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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 ma

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.

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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.
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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.

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