4 ms·
I have serious reservations about empowering universities to bestow green cards or residency upon would-be immigrants. I highly value the good people who will c
by geebee 5y ago
I have serious reservations about empowering universities to bestow green cards or residency upon would-be immigrants. I highly value the good people who will come to the US, but I don't trust universities to handle this responsibility, as PhD programs have clearly become very abusive of their students.
Low participation among US citizens in graduate (especially doctoral) level STEM PhD programs is often attributed to poor math and science preparation in K-12 or college level education in the US. While there is some support for this explanation, a RAND study of US citizens with STEM undergraduate degrees and high GRE scores found that the aversion to PhD programs is rational and market based. In short, the aversion to PhD programs makes sense - even for those who are capable and prepared to enter them - when those students have other options. Professional school programs, including Law, MBA, and professional health care doctorates (MD, DDS, PharmD) have shorter completion times, standardized and consistent completion schedules, vastly lower attrition rates, better employment prospects, and higher salaries.
I'd like to draw a bit more attention to attrition rates. I was a doctoral student at UC Berkeley in Industrial Engineering - I mastered out to a good hob in industry, but it was not entirely voluntarily. The doctoral attrition rate was around 50% for my cohort. This is pretty typical, attrition rates are 35-50% for PhDs in science and engineering. By contrast, the attrition rate for the MD program at UCSF medical school is less than one half of one percent. This is pretty standard for elite law schools as well. It's not an exaggeration to say that elite PhD programs in STEM have an attrition rate 70-100 times higher.
Now, every time I bring this up on HN, someone does point out (reasonably) that dropping out (especially mastering out) of a PhD program in, say, computer science is very different from dropping out of med school. Someone with a BS and MS in computer science from Berkeley faces a very different professional future in tech than someone who drops out of med school faces in medicine. However, these attrition rates are astoundingly high. They are so high that we need to ask these universities - if PhDs are in such critically short supply that we must grant you the power to bestow US residency on those who receive them from you, why are your attrition rates 100 times higher than a comparably elite law or medical school?
These programs should face a reckoning. When a job gets lousy, when a program gets abusive, the market tends to correct itself. Talented people abandon the field in favor of other paths, a shortage emerges, and employers (including universities) need to sweeten the deal to draw people back into the field. The RAND institute recommended several ways universities could make STEM doctoral degrees competitive with professional degrees. But as long as they can offer aa path to residency and citizenship that is denied through other paths, there's no need to attract people with that choice. There's no need for a market correction when the government will fix this by giving you control over the degrees people who would like to live and work in the United States are allowed to have.
In closing, I want to be clear I support a system for skilled immigration - the US needs this. However, I remain skeptical of the need to specifically privilege graduates of US stem programs, especially at the doctoral level. If we take this approach, expect people with choice to show even greater aversion to STEM PhDs.
- robocat 5y agoI am really struggling to understand your point. The reasons for the different rates of attrition, and the outcomes to society matter, yet you say nothing about causes. It is good if engineers have the choice to drop out of postgrad to get a job in their discipline instead (is that why STEM has high attrition rates?) It is probably good if STEM has strict standards and the high attrition rate is because marginal students don’t make the grade. Good engineering matters far more to the world than good doctoring does. It is bad if medical students can get a MD regardless of their competency level? It would be good if MDs had a low attrition rate because the filtering to get accepted let through only 1.5% of incompetent students (causally seems unlikely, but just hypothesising!). A lot of the filtering for lawyers occurs when they get a job (bimodal distribution of pay).
- geebee 5y agoIt's difficult to distill a complicated topic into a comment, even a somewhat lengthy one. I don't like respond to a question with a link (after all, a reading list is not an argument), but in this case, it probably would be best for me to provide the RAND study rather than try to summarize it. https://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html I do need to mention something here - I've argued with people about this for a long time, and I've provided this link, but it is old now, from 2003. I believe that prospects for STEM graduate degrees have increased dramatically in the last 20 years relative to other professional degree programs. So while I do think the arguments in th RAND study still hold (especially around reform for doctoral program), I suspect that the argument that an aversion to STEM graduate degrees in favor of professional degrees (for people who are free to choose other fields and are not restricted by immigration or citizenship status) is not as strong as it was nearly 20 years ago. I believe this is probably due to (among other things) a huge increase in global demand for STEM workers and the disruption of the wage collusion going on between large tech employers.
- robocat 5y agoI think you are trying to say that STEM could follow an “MD model” as a solution to the shortage of STEM graduates. From your link, solution 4 is “Introduce two new professional doctoral degree programs for science and engineering built on the MD model. This fourth strategy would also reduce training costs and uncertainties, specifically for those whose career goals focus on professional practice rather than cutting-edge research. Graduates would have a firm grounding in a broad set of skills, understand how their skills fit in with other skill sets, and be able to keep up with the cutting edge. These new programs would feature a structured curriculum with well-defined completion criteria and a definite term, perhaps of four years. Their faculty would be practitioners with other sources of income, as in medical schools. The rapid growth of industrial parks, corporate-like technical centers, and corporate partnerships would facilitate this arrangement. As with existing professional degree programs, students would not normally rely on grants and fellowships but would instead look to substantially higher lifetime earnings to pay their own way. The attractiveness of this strategy depends partly on whether the current employment of S&E PhDs could be partly satisfied instead by holders of these new professional doctoral degrees.” To me that is just an academic hodgepodge of ideas that reads like wishful thinking. I suggest that if you wish to make your point clearly, perhaps expand it into a blog article, and back it up with the facts you have access to.