_zeros 6y ago
> That is a shocking number to me. Entire grad programs are in serious jeopardy if the worst case scenario plays out. Wait till you realize how much young engineering and sciences talent would remain outside the US and how much investment they will attract.
JPKab 6y ago
Those grad programs are too large. The main draw for international students is often the visa, and the universities treat them as cash cows, often providing poor quality product. A friend of mine in a graduate physics program recently told me that he felt that 90 percent of the students lacked the aptitude to capitalize on the program at all, but that the university was financially incentivized to keep them in. Obviously, this applies to both foreign and domestic students, but the point is that these programs are grossly inflated.
- ecopoesis 6y ago
  This so much. I live in Boston so I end up interviewing a lot of new Northeastern grads. Foreign Masters students are the absolute worst cohort of candidates I deal with. The vast majority cannot write fizz buzz without help. A Northeastern Masters in CS seems to be nothing more then a way to buy a visa. This is doubly sad because Northeastern BS in CS grads are probably the most successful group I interview and hire.
  - tech-historian 6y ago
    FWIW, I've interviewed tons of CS Masters grads myself, US and international. Northeastern is not alone in awful coding skills. Makes me wonder what the typical curriculum is in a CS masters degree? How can so many people get a Masters without actually knowing fundamental programming skills? Not a great analogy perhaps, but you can't get a Masters in French without speaking the language right?
    - fredophile 6y ago
      This would depend on what specialty you're getting your masters in. What we would call theoretical computer science is really just math and predates computers. How many working programmers can explain fundamental concepts like the halting problem to a layperson? Clearly this knowledge isn't required to write good code but to use your analogy I'd say your average good programmer is more like the man in the chinese box than a fluent speaker of the language.
vmchale 6y ago
> That is a shocking number to me. Makes sense. American universities are top-tier and lots of talent is abroad! CS and EE in particular carry over in another country.
smm2000 6y ago
Many foreigners treat PhD and especially Masters program as a way to get visa and access to USA - doing actual research is secondary goal. $30k/year is poverty wage in US but solid pay for somebody from eastern europe, India or China. Programs will be in jeopardy because they won’t be able to do visa/salary arbitrage which could positive thing and lead to more Americans in those programs.
- tsycho 6y ago
  Doing a Master's/PhD from a good university isn't a cakewalk for these foreign students. It's not something you just buy and forget with your parents' money - you have to work quite hard, compensate for language and other educational gaps, and then succeed in landing a good job and the H1B lottery. It's a risky investment. America must ask itself why its students are not interested in grad school. Unaffordability (especially after an expensive undergrad) is absolutely a major issue, but from my experience at an Ivy, very few Americans were interested in grad school. And maybe that's fine, because doing research* is probably something that makes sense only for a small percentage of students. So there may not be a problem here, unless increasing this is an actual goal. Without explicit measures, and with a more globally accessible approach to admissions, it stands to reason that the PhD demographics would move towards global population ratios, adjusted for access and affordability. And that's been the secular trend of the past 20 years. *Master's is not research, and is primarily a way for universities to make money.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    I remember the professor asking a student from China how he was doing with the class being taught in English. The student replied, "Uh... book. I read book." At that moment I caught a glimpse of how big the language barrier could be, and how much sheer work it would take to overcome it.
  - fredophile 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure there is a portion of H1Bs that is reserved for people with advanced US degrees. Doing grad school in the US can dramatically increase your chances of getting an H1B.
norswap 6y ago
It's funny to me how wrong all of the answers of this thread are: These programs are too broad. / The talent is abroad. / This is a ticket for a Visa. Those may all be more or less true, but the broader issue of why these programs are mostly populated by foreigners is that they're too expensive (for master degrees) and vastly underpaid compared to market rates for PhD degrees. (Consider the strike at UC Santa Cruz by PhD students for a wage that would allow them to cover their living expenses without having to commute hours to campus.) US students, which most likely have already contracted debt to finance their undergraduate degree will simply go get a job that both pays better and may boost their carreers more, and may come with more social status, given the current wave of anti-academic sentiment.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- andonisus 6y ago
  The programs are so expensive because there is such a large supply (or rather demand) from wealthy international students, even if they college or university is far less prestigious than this cost would otherwise suggest.
- chias 6y ago
  Having gone through a PhD program myself, this smacks of truth. In the PhD program I went through, it was predominantly populated by foreign students and Americans whose parents paid for their undergrad (like me). Unlike in the United States, foreign college graduates typically don't have a massive amount of debt to pay off. When you graduate college and owe $35-120k in student loans, deciding between "lets get a job with actual pay" versus "lets make essentially no money for another 4-8 years" is a very easy question to answer, and it doesn't favor going to grad school. If you're American, your options are (1) very cheap undergrad, which makes it more difficult to go to grad school, (2) large amounts of debt, which makes it infeasible to go to grad school, or (3) have had your undergrad paid for, which is inaccessible to most.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
qppo 6y ago
Idk about everyone else but personally, the opportunity cost of a graduate degree makes it unlikely I'll ever go back and get one.
siberianbear 6y ago
I was very active in the university recruiting effort at large Silicon Valley for many years. I went to tons of university career fairs. This statement is wholly true. At the undergraduate, the majority of students were US citizens (but there were still a lot of foreigners). But at the master's and PhD levels, virtually everyone was a foreigner.
hakfoo 6y ago
It does seem like there'd be an obvious pivot from student visas. "Loved your college experiencem? Stay in the US! Here's a two year work permit, and if you get a position in your field, maintain it for 12 months, and show you're paying down any student debt you've accrued, you can convert it to a green card.
rapjr9 6y ago
One of the reasons many foreign grad students come to the US now is because there are so many foreign grad students they can find a community of fellow nationals which makes them feel less isolated and helps them in coping with a new culture. As the number of foreign students declines there will be less community which will make coming to the US less desirable. I worked at Dartmouth in CS and most of the grad students were foreign, at first mainly from China, but later many from India also. My understanding is that a big part of the economic hit for universities is the profit from providing housing. If undergrads are not on campus, the profit vanishes. Dartmouth has historically cut staff and expenses rather than use it's endowment to weather crisis. They say it's because much of the endowment is tied to specific purposes, like building new buildings with the donors names affixed there-on. So a big endowment may not be of much value in weathering the current crisis if you can't spend it and your cash flow dries up.

nine_zeros 6y ago

> That is a shocking number to me. Entire grad programs are in serious jeopardy if the worst case scenario plays out. Wait till you realize how much young engineering and sciences talent would remain outside the US and how much investment they will attract.

JPKab 6y ago

Those grad programs are too large. The main draw for international students is often the visa, and the universities treat them as cash cows, often providing poor quality product. A friend of mine in a graduate physics program recently told me that he felt that 90 percent of the students lacked the aptitude to capitalize on the program at all, but that the university was financially incentivized to keep them in. Obviously, this applies to both foreign and domestic students, but the point is that these programs are grossly inflated.

ecopoesis 6y ago
This so much. I live in Boston so I end up interviewing a lot of new Northeastern grads. Foreign Masters students are the absolute worst cohort of candidates I deal with. The vast majority cannot write fizz buzz without help. A Northeastern Masters in CS seems to be nothing more then a way to buy a visa. This is doubly sad because Northeastern BS in CS grads are probably the most successful group I interview and hire.
- tech-historian 6y ago
  FWIW, I've interviewed tons of CS Masters grads myself, US and international. Northeastern is not alone in awful coding skills. Makes me wonder what the typical curriculum is in a CS masters degree? How can so many people get a Masters without actually knowing fundamental programming skills? Not a great analogy perhaps, but you can't get a Masters in French without speaking the language right?
  - fredophile 6y ago
    This would depend on what specialty you're getting your masters in. What we would call theoretical computer science is really just math and predates computers. How many working programmers can explain fundamental concepts like the halting problem to a layperson? Clearly this knowledge isn't required to write good code but to use your analogy I'd say your average good programmer is more like the man in the chinese box than a fluent speaker of the language.

vmchale 6y ago

> That is a shocking number to me. Makes sense. American universities are top-tier and lots of talent is abroad! CS and EE in particular carry over in another country.

smm2000 6y ago

Many foreigners treat PhD and especially Masters program as a way to get visa and access to USA - doing actual research is secondary goal. $30k/year is poverty wage in US but solid pay for somebody from eastern europe, India or China. Programs will be in jeopardy because they won’t be able to do visa/salary arbitrage which could positive thing and lead to more Americans in those programs.

tsycho 6y ago
Doing a Master's/PhD from a good university isn't a cakewalk for these foreign students. It's not something you just buy and forget with your parents' money - you have to work quite hard, compensate for language and other educational gaps, and then succeed in landing a good job and the H1B lottery. It's a risky investment. America must ask itself why its students are not interested in grad school. Unaffordability (especially after an expensive undergrad) is absolutely a major issue, but from my experience at an Ivy, very few Americans were interested in grad school. And maybe that's fine, because doing research* is probably something that makes sense only for a small percentage of students. So there may not be a problem here, unless increasing this is an actual goal. Without explicit measures, and with a more globally accessible approach to admissions, it stands to reason that the PhD demographics would move towards global population ratios, adjusted for access and affordability. And that's been the secular trend of the past 20 years. *Master's is not research, and is primarily a way for universities to make money.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  I remember the professor asking a student from China how he was doing with the class being taught in English. The student replied, "Uh... book. I read book." At that moment I caught a glimpse of how big the language barrier could be, and how much sheer work it would take to overcome it.
- fredophile 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure there is a portion of H1Bs that is reserved for people with advanced US degrees. Doing grad school in the US can dramatically increase your chances of getting an H1B.

norswap 6y ago

It's funny to me how wrong all of the answers of this thread are: These programs are too broad. / The talent is abroad. / This is a ticket for a Visa. Those may all be more or less true, but the broader issue of why these programs are mostly populated by foreigners is that they're too expensive (for master degrees) and vastly underpaid compared to market rates for PhD degrees. (Consider the strike at UC Santa Cruz by PhD students for a wage that would allow them to cover their living expenses without having to commute hours to campus.) US students, which most likely have already contracted debt to finance their undergraduate degree will simply go get a job that both pays better and may boost their carreers more, and may come with more social status, given the current wave of anti-academic sentiment.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
andonisus 6y ago
The programs are so expensive because there is such a large supply (or rather demand) from wealthy international students, even if they college or university is far less prestigious than this cost would otherwise suggest.
chias 6y ago
Having gone through a PhD program myself, this smacks of truth. In the PhD program I went through, it was predominantly populated by foreign students and Americans whose parents paid for their undergrad (like me). Unlike in the United States, foreign college graduates typically don't have a massive amount of debt to pay off. When you graduate college and owe $35-120k in student loans, deciding between "lets get a job with actual pay" versus "lets make essentially no money for another 4-8 years" is a very easy question to answer, and it doesn't favor going to grad school. If you're American, your options are (1) very cheap undergrad, which makes it more difficult to go to grad school, (2) large amounts of debt, which makes it infeasible to go to grad school, or (3) have had your undergrad paid for, which is inaccessible to most.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

qppo 6y ago

Idk about everyone else but personally, the opportunity cost of a graduate degree makes it unlikely I'll ever go back and get one.

siberianbear 6y ago

I was very active in the university recruiting effort at large Silicon Valley for many years. I went to tons of university career fairs. This statement is wholly true. At the undergraduate, the majority of students were US citizens (but there were still a lot of foreigners). But at the master's and PhD levels, virtually everyone was a foreigner.

hakfoo 6y ago

It does seem like there'd be an obvious pivot from student visas. "Loved your college experiencem? Stay in the US! Here's a two year work permit, and if you get a position in your field, maintain it for 12 months, and show you're paying down any student debt you've accrued, you can convert it to a green card.

rapjr9 6y ago

One of the reasons many foreign grad students come to the US now is because there are so many foreign grad students they can find a community of fellow nationals which makes them feel less isolated and helps them in coping with a new culture. As the number of foreign students declines there will be less community which will make coming to the US less desirable. I worked at Dartmouth in CS and most of the grad students were foreign, at first mainly from China, but later many from India also. My understanding is that a big part of the economic hit for universities is the profit from providing housing. If undergrads are not on campus, the profit vanishes. Dartmouth has historically cut staff and expenses rather than use it's endowment to weather crisis. They say it's because much of the endowment is tied to specific purposes, like building new buildings with the donors names affixed there-on. So a big endowment may not be of much value in weathering the current crisis if you can't spend it and your cash flow dries up.