Foreign Graduate Students and Industry Employment

I read an article in Bloomberg (PDF) recently; it was titled: "How Foreign Students Hurt U.S. Innovation". (The URL for the article reveals a more aggressive title: "Glut of Foreign Students Hurts U.S. Innovation".)

The article builds the following case:

1. Though there are plenty of domestic STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) undergraduates, there are very few domestic graduate students.  
2. Domestic graduate students are virtually non-existent because
1.  Wages in the STEM fields (academic and industry) are lower than they should be due to the oversupply of foreign graduate students.
2. Universities choose foreign students over domestic students "because they can pay" (versus those students who pay the much reduced, tax-dollar subsidized in-state rates).
3. Domestic STEM holders of bachelor's degrees are being diverted into non-STEM fields due to lower wages in STEM fields.
4. To encourage development of our STEM talent pool, we should focus on the domestic students by removing competition from foreign students.  This will reduce the supply of STEM workers, raise wages, and provide an economic incentive for domestic students to continue in their STEM education.

I am a STEM graduate student now, worked for eight years previously in a STEM job, and since I am working towards being a professor in a STEM field, I think I can safely say I have the means, motive, and thanks to this blog, the opportunity to speak to this issue. Here are my opinion-neutral observations (as much as such things exist).

Item 1 - There are a lot of foreign students in the graduate program at Wichita State.  All of my graduate classes here have had far more foreign students than domestic. I would guess that most have been over 80% foreign students. In some, I am the only domestic student in the class.  Most of the faculty in our department are foreign-born.  I would expect this to be the case in many universities around the nation though I only have my experience at conferences to extrapolate from; no hard data.

My time in the engineering workforce also showed that there are a lot of foreign workers.  Not near as high as Wichita State but I would guess a that one-quarter to one-third the department was employed through a work visa. I don't know exactly how these visas are granted but it is clear that my employer was going to some amount of legal effort to get these foreign-born engineers jobs in the US.

Item 2 - Universities do enjoy getting the extra funds that foreign students provide.  As state support of public universities and colleges has diminished over the years, these institutions have become more dependent on private donations and student-derived income to continue as a going concern. The amount of student-derived income is much larger for foreign students than domestic (in-state) students so universities have an incentive to admit more of these higher-paying students. 

Item 3 - Wages in the STEM fields are lower for those who posses STEM skills.  For reasons that are still not clear to me, the invisible hand of capitalism has recently valued positions in finance (for example) over those in engineering and if a student is simply looking for the highest-paying job, they won't choose STEM.  For the amount of effort and difficulty it takes to graduate with a respectable STEM degree, the STEM industry pay does not seem proportional.  This is not to say that STEM workers are universally impoverished, just that the cost/benefit trade-off does not provide a strong incentive for students to pursue STEM fields.

In these fundamental ways I can agree with the article. I don't know enough to speak very well to many of the specific facts cited in the article but my experience generally echos sentiments alluded to by the author, an academic himself.  My personal experience makes it easy for me to believe the general trend of items 1 through 3 above.  Its item 4 that gives me pause.

The author believes that limiting the number of foreign students will reduce competition for domestic students who desire to enter graduate school and allow them to continue on with their education.  To make this case well, the author would need to provide some evidence of a direct connection between reduced domestic graduate student enrollment and increased foreign graduate student enrollment. In other words, are domestic graduate students being pushed out?  The article implies this is the case but provides no evidence.  My question: do domestic students want to go to graduate school but can't get in because all the slots are taken by foreign students?  I don't know.  

Clearly universities have the financial incentive to admit more of the higher-paying foreign students.  If the financial needs of the universities are the only barrier for domestic students, the solution is simple: remove the incentive for universities to balance their books through income from foreign students by providing more public funds. If the admissions office is being run with the university finances as the key factor, tax money from the states will change the equation. This will only work, though, if money is truly the only barrier for domestic graduate students; I suspect it is not.

The author also seems to equate a strong STEM workforce with a strong STEM academic workforce.  The F-1 visa program is for students and the article deals strictly with this type of visa.  The H-1B is the common foreign worker visa and is completely separate from the student visa. A glut of F-1 visas may in fact be the core factor in the lack of domestic STEM graduate students but what about all of the STEM employment options outside the university? It is entirely possible for the U.S. to have a thriving STEM industry that is achieving many of the things the politicians want while having a limited representation of domestic STEM students in graduate school.

Said simply: I believe the power of the American STEM industry does not primarily lie in advanced degrees.  Those degrees help and may even be a central piece in forming a the business but it takes more than an academic understanding of an issue to make a company successful. Entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and daring ideas don't come simply from working towards a PhD; the gap between a good idea well proven through a dissertation and a game-changing company is large.  The problem with the STEM industry in this country cannot be so simply tied to foreign graduate students.

Snow Day

Over the past 24 hours Wichita has received about a foot of snow.  This is enough snow to:

• Force me to shovel the landing strip that is our driveway.
• Get Katie home from work early yesterday and let her work from home today.
• Force the closure of Wichita State University starting yesterday afternoon and continuing into today (not that it keeps me from having to work on my dissertation).
• Give our dogs plenty of snow in which to play.
• Force the use of our kerosene heater to dry out the dogs after the aforementioned activities.

Photographic evidence:

Garage Heating

Graph from yesterday's home temperature measurements:

Of particular note are the garage (dark blue) and attic (green) traces. There are three bumps in the graphs that mirror each other and are co-incident; these events are when the garage door opened to let a car in or me out to shovel snow. The two areas are connected by an access hatch that I tend to leave open, allowing air to flow between them easily.  During these bumps in the graph, the garage temperature falls and the attic temperature rises.  The warm air that has formed in the garage is displaced into the attic by the cold air moving in through the open door.  When the door closes, the temperatures in both places begin moving back to their former state.

This leads me to to observations:

1. The air flow through the garage is not very large when all the doors are closed.  The space is far from air-tight but it must be tight enough because the garage warms back up once the doors close.  The cold air from the outside isn't getting in near as well.  And where is that heat that is warming the garage coming from....
2. The insulation between the living space and the garage could be better. The heated house is the only source of energy that could be warming the garage after the door closes.  This has implications for the summer; keeping the garage cool by opening doors and allowing air to flow will hel reduce the cooling demand in the living space.

The Best Cup of Coffee I've Never Had

During one of the podcasts I regularly listen to an off-topic conversation developed regarding how to make coffee.  The podcasters claimed the following:

• Most people have never had a good cup of coffee because most coffee is made poorly.
• Coffee, straight, black, simple coffee tastes great when it is made properly.
• The formula for good coffee is not very complicated but it can't be mass produced easily/cheaply.

1. Filtered almost boiling water.
2. Good beans.
3. Burr-grinding.
4. Aeropress coffee maker.

To me coffee has always smelled good and tasted terrible.  I love coffee-flavored anything, really, and am sure that I would enjoy coffee with enough cream and sugar in it.  This all seems like cheating, though, and the prospect of straight-up coffee that needs no doctoring is appealing.  I'm tempted to experiment with the above formula but the cost of the equipment is too high to take a gamble at this point.  So I'm asking around, trying to find somebody who thinks they can make a cup of coffee that is so good nothing needs to be added.  Any coffee perfectionists out there that want to try to convert me?

Sunday Bake-Off

Yesterday my wife and I found ourselves in an inadvertent bake-off with/against each other.

My entry was the product of my (three week old) weekly tradition of making a loaf of bread on Sunday afternoon.  I use a bread machine which is, obviously, very convenient and easy to use as well as able to produce excellent results. This week we decided to try an oatmeal bread and of all the alleged oatmeal breads I've had, this is the first I can recall that definitively had a distinct oatmeal taste.  My wife loved it.  A lot.

There was symmetry in our enjoyment of baked goods, though, as I found her entry fantastic: apple crisp/cobbler. We couldn't remember if she had made any baked apple deserts this winter; this is clearly a sign that such a treat was in order.  The apples were delicious and the cobbler top had an excellent chewy and crunchy texture simultaneously.

Best way to end a Sunday.

Reading Academic Papers

Today marks the day that I have been working on my dissertation for one month.  By "working" I mean that I have been devoted full-time to the endeavor; last semester the time I put in was severely limited due to the course I was teaching.

And what I have been doing the past month: reading, mostly.  A little bit of writing as I try to organize, collect, and synthesize the material I've been reading.  But mostly reading.

Reading academic papers is a bit like reading poorly written textbooks.  The value in the writing is not in how it is said but in what is trying to be communicated; there is no poetry in these papers.  The papers are not entertaining, there is no florid language; at best, they are interesting because of the results they present and the conclusions they purport.

"Reading" is even a strong word for what I'm doing; mostly its just skimming.  Read the abstract, maybe a little bit of the introduction, read the section headings, look at the tables, charts, and graphs (even graduate students like pictures more than words), and slowly skim the results and conclusions.   I highlight any important details I happen to catch, rate the paper on its expected usefulness, and sort it into folders that I've set up for my dissertation.  I "read" most papers I for the first time in less than ten minutes, more interesting ones that I know will be useful I spend a bit more time on, looking for specific details.

So how many of these have I "read" this past month: 214.

I've got 32 in the queue and am constantly adding more, usually referenced from a paper I'm currently reading.  There is also a significant subarea of my research I haven't specifically been reading in so you can be sure that there will be more reading once these 32 are done.

Flat Band-Aid

I was able to successfully use an emergency bicycle tire inflator on the way home from school today.

What you see above is a bicycle multi-tool with an integrated compressed-air cylinder (the brass-colored, shiny part in the middle).  In case of an emergency flat that needs re-inflating, put the red nozzle at the top over the stem of the tube and press down.  The compressed air will inflate the tire quickly and you'll be off and cycling again.

At least that's how it is supposed to work.  The first time I had a flat after purchasing the miracle worker, I couldn't figure out how to operate it. Aften ten minutes of puzzling, I gave up and walked the last two miles home.  Once home I spent another fifteen minutes messing with it and still had no success.  The break-through came when I realized I didn't know how to replace the compressed-air cylinder; figuring that out revealed that the cylinder had been installed upside down (I assume to prevent accidental discharge during shipping). I flipped it over and a test yielded a short blast of cold air.

So today when my front tire started deflating an hour from home, I knew what to do.  I pulled this little guy out and in less than a minute the tire had inflated enough to get me the rest of the way home.  Not only did it save me a bit of walking time but a successful field test is always reassuring.  

The big question now: do I need to replace the cylinder or is it good for another use? There is really no way to tell so I'll probably just grab another cylinder and keep it in my bag for now.