The comments in this discussion that talk about how foreign nationals look at a PhD as a short-cut to getting permanent residency infuriates me.
I have a CS PhD from a reputable mid-west school. I am also not a US citizen. When a person is considering investing 5-7 years of his/her life into a PhD program, I am quite certain the US immigration policy is not a motivating factor by any measure. You can apply for permanent residency under the EB-2 quota even with a Masters. The EB-1 quota is for "outstanding researchers" with truly exceptional skills, and who have made significant impact in their field of research. All the non-American PhD students I have met in my life (and I have met a LOT of them) have a real drive to innovate and be someone in their field of research. Sure, higher salaries (if they decide to enter the industry, as opposed to academia) are a strong motivation to some of them, but I doubt if permanent residency is.
I agree that it's possible to overstate the influence of immigration policy but I really don't agree that it is "not a motivating factor by any measure". When I was in grad school at Berkeley (didn't finish, dropped out with an MS), many international students were quite open about the benefits of a grad degree in gaining US residency, and expressed irritation that other fields weren't as open as STEM.
These are just our anecdotes, but there is some data to support this.
Take a look at this study from the RAND institute (historically a very pro-immigrant think tank) that compares STEM PhD programs to other options available to highly educated people with choice and concludes that the decision to avoid STEM graduate programs (PhD in particular) is a rational response to market conditions relative to the professions.
Here's the thing - those "professions" are much more closed off to international students than STEM graduate programs. This absolutely influences choice!
It's pretty clear that some fields and paths to graduate study in the US are far more open to non-citizens than others, and that visa programs targeting STEM fields do provide an extra incentive for non-citizens to go into STEM graduate programs rather than other study paths. This doesn't make it the only reason, or the main motivation, but I'd say it is a motivating factor to go to grad school.
I tend to agree with you that once the MS is achieved, the motivation would be lower, but it still influences the field of study.
> It's pretty clear that some fields and paths to graduate study in the US are far more open to non-citizens than others, and that visa programs targeting STEM fields do provide an extra incentive for non-citizens to go into STEM graduate programs rather than other study paths. This doesn't make it the only reason, or the main motivation, but I'd say it is a motivating factor to go to grad school.
What? This is the weirdest reason I've seen about why foreigners do STEM. Are you suggesting that it is because it is easier for them to get visas in STEM?!?
You are clearly ignorant of the gaping difference between STEM and non-STEM education in India and China. There are too many good STEM schools and too few non-STEM programs in these two countries for there to be any other reason for people doing STEM in US grad schools.
I continue to be surprised by the casual anti-immigrant bigotry on HN. Stating that they choose STEM because it is easier to get visas sure is an unfair stereotyping and second guessing of someone's motives based on their ethnicity.
You appear to be assuming either all non-US grad students are from China and India or that geebee was only writing about them. I see no reason to believe either is true.
I read geebee's comment to mean that it is possible that citizenship may be a factor. I happens to know someone, from Europe, who attended grad school in the US who also wanted to get his green card.
On that basis is it not conceivable that geebee may have a point?
India, China, and South Korea (all countries with heavy STEM emphasis) together make up close to half of all foreign students in the US [1]. At just the graduate level, India and China contribute ~70% of all science and engineering students [2]. It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
> That is precisely why a lot of us pursue STEM degrees - it is easier to immigrate with a STEM degree, and the job market is favorable.
That's a needless generalization. Can you back it up with data from surveys? It is an offensive suggestion that immigration is an end in itself. People doing PhD just to immigrate? You mean to say you would invest several years into education and forgo thousands of dollars of income and sacrifice certainty just to immigrate to the US? The end for most people doing a PhD is professional excellence, unless proven otherwise with data, immigration is secondary. The reason people choose the US for PhD is either because programs in their own countries are hypercompetitive to get into (not having enough quality PhD programs) and/or because the US is the world leader in research in almost every field in STEM.
For someone coming from India, you aren't necessarily forgoing thousands of dollars of income. My PhD years were quite relaxed, you can live frugally, you get a stipend, you work on interesting projects, and at the end of the day you have an option to live in a country with far more opportunity than the one you came from.
Fellow transplant here, if anything the US immigration system actively discourages people with options (smart folks who can focus and work hard for 5-7 years) from coming to the US. What brings/keeps them here is the network effect. This is sad, because the immigration system is immune to any feedback because of this fact. Namely their actions don't have any consequences. The system is a parasite, it has so far managed to thrive without killing its host. Either that continues indefinitely, or I really hope another center of knowledge puts pressure or better yet totally kills the US immigration parasite.
I can't speak for CS, but I got a PhD in applied math at a respectable school in Virginia and about 90% of our grad students were not US citizens. To my knowledge, every one of them left on completion of their degrees and I can't remember a single one who actually expressed an interest in staying. I think people who see STEM grad students as some sort of huddled masses yearning for US residency are pretty out of touch with reality. This isn't 1960 anymore.
"PhD as a short-cut to getting permanent residency infuriates me"
You should not be. There are managers with 1 year work experience outside US and they come to US in L1 Visa and apply for Greencard in EB1 - Multinational Manager category and gets their Greencard in less than a year. May be this should infuriate everybody.
By doing so these people use up the Greencard visas significantly. So EB2 guys from India who applied for Greencard in 2005 are getting their greencard now.
These days, even project managers (PMP) are getting EB1 green cards, if they know how to play the game right. I know a few who got through tthat route.
This is because of the field itself more than any other policies. I have an undergrad degree in Computer Information Systems. That was VERY appealing when I knew nothing about programming, the field, etc.
After having been in the field for 15 years, there are a few things that become very clear:
1. I did not need an undergraduate degree to do this. Some fields you need formal education in a controlled setting. This isn't one of them.
2. There is virtually nothing in this field that I feel I couldn't learn given books and free time
3. I am married with 2 kids and a good job. To pursue a PhD I've got to either put my job and my income on hold to go pursue it (while taking on the expense) OR pursue it in my spare time and encroach on my children's childhood. Neither are worth it.
4. Virtually nothing to gain FROM the PhD
I also have a Master's but I got that in a business field instead, which is tremendously harder to just get from books. Experience and connections in business are huge and that degree was worth every penny.
At this point, if I went back to school for anything it would probably be Law, Statistics or Finance. There's just nothing in the field of computing that I believe couldn't be better learned by experience.
> There's just nothing in the field of computing that I believe couldn't be better learned by experience.
Not sure I would agree. School gave me a bunch of the knowledge I'd very unlikely picked autodidactically. For example, the basic advanced maths package, which is a key to understanding numerous CS concepts. Finite state automations, Fourier transforms, dynamic programming, formal grammars, graph theory.. are not something I could be able to casually pick up with just high school knowledge and fumbling around. No doubt some people could, but am pretty average in this regard and I think the majority would relate to that.
I'd even argue non-academic things, like organizing a project, working in groups, being able to tell a dud from someone who delivers, meeting the deadlines and time planning, are better and less stressfully learned in the school.
With all due respect,i disagree with you.I have a master degree in computer science from a university in Chicago and i can tell you that most of these courses can be learned by yourself.You just need to be self-disciplined and self-motivated.And constantly ready to learn.This field is all about continuous learning.Nobody teaches me Chef,Docker,Ansible,AWS in the university.
Infact, American tech industry moves faster than most computer science departments in terms of new technology.
When i look at the course outline of online Master in Computer science from Georgia Tech last week,i laughed.You know what,you can learn it by yourself.Please see http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/courses/
I am a big fan of college education.But computer science is just not one of them.That is my experience.YMMV.My CTO has a degree in Visual Communication.He taught himself all what he knows.You know what,we both earn six figures,i can tell you that you wont know that he does not have any degree in computer science.
Computer Science is math. Chef, Docker, Ansible, AWS are industry technologies. You don't go learn CS to learn these, you want a trade school instead. Industry generally doesn't even work on the same problems that university CS departments work on.
In industry, a "hard" problem is one that takes more than a few weeks to solve. In academia, a hard problem is one that you don't even know if you can solve, let alone put a time frame on it.
And yes, you can learn anything on your own, but the number of people who actually go and learn the deep maths on their own is vanishingly small.
> I have a master degree in computer science from a university in Chicago and i can tell you that most of these courses can be learned by yourself.
Is there any skill in the planet that cannot be learned by yourself, given enough time?
Now, if you do have the self-discipline to learn everything, at the same level, without a teacher supervising and pointing out the mistakes you didn't even know you had made, congratulations.
In that case, though, why wouldn't you enroll anyway? It's like a self-signed certificate. You may have a valid one, but having someone else to validate gives it more credibility.
Well,you guys are part of the problem.That is high school kids end up spending/getting loans to go to college to study course they can easily learn at a fraction cost by themselves.
And not too distance reasons why boot-camps are everywhere.You try to make computer science/tech looks like extra ordinary adventures.I repeat you don't need four walls of university to learn almost everything you need to know in computer science.
If i had had information that i have now,i would have dropped out of college in a heartbeat.I don't need to give you any example of people who drop out of computer science study and still excel.They are everywhere.Don't say that these folks are exception because they are not.
I understand that some folks need structure to excel in anywhere they find themselves in life.
Horses for courses I guess. Personally, I don't see the basic volatile tech belonging to CS curriculum at all, it's the things you pick up from user manuals on your way of doing bigger things.
Do you assume that I would be a CTO of anything had I not stuck in the school, or? I didn't say that grad school is a shortcut to financial success, just a shortcut to understanding the harder CS problems.
>Finite state automations, Fourier transforms, dynamic programming, formal grammars, graph theory.. are not something I could be able to casually pick up with just high school knowledge and fumbling around
Was no real problem for me. (Though not 'casually' as I head to read up quiet a bit).
Well to understand Fourier transform for example you need to master the better part of the calculus as prerequisite. Did you get all the way to convolution theorem without taking any math classes? Then congrats, I'm certainly not in your ballpark.
IOI and IOM contestants (and those who do both) probably know much of the material. Most of them aren't geniuses, just kids with persistence, good guidance and lots of time on their hands.
I was an OI contestant but only a mediocre one at a national level. We've been trained by brilliant teachers until our noses bled, it does not qualify under "on your own" at all.
> There's just nothing in the field of computing that I believe couldn't be better learned by experience.
The rest of your post makes sense, but you lost me at this sentiment. There is a lot more to computing that information systems and programming. I'm glad your career worked out, but there is certainly much in CS that you will simply never learn in the field.
Definitely! This prevailing sentiment that practical experience can replace a CS degree baffles me. There's a vast array of topics in CS that aren't encountered in 95% of typical programming tasks. Then you've got the greater efficiency of learning when you learn things directly and can interact mentors and other students. No book or tutorial will have all the details down like a human that understands something. Then there is the crafting of a holistic program that ensures students get exposed to the right topics in the right order, building a strong theoretical basis. Also, more advanced or cutting edge topics are not going to be well documented so the academic world is a great place to get exposure. Also, you don't have career pressure to meet business goals so you can focus on learning. Also, the time structure and social environment helps with people that aren't completely self driven yet (the majority of young adults?). And then you've got the entire collegiate experience which gives you skills and learning and networking beyond your chosen field. I could go on.
I think people who trash university education either never attended, went to a poor school, or were studying something they didn't care about and thus never engaged properly.
The worst part is: you don't even know what you are missing in the first place.
Since we are all into anecdotes today, let me give you mine:
My co-founder once called me with some aggravation, because he was developing a feature for a client that needed, in a nutsheel, to figure out which points, out of a few million, were inside some arbitrary geographical boundaries.
His naive algorithm was taking minutes to process all the data, but the requirement was for real-time(ish).
Turns out I didn't even get to apply the space partitioning techniques that I learned in class. Just explaining to him the concept of pre-calculating bounding boxes was more than enough for him to implement a solution in less than an hour.
Since he had not even heard of them, he didn't know what to look for, or that there was an entire class of algorithms and data structures in computer graphics dedicated to that sort of problem.
Don't even get me started with things like dynamic programming, or mathematical logic. Are you seriously going to study something like that for months, if there's no-one pushing you?
Well now you've changed the goalposts with "a reasonable amount of time" and self-study rather than industry experience. More to the "experience" point, I can't think of many jobs that will expose you to the sheer breadth of a good undergrad CS curriculum: think a solid foundation in algorithms, networking, calculus, linear algebra, databases, advanced algorithms (randomized, approximation), programming languages, compiler design, ai of various sorts, numerical methods, theory of computation, to name the big ones.
The issue comes down to whether it's reasonable to expect a very large number of people to try to emulate the work of the true professional theorists. For the average programmer, it might be nice to know once in a while, but why this continued emphasis on a (formal) theoretical background?
"There's just nothing in the field of computing that I believe couldn't be better learned by experience."
I don't know what it's like on the Ivy League School level, but on the community college level; it seems like the courses are at least five-ten years out of date. (I'm not dumping on community colleges either. I have gotten more out of community colleges than state, or UC courses. I've alway been a huge supporter of community colleges.)
I really wanted to support my local community college, and learn something new, but every year I look through the offered courses, and even the catalogue, and it's just not worth the time, and now the money. The course are just too basic, and dated.
I honestly think tenure is to blame. Plus, I don't think most administrators know anything about computing, and just rubber stamp these antiquated courses. It's a shame because my local community college is surrounded by tech workers, and kids/adults who want to learn this stuff.
What do you mean "five-ten years out of date"? Most CS topics are decades old: algorithms, computer architecture, language/compiler/OS design, basics of networking, basics of databases, etc. All that hasn't changed much in the last 10 years.
>To pursue a PhD I've got to either put my job and my income on hold to go pursue it (while taking on the expense)
In other sciences, schools typically provide free tuition in addition to a decent annual stipend (for housing, food, supplies, entertainment, etc.). I'd guess most CS PhD programs are similar.
>Virtually nothing to gain FROM the PhD
That is probably true if you go into it assuming that. The idea is that you already have a longish (2-6 years) project that you want to work on. You gain whatever you'd like.
>There's just nothing in the field of computing that I believe couldn't be better learned by experience.
Right. It's fascinating how often I hear people saying that can learn by experience but wouldn't do a PhD.
A PhD is a guaranteed salary for five years to do pretty much whatever you want (plus a bit of politicking to explain to someone why what you're doing is related to an existing grant, which is way easier than it sounds). And bonus: you get to work on things that no one has ever done before, instead of just teaching yourself stuff everyone else already knows out of a book.
You're missing the single best part of it: add on top of that mentorship from someone who's a world-class expert. My PhD advisor was probably the single best programmer I knew.
He taught me things about the Linux kernel that I'm not sure I could have learned anywhere else. I'm sure plenty of programmers are kernel experts, but none of them have the time to sit down and do an all-nighter hackathon with me the way my advisor did.
Give me a call when you find a company that lets its employees work on whatever they want with minimal effort put into politicking/explanation.
Plenty of excellent engineers take unpaid time off work between jobs for the opportunity to work on personal projects without interruption.
Point is, 30-40k/yr ain't bad pay for that sort of freedom.
EDIT: I've been in a PhD program. The reply to this comment DOES NOT describe a normal or healthy advisor/advisee relationship.
Ultimately, there should be a point in every PhD where the student carves out a project and works on that project, and it should probably happen before the student is spending most of their time on research. The student shouldn't have to play politics to convince people to allow him/her to work on their own ideas, as long as those ideas have scientific value.
If you find yourself consistently working 80 hour weeks and answering 2am emails, switch advisors or switch programs.
If you're just working on your advisor's stuff without any autonomy and/or don't have any say in the direction of your or your lab's research, switch advisors or switch programs.
A lot of the "bad press" PhD programs get aren't indicative of a healthy PhD and are not as common as they're made out to be. And never necessary. It's usually a combination of an abusive professor and a niave student. Which, BTW, happens in industry as well ("death marches" etc)
A phd isn't a 40 hour work week kinda gig, but it also shouldn't be abusive. But in general, it's really simple: don't let people abuse you, and if you're taking a pay cut in return for freedom, be damn sure you demand the freedom.
Calling it "freedom" could not be farther from the truth. You don't get to work on whatever you want unless you want to pay your own way. Stray a little bit out of your advisor's comfort zone and prepare to be put in your place. There will be plenty of interruptions, and you will spend countless hours digging holes and filling them back up as you carry out orders from emails that you get at 2am from your advisor.
That salary is abysmal when you add up 80-hour weeks over 5+ years. Add in the risk of failing out of the program or quitting, and you would have to (in many cases) be a fool to take the deal.
Not the OP, but I'm in a phd program right now and can see the light at the end of the tunnel. My experience has been great, my advisor has given me a lot of freedom to do the things I'm interested in. He has also taught me a lot ranging from technical stuff to big picture research issues to career advice. Obviously, our relationship has seen ups and downs, but show me a 4+ year relationship without ups and downs.
I hear about people with dysfunctional phd experiences and one of my friends is experiencing one right now. To be honest, the students are to blame at least partly for this. IMO the people who get most exploited are those who are most desperate for a phd. Like someone said in the reply to the linked comment, you shouldn't tolerate abuse, you need to do your research before you sign on the dotted line and you should be prepared to walk away if things do go south.
Sure, there are jerks in academia, but I've worked for a few different tech companies and there are plenty of jerks there too. We never think twice about getting out of a shitty job situation, but somehow people don't do the same in a phd program.
I also don't know what people are talking when they mention 80 hour workweeks. I do something like 40-60 a week. Some weeks are closer to 30 than 40, and the 60 hour weeks are rare. The people who do 80 hour weeks don't seem to know when to stop working, and they don't seem to be able to accept that there are others who are way smarter than them and working harder isn't going to make up for that. I realized very quickly in my phd that there were people here who were in a different league from me in terms of ability. If I'd tried to compete with them, I would have lost both the rat race and my peace of mind, so I didn't. What I do know is that my work is interesting and important and clearly people appreciate it, I'm satisfied with that. I'm sure I could be winning more awards and publishing 4 papers a year instead of 2 if I worked 20 hours more every week, but really, I don't want to do that.
And if there is no advisor there doing something you find interesting? Then you quit grad school, right. Since you are arguing total freedom in grad school, then the answer is that it isn't total.
I'm not arguing that there's total freedom to go to grad school and do what you want. I'm arguing that no one is forcing anyone to be in grad school doing something they don't want.
Interesting. Perhaps it's different in the US (I'm an academic in Australia at UNE), but in the Australian system, the system is designed so that the student has a great deal of freedom.
Ultimately, it is geared around your two major milestones of confirmation (at 1 year) and submission (at 3-4 years). As your supervisor is not an examiner for your thesis at submission, this means that you are very much in control of what you do and write in your PhD. Your supervision team are your board of advisors, not actually your boss. (Though usually their advice is good, well-intentioned, and worth heeding.)
This does mean that in grants, we have to be a little careful what we say will be done by PhD students, because it's always possible they'll head in a different direction instead!
Actually, as I understand it (I'm a fairly junior academic) most Australian academics prefer capable independently-minded students. That's not just because we're nice people, but because that's how the incentives work -- we're all time pressured, so students who we can be confident will produce a good thesis with just a bit of direction and advice are like gold dust. Ones that we need to give more direction to are also good -- we've been through the process a few times and can design some PhD-shaped research for you to do. Not-so-capable independently-minded students I guess could be a bit trickier, as it could take quite a lot of time and effort to get their research into a shape that will be approved by the external examiner. (I'm yet to encounter the last category though.)
But I'm yet to hear of a 2am email that a student must answer at 2am.
But then, Australian PhDs tend to be 3-4 years' pure research, rather than 5+ years including lots of TA work, so there are a few differences in the system.
Just chiming in to say that this depends on the country quite a bit (although I appreciate this thread is US-focused). UK PhDs have a lot of freedom to choose their research direction, and they're generally quite a bit shorter and less of a major life risk. My PhD was (supervisor 'challenges' aside...) a really positive experience for me overall, despite the fact that I worked out pretty early on that I didn't want to go further in academia.
I am curious what point are you trying to convey in regards to this article. The fact that PhD in the CS field is not so useful is the reason why more foreigners pursuing it? I am a bit confused.
There wasn't a return on investment for pursuing a PhD for me, I'd venture to guess that I took a salary hit by staying in school for my bachelor's degree vs. dropping out.
But the work that I do isn't research, and I'm not advancing the field -- just solving business problems. If I was born in the late 60s vs late 70s, pursuing an academic career would have been a great option, but that ship sailed.
> There is virtually nothing in this field that I feel I couldn't learn given books and free time
Nah, you just don't know what you don't know. There are subjects that are hard to pick up outside of a real course with an instructor, peers, projects, etc. Some areas of CS depend on graduate level math and would be very tough to pick up on your own.
Not sure what business field education you did but the experience and connections vs kicking your brain into a state of formal proofs makes me always say my CS degree was worth far more than my business education which was boosted more by contacts and networking long after uni.
This kinda blew up after I left so let me elaborate.
When I say some fields you need formal education in a controlled setting, there's a few examples I can give to provide context.
If you want to go into medicine, you can't borrow a friend and just try things on them. By the time you go into the field any mistake you make becomes critical and it's difficult to log hours and gain experience without a formal educational environment.
To practice law you need to be able to pass the bar, you need to understand decades of case history, legal precedent and how the entire system functions so that you can feasibly operate within that system.
To get into management you can potentially gain experience in volunteer organizations but to do so you're likely going to have enough of a go-getter attitude to be elevated to those positions in the first place. It's not quite the same as saying "I'm going to read these books and learn management."
To go into various fields of engineering there are a number of systems to be understood, sometimes expensive equipment involved and literal danger to other people if things aren't done properly. You can certainly tinker your way into an interest, but you need the formal education in a controlled environment.
There are many other fields that fit within that bubble.
For most of computer science you can pick up and book, sit in front of your laptop and work, learn, experiment, try, fail, learn, improve continuously for virtually no cost other than your own time. You need a goal, then to work towards that goal you learn what you need to accomplish it and pick up those pieces to begin. When it sucks, you learn why and figure out how to improve it. You start optimizing. You need to make something faster you learn how it works under the hood. You need to hook up to some other system you learn about apis. You need to make the interface better, you learn about UX.
The cost to learn is time and that's why this field is constant learning.
I agree with other posters that most people are pursuing advanced math in their spare time. Neither am I but I don't often need to invoke advanced math. I know there are areas where one would need it more, but these days I do not know many people in this field who do.
The crux of my point is simply that, some of the best programmers I know have never gone to college and are 100% self taught. There are very few other fields that you can say that about.
This is primarily a problem with immigration policies and bureaucracy that make it difficult to remain in the U.S. after graduation. Rather, the U.S. should be actively recruiting such high skill people and trying to handhold them through the paperwork.
I went through this process with my wife (who also holds a Ph. D. in a technical field, though non-computing), and even being married to a U.S. citizen, the process is so opaque and convoluted and petty, that only the most dedicated would-be immigrants follow through with it.
I work with some very capable foreigners. Some of them have been here for almost 10 years and still haven't gotten through the citizenship process. There is something wrong with that.
What benefit is there to employers to have people languishing with green cards for years on end? H1B -> permanent resident can be a long process, but it is rarely the longest part of the process. Once they reach the permanent resident stage they are more or less equivalent to a citizen with respect to employment.
I couldn't really say anything about the H1B program that hasn't already been said (you can see my post history as I've posted about it a few times myself)
Basically the way the program is run gives a lot of power to employers and very little power to employees.
In terms of salaries there are a few tricks employers use to suppress wages. Wages are set* by the department of labor but the data is very inconsistent which means you can hire someone as a level 4 software engineer with a market salary of 130k or you can hire her as a level 1 systems analyst at 65k... which do you think the employer picks? A big problem besides the nebulousness of it all is there isn't anyone responsible on the other side to verify.
* actually employers can submit their own wage data to support the wages given, which is just insane.
This is a major reason for reform of the visa system. If you get a US PhD you should be guaranteed a US visa. Studying a STEM PhD is free and mostly paid for by public grants aka tax dollars. If you force these people to leave you are using tax dollars to train them to go back and contribute to another country's economy. Instead they should be heavily incentivized to stay in the US and grow the US economy since we already wasted time training them.
For years China and India have been suffering brain drain to the US with their best researchers and engineers coming to the US but at least in china there has been a shift with more and more Chinese PhD grads choosing to go back most of which is because it is just too hard to stay in the US. They go back and work for upcoming tech giants like alibaba and other companies that are competing with US companies. So US companies are facing more competition from companies whose workers are trained in the US with grant money from US tax payers
For a lot of people, getting a higher education is not a decision made by economical motivations. When I decided to pursue an MSc, I was well aware that it's very possible that I would have had a higher lifetime income just staying in the industry, or being satisfied with a BSc. It's not about the money.
That is undoubtly one of the drivers but to my point, it would only matter if it was a driver that might explain why non-residents are more likely to get a PhD than residents.
I could see that being true. Perhaps non-residents value a PhD for family or cultural reasons more than residents do.
>> Isn't one of the drivers of this something to do with it being a path to work in the US after they (non-resident) get a degree?
>This applies to undergraduate degrees, too. Therefore the argument that restricts it to Ph.D degrees is moot.
You seem to have ignored his second point. Yes, it applies to undergraduate degrees, but undergraduate degrees are attractive to residents as well. An undergraduate degree is helpful for getting a good job, whereas a Ph.D doesn't doesn't do much in that regard.
> You seem to have ignored his second point. Yes, it applies to undergraduate degrees, but undergraduate degrees are attractive to residents as well. An undergraduate degree is helpful for getting a good job, whereas a Ph.D doesn't doesn't do much in that regard.
That's a fair point but I'm not sure the conclusion is necessarily the right one. The US has some of the best universities in the world. It makes sense, if they're unattractive for residents in terms of job prospects, for most of the clientele to be foreign nationals. My point was that it's essentially no easier to get a job (not on OPT) in the US because you were a student in the us. H-1B applicants go through the same process either way, the only difference being that applicants on OPT are already in the country which, I reiterate, doesn't really make the H-1B application any easier.
I went to the University of Illinois at Chicago for undergraduate CS, and very few of my classmates grew up in the US. I might be recalling this badly, but I'd say the number was on the order of 10-15%.
All of the native-born Americans seemed to be majoring in business and liberal arts. /anecdote
We all thought of it as a typical working-class immigrant progression: the first generation goes to engineering school (while working full time), their kids become doctors and lawyers, and their kids become artists, poets, and slackers.
> I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
>
> Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
I think that undergraduate degrees are generally viewed as the "next step" among many Americans and the ROI is generally viewed as a positive (regardless of it is or not). Also while you do need a work visa once your OPT has expired, PhDs can be used to get EB-2 or as part of EB-2 NIW or EB-1 applications which have much shorter waiting times than EB-3.
Undergrad degrees aren't the same because the employers that (ab)use the H1B/OPT program only really want masters graduates because it avoids having to declare being an H1B dependent which comes at a cost employers don't want to bear. This is why you have universities like UT Dallas (not to single them out, this is the fact at nearly all universities I'm familiar with, it's just that UT Dallas are one of the few that publishes demographic data) with nearly 100% of its cs graduate students being foreign. It's a nice little system that works out for education institutions and employers but with definite costs to pretty much everyone else.
> Agreed, but it's a lot easier + quicker for PhDs to obtain permanent residency as opposed to non-residents having undergraduate or Master's degree.
Perhaps. I think that's arguable, though. The only difference it might make is in the initial petition stage. The only situation in which I see holding a Ph.D makes any difference is if, for example, the applicant petitions for residency by claiming they are an "Alien with an extraordinary ability". This is rare enough that I feel it's probably no easier.
Exactly. Computing Ph Ds are not very attractive to commercially oriented U.S. citizens, because the content can be learned in situ, in books, online, through practice projects, with friends, &c.
But computing Ph Ds are great for 1) the small portion of people who want to become academics in the field, and 2) non-citizens looking for a path to transition into the U.S. economy.
Unfortunately, this is probably another instance where hidebound immigration policy is creating a bubble (in higher ed) while preventing human capital from attaining its highest and best use (in the private economy (at least for four years)).
because the content can be learned in situ, in books, online, through practice projects, with friends, &c.
"The content" of a PhD is largely about stuff that's not yet in any books or papers (let alone tutorials and practice exercises). The role of the PhD student is to write them (after discovering that content).
>s it a surprise when more of your graduates are foreign students?
This isn't a case of merely an increase in foreign student PhD's. It's that the degrees are primarily foreign students, even though as your link shows, they are a minority of students on campus.
Side note, I love that they decided to show the distance scale on the map.
Yes, it is opposite in grad school. Recessions bring U.S. students. In a booming economy, qualified students take high-paying jobs. In a recession, they ride it out in grad school. (I only have anecdotal evidence for this claim.)
"an internal report in the National Science Foundation, a key government agency, actually advocated the use of the H-1B program as a means of holding down PhD salaries, by flooding the job market with foreign students. The NSF added that the stagnation of salaries would push domestic students away from PhD study, which is exactly what has happened".
Many of the best research universities in the world are in the US. 95%+ of the world's population is not. The best schools have access to the global talent pool, so if the system is working even fairly well to identify great students, you would expect most PhD candidates to be from elsewhere.
There was a joke in the Stanford economics department a few years ago: "There are two American professors in the department, and one of them is named Bhattacharya"
It is not just Ph.D; it is the case in M.S in STEM fields. 99% of Masters students in STEM are foreigners, most of them are Indians and Chinese. Usually, these foreign master students puzzle why American citizens don't pursue masters.
It is rational for foreigners to pursue Masters in US. This has to do with these factors.
1. Many of these students come from countries where getting a tourist visa is hard. Even getting a H1B is hard too: look at the lottery ticket issue.
2. UK does not permit non-EU foreigners to work after finishing studies. So, it is irrational for those who borrow money to study to UK, then find work to pay off the debts.
3. USA gives 12 months OPT EAD permit after finishing their studies. If it is STEM masters, this OPT can be extended for 17 months. So, solid 29 months afte finishing 2 years masters. Given how hard is it to win the H1 lottery, it is a good choice.
4. There is 20,000 H1 quota every year for US STEM graduates.
5. It is very hard for many of these Masters students in US to get a decent paying job in their home countries. That's why, in India, etc., F1 visa is seen as a ticket to good living abroad.
American citizens/perm residents are equally rational as foreigners above. Their reasons are:
A. You don't need a masters degree to pursue PhD in the states. This is not the case in India and in many common wealth countries: you need to have masters to pursue Ph.D.
B. There is a chance that many students want to give up on Ph.D in the middle of their studies. So, they can use whatever credits they got to get Masters degree and drop out of the Ph.D program. This is the case when one passes Ph.D quals or not.
C. Some pursue masters to broaden their interest. Imagine someone with BA in Maths is interested in psychology, but don't want to pursue Ph.D. He just want to broaden his understanding. He will go for MS in Psychology.
D. For few, it could be moving from no-name school BA to MS in Finance at an Ivy League. HYP are in differnet category of Ivies from the rest.
E. The only masters Americans show interest in are: JD, MBA, MD.
Really, really unconvinced that's the case for computer science. Graduate level classes are definitely yet another cut above undergrad classes, and a lot of the sub-fields that are heating up right now are currently graduate-level only, and in many cases, likely to stay that way. You just aren't going to get into serious machine learning or computer vision in an undergrad course, without rewriting the entire required curriculum for that explicit purpose. (The prerequisites for those things are already considered senior-level courses.)
Disclaimer: I have one, but they paid me for it. I got it 2000-2002; a moment's thought will reveal why I thought that was a good way to spend those years.... (Spoiler: Which is better, being paid to get a grad-level degree or unemployment?)
in my experience the grad classes are whatever the professor can slap together at the last minute. the reason to get a graduate degree is for the research and mentorship and maybe you can get that out of a masters degree but probably not most of the time.
edit: if you can get paid to get a masters, then why not. support is usually tiered so that phd students are covered and whatever is left over can go to masters students though...
I've heard this as well - that a Masters in Biology/Genetics/etc science fields is, essentially speaking, a consolation prize for washing out. The best job (initial) prospect for people who hold that degree is teaching at a Community College. I don't mean that as a condescending thing, I just basically agree that the ROI is...not good...
This may be the case in CS, but for EE and other engineering fields, a master's degree is definitely worth it. The expanded job opportunities and differences in starting pay are worth the tuition most of the time.
I expect this is mostly because there is less funding available for students pursuing a Masters. If you can get funded by doing research or teaching, then the ROI of a masters is not bad for US students. It is typically 2 years and many employers treat it as work experience.
This is different for PhD students because you are talking about a potentially much longer period of time and much less ROI. This is especially true given the oversupply of PhDs in most fields relative to the number of actual tenure-track positions. If you can't get a tenure-track position, then you are probably over-qualified for most industry jobs and wont get much more compensation that someone with a masters.
For non-US students, the return is getting into the US on a visa and getting a post graduate technical degree from a US institution, both of which are much more likely to land you a US job (and probably wont hurt your chances in academia / industry in India / China either).
I've known PhD friends that will straight up lie on their resumes when applying to places and only list that they're a masters student. I'm fairly sure this is legal since they technically did graduate with a master's degree.
Regardless, it really shows how screwed up things are that you have PhDs that have to do this in order to find work. These are STEM majors, mind you -- to any naysayers.
Getting a PhD should be for people who want to go into research or university level teaching, but there really aren't enough research / higher ed teaching jobs for the number of PhDs supplied. The reason for the oversupply is that US universities use PhDs as cheap teachers, meaning that they don't have to hire as many lecturers (who would be PhD graduates), meaning less jobs for PhDs once they graduate.
As always, it depends on where you get it from. I will say that one of the best things about doing you bachelor level work in the US is the diversity of the students. However, US degrees are a LOT more expensive.
From my anecdotal evidence in grad school, this is largely true across many other engineering fields as well. I think some of it is driven by immigration policies and some by culture. A Ph.D. in the US doesn't get you as much respect these days as it used to. Other cultures place more value on higher education.
Also, in a lot of other countries, you can't do much with just an undergraduate degree.
This is pure speculation, but I think the devaluation on PhDs in America might have to do a lot with the large of influx of people in college just attending to "get a degree". I feel this made colleges more of a business than a place of learning with the large increase in revenues, and thus leading to PhDs and fields that aren't as respected or really don't have a basis for being around other than people are willing to pay for it.
Interesting data, but it seems like the CRA could use some data visualization help.
Instead of a rich gradient of color to indicate percent, it chooses a small subset of shades (and texture). I know- this is common, but since many percentages are close to 50%, it makes them stand apart too much. And then there is the mostly useless indicator of metric distance: the U.S. uses miles as the standard not km, and if you don't know how big the U.S. is, then the data in this map is probably of no use to you. Finally, a dotted texture was used that looks pretty 1990s, so it stands out too much with the others being solid colors. The colors aren't even in the same palette or color family. And the orange dots seem too fat and clash with at least one of those greens.
That is a bit surprising. When pursuing my CS PhD the breakdown felt closer to 60/40 non-US vs. US citizens. US born citizens were certainly outnumbered, but not to the degree that you observed. This was in NYC, however, the breakdown could vary geographically, perhaps?
Depends on the institution. I understand that higher tier research universities have a better graduate student ratio for domestic/non-domestic. My institution seems closer to 90% non-domestic for EECS PhD students.
I did my PhD in mid-west, and I literally only met 2 American PhD students during my entire PhD (majority was Chinese and Indian students who pursue a PhD as a gateway to a top job). I guess location is a big factor.
It also makes sense why there are less American PhD students in those kind of locations when you look from their perspective. If I were an American, there was no way for me to spend 5+ years of my life in mid-west with 1500K a month (instead, I could just lend to a top company in a good location with $$$$). But for most of the foreign nationals, such an experience is OK to bear with in return for a better life standard.
I'd imagine it's at least in part cultural. I got a job developing after receiving a two year degree almost ten years ago now, and have felt almost zero pressure to pursue further degrees. My career has grown beyond what I ever imagined too. American development shops and developers in my experience value degrees far less than actual experience and ability. You can jump right in and start having actual experience or you can spend 6 years in school and come out behind your peers. My 2¢ anyway.
Something that wasn't mentioned here: a Ph.D. in the US is a great way to increase your chances for an offer for professorship back home in Europe (or anywhere, really). That will skew the number towards people who fully intend to leave after getting their Ph.D. as naturally US naturals can derive no such benefit. In fact, if we imagine the opposite holds, they might well be penalized for getting their Ph.D. at a US university.
This effect could be explained by the international standing of the university without recourse to inverse-nationalist bias. A Stanford degree is better for an Italian than a Sapienza Rome degree. But a Cambridge degree is better for an American than a Georgia Tech degree. Since the US has lots of top-tier universities, you see lots of American-trained professors in European schools.
I've seen people arguing that you don't need a degree.
I think getting a BS in Comp Sci was the best decision I've made.
It made me well rounded and I've done many different things within the field of comp sci (web dev, full stack, mobile, etc...).
But I'm going back for a master in statistic so I can do data science. I don't believe a master in comp sci would help much because I have the foundation of BS in Comp Sci to pick up most comp sci book and further myself in CompSci.
Not surprising. I went to a public (UC) school for undergraduate and a private school for a graduate degree. > 90% of my TAs (who were on the PhD track) in both programs were from abroad.
I think this is true for PhD's in all male-dominated fields. (And it has a lot to do with male domination because the foreign students lean strongly male)
I don't know much about the doctorate process but do these people get scholarships/sponsorships? Most of the time those appear to be favored towards foreign students.
I have a CS PhD from a reputable mid-west school. I am also not a US citizen. When a person is considering investing 5-7 years of his/her life into a PhD program, I am quite certain the US immigration policy is not a motivating factor by any measure. You can apply for permanent residency under the EB-2 quota even with a Masters. The EB-1 quota is for "outstanding researchers" with truly exceptional skills, and who have made significant impact in their field of research. All the non-American PhD students I have met in my life (and I have met a LOT of them) have a real drive to innovate and be someone in their field of research. Sure, higher salaries (if they decide to enter the industry, as opposed to academia) are a strong motivation to some of them, but I doubt if permanent residency is.