Decline in Grad school admissions

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: vijay gill <vgill () vijaygill com>
Date: August 23, 2009 11:45:56 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Decline in Grad school admissions

Dr. Farber, for IP if you wish. What does the list thing of this  
article?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/23/foreigners-attending-us-grad-schools-way-down-wake-up-xenophobes/

It’s happening: Lou Dobbs’ dream come true and Silicon Valley’s worst
nightmare. We’re already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart
immigrants take their US educations and experience building companies
and creating technology back to their home countries.  But now,
xenophobia and the lack of any sensible H-1B visa policy is keeping
the world’s brightest minds from coming to the U.S. in the first
place.

U.S. grad school admissions for would-be international students
plummeted this year, according to the Council of Graduate Schools—the
first decline in five years.  The decline was 3% on average, thanks to
increases from China and the Middle East, but some countries saw
double-digit declines in interest in a U.S. education. Applicants from
India and South Korea fell 12% and 9% respectively—with students
turning their sights on schools in Asia and Europe instead.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Much of the world’s economic
growth—hence, jobs—is in emerging markets, the schools are far cheaper
and in many cases competitive academically, and then there’s the H-1B
issue. If America won’t allow a PhD just trained in our top schools to
work here and contribute to the economy—why come here and take on the
student loans to begin with?

Make no mistake: This is a huge blow for the United States, and
particularly Silicon Valley. It’s killing diversity in graduate
schools at a time future business leaders most need to understand
other countries, especially Asian ones. Xenophobic, anonymous cowards
may leave as much bile in the comments as they want: The reality is
one out of every four tech companies is started by an immigrant. In
the tech industry, immigrants have created more high paying jobs than
they’ve “stolen.”

And nearly every CEO will tell you how much added cost and hassle
there is in hiring a foreign-born worker—they do it because they
physically can not find enough appropriately skilled workers in the
U.S. (Below is an interview I did with LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman about
this very subject a few months ago, and he wrote a guest post on
TechCrunch discussing the issue as well.)

Indeed, a recent study by the Bay Area Council, the Campaign for
College Opportunity and IHELP showed that we’d need a 90% upswing in
people graduating with degrees in science, technology, math or
engineering to keep up with all the new jobs being created in that
discipline.  What created Silicon Valley was a culture of openness and
there is no future to Silicon Valley without it.

You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we
always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who
came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have
no birthright or natural lock on these things. Money and talent are
fungible assets that flowed to the U.S.—and specifically the
Valley—because that is where they were supported and rewarded.

Some people have blithely dismissed growth in markets like China and
India saying Silicon Valley will always be the hub for tech; that
everyone will come to us. Wake up: Because the numbers are showing
money and talent is increasingly going elsewhere.

(Flickr image by Stephen Pierzchala)




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