Percy Deift, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, and Sergiu Klainerman write,
Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals. In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.
That report also concluded that many programs in these fields couldn’t even be maintained without international students. In our field, mathematics, we find that at most top departments in the United States, at least two-thirds of the faculty are foreign born. (And even among those faculty born in the United States, a large portion are first-generation Americans.) Similar patterns may be observed in other STEM disciplines.
Later,
China pursues none of the equity programs that are sweeping the United States. Quite the contrary: It is building on the kind of accelerated, explicitly merit-based programs, centered on gifted students, that are being repudiated by American educators. Having learned its lesson from the Cultural Revolution, when science and merit-based education were all but obliterated in favor of ideological indoctrination, China is pursuing a far-sighted, long-term strategy to create a world-leading corps of elite STEM experts.
Have another nice day.
An immigration policy that I fully support. There should be a free green card stapled to every one of those diplomas.
Of course this is portrayed as a failure of American STEM education but in reality domestic students just better understand the job market. Why get a PhD in Math to fight tooth a nail for an ever shrinking and increasingly competitive job in academia publishing marginal papers that push the limits of our understanding absolutely no where. Most domestic students understand that is a dead end and pursue medicine, law, investment banking, management consulting, and computer sciences instead since those are the only fields left where you have a prayer of making enough to pay off student loans and possible even afford a house in a US metro area. Unfortunately technologically stagnant economies have no need for STEM academics. The foreigners are just being tricked into thinking we are still a technologically progressing society.
I wonder if that Math PhD would seem more valuable to American citizens if we didn’t import so many foreign STEM students.
Two thirds of the faculty are foreign born. Maybe U.S. schools should only hire American STEM faculty for a little while to help even things out? For diversity’s sake, of course.
Right.
“The National Jurist reports that the median salary for first-year associates at law firms with less than 50 employees was $90,000 and for firms with over 75 lawyers, starting salaries ranged from $126,500 to $168,250.”
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BLS Stats Mean Entry-Level Salary
Biomedical Engineering $62,328
Chemical Engineering $68,031
Civil Engineering $58,840
Computer Engineering Computer Hardware Engineers Software Developers, Systems Software $75,376
—30—
Well, duh. Get a law degree.
Interesting:
“RBA Governor Says International Border Closure Could Fuel Surge in Wages
Australia could face a surge in wages growth and inflation if the closure of the country’s international borders to foreign workers continues for some time, Reserve Bank of Australia Gov. Philip Lowe said Thursday.
In a speech to economists, Mr. Lowe said the most significant challenge to labor supply in the country was the closed border, which has normally been a major source of skilled workers for the economy over many decades.”
—30—
Immigration policy has been a de facto war on America’s employee class for two generations now.
You want to promote math? We live in a capitalist society. Get the wages up, and way up. Show students they can start at $150k a year in computer science—and maybe get a scholarship.
Right now, the market says STEM grads are not valuable.
America produces top-notch lawyers.
Oh, yes, by all means, let’s have lots more lawyers. I’m sure that will solve all our problems.
Remind me, was it mathematicians or was it lawyers who invented critical legal theory?
… this isn’t true. tech jobs are valuable, desirable and popular. If you knew many tech workers, I don’t think you’d say this. I work full time as a programmer. I consider myself fortunate and others with similar jobs fortunate.
The other big test is do adult workers advise their children to consider the field: that’s where adult workers who know the field make a choice with their precious children, where they have skin in the game. I would advise my kids to consider that field if that was what interested them.
By the way, I’m pretty sure you’re comparing wages for a STEM bachelor’s degree to wages for lawyers with three additional years of schooling.
And the distribution of lawyer salaries is bimodal. Most law school graduates earn in the $30,000 range. Then there is the clump that earns $90,000 plus.
Sorry I keep going back to this… And let’s not forget that people with STEM degrees are doing something useful, unlike most lawyers.
@Arnold Kling:
“And the distribution of lawyer salaries is bimodal. Most law school graduates earn in the $30,000 range. Then there is the clump that earns $90,000 plus.”
Bimodal distribution per “Cravath System” is generally correct, however (a) those numbers need to double (see latest from NALP), and (b) those are only starting / ‘probationary’ associate salaries for new graduates, and typical salaries averaged over a legal career are more converged and normally distributed and higher (see latest from BigLawInvestor).
In terms of making a choice between a legal career and STEM PhD for someone with the talent and potential to pick either option, I’d say it’s still rational for a typical American to choose law as a professional ecosystem that is much less distorted by factors related to immigration, or, from another perspective, just as distorted but in an American citizen’s favor.
As for (a):
About 25% are making more than $160K, to start, at 25 years old (!), and about half make from $45K to $75K. But, keep in mind, that a lot of lawyers get their start as law clerks or other new government employees, and starting pay is low with quick increase then plateau per the usual “wage compression” structure. This really distorts that ‘new graduates’ statistic, since a clerkship is more like internship / teaching-assistant-with-stipend, most being hired at starting steps in grades 11 or 12. Most clerks go on to earn a lot more as soon as they are done with their clerkship.
As for (b):
Consider typical lawyer salaries in a ‘normal’ state like, say, Iowa, in percentiles:
10th: $50K
25th: $69K
50th: $94K (average is $112K, so mean vs median not crazy different)
75th: $130K
90th: $201K
I think my point stands as a reasonable one, which is, one can’t use the percent of immigrants in those STEM programs to draw an inference about the “quality” of domestic American STEM education or human capital in terms of student potential and talent. The sad face is that it’s just not a very attractive lifestyle and competitive payoff matrix.
I’m not saying American STEM education is all that good either, only that this is not a good data point from which it is reasonable to draw that conclusion with confidence.
The usual economist response to “look at this shortage!” is not to criticize the education system but to respond, “There is no such thing as a shortage in a functioning market, you are just complaining about price and the costs you must pay to attract resources from other uses to get the supply you say you want.”
Well, here we are talking about a ‘shortage’ of Americans able and willing to go the STEM PhD route, but the must bigger problem is in the ‘willing’, not the ‘able’, because foreigners expecting to get valuable immigration benefits will accept levels of compensation lower than an American with equivalent talent can more securely obtain in alternative professions and careers.
Some of the comments here consider that a feature of our immigration system, but I think it’s a bug.
The question is, why does our society favor lawyers over mathematicians, scientists, and engineers? If we want to be competitive with China and other countries in technology development, we need STEM, not lawyers. I think we’re too comfortable about the fact that the U.S. has been the most innovative country up to now, and places like China have not been very good at that sort of thing. Are we really sure that will continue to be true?
The problem with tech jobs isn’t money. I know lots of people who’ve worked in tech for 10+ years: a common view is the money is good and comfortable, but often the work is boring and unfulfilling. I just talked with someone who quit a tech job for a lower paying job as a CrossFit trainer because it’s more fulfilling work. A common scenario is people who train at advanced math, they get a tech job, they like the money, but get frustrated with the work itself, it’s not what they wanted or expected, and many have a hard time doing the job seriously.
I know a few super rich + successful lawyers, but I know lots of lower tier lawyers who hate their jobs; even wen they pay is good they dislike the work. It’s not just a few mediocre workers, that seems a common trend. I don’t see legal careers as safe bets for a happy career.
This is exactly what I was thinking. I am pretty sure that a US student that is qualified for a STEM PhD program will dramatically lower their lifetime earnings if they pursue one instead of going and getting a job immediately after getting their bachelor’s degree. For a lot of the foreigners, getting that PhD increases their lifetime earnings, in large part because it is a good way to get into the US.
This was my personal experience. An American focusing on pecuniary matters like raw wages is competing with foreigners for whom the expected immigration benefits are a substantial part of the total perceived compensation for the work, and risk.
Even if their PhD doesn’t ‘pan out’ in terms of an actual professorship or job in their field, getting the immigration benefit that allows them to stay in American to do anything else still makes it a worthwhile course of action. For an American, that is no improvement, and would just mean all their lost time and foregone higher wages would just have been a total waste and big mistake.
Since you can pay such foreigners a lot less and hold the denial of those immigration benefits over their heads for any slip-up or complaint, it’s no wonder most institutions are happy to get just as high a percentage of them as the law allows. Those deviations from the counterfactual domestically-supply labor market do not by themselves justify an inference that American STEM education is incapable of or failing to teach talented people STEM skills, only that many STEM-capable students pick up that STEM often doesn’t pay and PhD-life requires one to spend one’s youth in low-pay grind for many years.
And then their kids – if they have any in our IQ-shredder society – can do what other Americans do and find more secure and remunerative employment in other sectors.
Also, it bears mentioning that one can pass a critical mass of foreigners in any field before that fact by itself is discouraging to native-born Americans who know they will experience intense social alienation in such an environment. If they foreigners were equally distributed among the various nationalities, then one would end up with the “polyglot boarding house”, and probably default to English language and American cultural and social norms. But the fact is that just a few countries have dominant representation, and so professional or institutional life is dominated by ethnic enclaves and cliques in which someone from China or India can feel more at home and more among their element than an American born and raised a block away from that campus.
What happened to the null hypothesis watch? Did it disappear like a fart in the wind?
Go ahead and let them get their advanced degrees in mathematics or what have you. It shows grit + IQ, even if the degree itself is worthless.
They can easily transfer those skills to something more remunerative post graduation.
But seriously, let them stay permanently. At the very least, they can spend their time and education engineering an impenetrable wall at the Southern border.
But seriously, let them stay permanently. At the very least, they can spend their time and education engineering an impenetrable wall at the Southern border.
When you see that Asians are happier than other groups about the declining white share of the population, does it affect your enthusiasm for admitting more of them?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/23/most-americans-say-the-declining-share-of-white-people-in-the-u-s-is-neither-good-nor-bad-for-society/?
@chendolf
I loved my Korean shitlod classmates in high school, but it seems a generation in the west makes globohomo of us all. The best argument against Asian immigration is that they are conformists at heart, and they conform to globohomo if that is their closest status ladder at hand.
It’s not just PhDs, it’s STEM majors as well. And the market for STEM phds isn’t bad. You can go into industry pretty easily. Not like getting an English PhD.
Foreign graduate students expect to receive stipends paid for by US taxpayers. Additionally, they expect government privileged career tracks and government privileged social circles. That seems less noble than a person working on the free market, and earning their income by delivering value to others.
Funny thing about foreign students, they haven’t been subjected to the dozen or so years of US schooling with its emphasis on denigrating STEM and the useful arts in favor of sports and English lit. How to use math outside the classroom is not taught. In the end, it is all academic.
I teach a Saturday computer class during the school year to tweens/teens and reserve part of class time for supplemental topics.
One of those topics is immigration in tech where we review an article (referenced below) which states that outsourcing firms underpay their employees at least $30K/year versus the big tech firms and there were 300K Indians on ‘temporary’ visas waiting for green cards at the time the article was written.
I also quote the adage “you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate” and tell them not to be too ideological when choosing a career.
Reference – https://hbr.org/2017/05/the-h-1b-visa-debate-explained
US universities coercefully take lavish fuding from US government and US citizens to provide career advancement + social status advancement to foreigners who didn’t have to pay anything. And many graduate students are paid stipends to attend grad school and do not have to pay tuition at all.
This is outrageous and grossly unfair to US citizens.
I’m all for positive-sum free market meritocracy. If people, regardless of nationality, are able to generate value on free markets, they deserve to enjoy the rewards of that. However, US citizens shouldn’t be expected to foot the bill for high status career development of strangers.
It is not just Asian universities. Most good European and even Latin American universities are vastly more test based than the US. The idea that sports and summer volunteering should play a greater role in admissions than high test scores is laughable in 90% of the world. If only top universities worldwide weren’t screwed up on so many dimensions as well as mostly lacking in huge endowments, the Ivy League and other elites like Stanford wouldn’t stand a chance in higher ed. It’s one reason that foreign students often do better in first year grad programs than Americans unless they’re products of the most rigorous undergrad courses from the top universities. Note that even an HYP grad who merely does the minimum required for the econ BA degree is unlikely to perform as well as a top foreign student in the HYP Ph.d programs because the foreigner is likely to have had more and more rigorous math as part of their normal coursework.
I don’t have a problem with the idea that test scores aren’t EVERYTHING!, and that maniacal focus on test scores is a flaw and not a virtue (Xi Jianping gets it):
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Education/China-s-cram-schools-scramble-out-of-tutoring-as-crackdown-looms
The problem is that all the substitutes for test scores in the West are dumb as shit and worse then autistic focus on test scores.
In Bryan Caplans, “The Case Against Education”, it says:
> “If you apply your knowledge of Roman history, Shakespeare, real analysis, or philosophy of mind on the job, you have an odd job.”
Real Analysis is a foundational undergraduate math class that is required for any kind of higher math education. Bryan Caplan argues that higher math is extremely rarely used in the job market.
I have a pure math degree, I studied Real Analysis and lots of other math classes, I got perfect SAT/GRE math scores without studying, I work a tech job, and take graduate math courses at a prestigious public university part time. I suspect Caplan is right. Things like computer encryption use math, and mathy types like me love that stuff, but I’d guess around 99% of employed tech workers don’t use any higher math at all.
After discovering that their 2 loaves of bread per family policy left people starving the USSR has enacted a far reaching policy to educate more farmers on modern techniques and will soon be a world leading agricultural power house again.
Central planning is still central planning, the flaw in it is never to much or to few, but its entire existence.
Maybe I am just being paranoid.
China is a Marxist-Leninist state in competition with the USA.
China is adapting his education program to make it more powerful.
BLM is a Marxist-Leninist organization. It is pushing programs to make the US educational system inferior to China.
If he imagine that BLM is advancing China’s interests, it all makes sense.
Look at the hundreds of job openings at Tesla:
https://www.tesla.com/careers/search/?country=US
There are a few that require EE backgrounds, a ton that require Civil/Mechanical engineering, also a ton that require 2-year technical certificates rather than 4 year degrees. The EE requirement is probably the most math heavy. I see no jobs that require higher math at all.
I will note that in any discussion like this there is no mention of what the appropriate % of US born students there would be in these programs. The US has 4.25% of the world’s population, if it happened to have the best university system in the world one might imagine that the other 96.75% of the world could easily supply 50-75% of the top students in those areas without the world ‘getting ahead’ in any meaningful way.
Why should US taxpayers be obligated to pay for the advancement opportunities of complete strangers?
If universities weren’t run as parts of government, and operated as more free market institutions, I’d agree with you: build facilities all over the world and cater to humans all over the world without regard to nationality or geography. That would be a better model.
Existing US universities are built as a core part of US government. They are built and they operate on finances provisioned from the US government, and have the social status and official authority of the US government. Such institutions owe their existence to US residents and families and not foreigners.
In STEM, what the government/taxpayers are typically paying for is research, which has value regardless of who is performing the research. There might be important concerns regarding losing intellectual property to China or whomever, but that’s a different issue.
…research, … has value regardless of who is performing the research. There might be important concerns regarding losing intellectual property to China or whomever, but that’s a different issue.
I’d say it is tied together; especially if college in the US contributes to the pipeline of intellectual property flowing offshore.
There is government funded research. That’s a separate topic. Some research is worth far more than it costs, but a lot of research is not generating real value for society.
Universities themselves are dependent on enormous perks of government, even private universities are basically part of government.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but graduate degrees may be a bad metric for showing this.
I am a computer scientist at a major tech company, and most of my coworkers are of international origin.
Among my coworkers, foreign-born workers tend to have gotten an undergraduate degree in their native country and then a graduate degree in the U.S., whereas U.S.-born workers tend to have only an undergraduate degree from a U.S. university.
By the methodology cited here, 100% of my coworkers in my (admittedly small) sample of graduate degrees are foreign-born…but when looking at my coworkers by occupation, only around 80% are from abroad.
The example of my coworkers may aid your broader point, but using graduate degrees as a metric seems severely skewed.
My understanding is that STEM careers do not pay off particularly well, so maybe it is rational for US-born students to avoid them? A little math goes a long way (basic algebra, calculus and prob/statistics) because it’s useful in business, banking, etc. But math- or science-heavy careers don’t seem lucrative or fun. Who wants to be a postdoc for years?
Hmm. That’s not my understanding at all. What do you think pays off better? More lawyers? In my opinion, math- and science-heavy careers are lots of fun. And I had one. (Retired now.) The only time I didn’t enjoy it was when politics started intruding too much… In referring to postdocs, you’re really only talking about academic jobs, and I would agree with you that an academic career probably wouldn’t be much fun right now (and wasn’t for me in the past, either). But there are lots of other possibilities in industry and research organizations.
> But math- or science-heavy careers don’t seem lucrative or fun.
Lots of math/science/tech jobs are lucrative and fun.
I’ve seen both good and bad in the job market. Some math/science/tech jobs are dull, or stifling, or frustrating in that people don’t get to do what they envision doing. I’ve also seen really good outcomes were people get nicely paid jobs and are treated well. That’s probably a rarity, but that’s how most fields work. Most lawyers I know are quite miserable, and I don’t envy that field.