Coronavirus will end the golden age for college towns

https://www.chicagobusiness.com/opinion/coronavirus-will-end-golden-age-college-towns

by walterbell • 6 years ago

136 158 6 years ago

jakeogh• 6 years ago

Risk of coronavirus spreading in schools is 'extremely low' study finds: https://www.yahoo.com/news/risk-coronavirus-spreading-school...

arcticbull• 6 years ago

To be fair that's high schools and elementary schools. They're a different risk category, yet lower than colleges. College are really low risk too, though I haven't seen anything to indicate spread would be slow in a college setting.

trianglem2• 6 years ago

That makes no sense. All the kids are in very close proximity.

jansan• 6 years ago

Close proximity does not have to the the only factor, although all the world ist currently fixed on social distancing. How about children being less contagious? After all they are developing no symptoms at all in most cases.

sideshowb• 6 years ago

And to paraphrase a post doing the rounds in the uk, elementary school kids are great at social distancing and never randomly lick you

MattGaiser3• 6 years ago

The STEM grad student numbers are both astonishing and not when you remember how little they are paid.

MattGaiser3• 6 years ago

It will be impossible for engineering departments to replace many of these lost researchers. That in turn will force many labs to shutter or scale back, making college towns a less attractive investment destination for private companies.

This part made me curious. Is grad school not all that competitive to get into?

d-sc• 6 years ago

Well, it’s hard to find capable people for grad school. It’s not just a selection to pick some form of the best. To succeed as a grad school you need people that can make discoveries and play the academic game.

throwaway713• 6 years ago

Even before coronavirus, President Donald Trump's administration had been working to decrease the inflow of students from overseas

Sometimes I wonder if the U.S. is purposefully trying to move down in world rankings... I'm not sure why anyone would think it's a good idea to intentionally limit the opportunities to the best and hardest working people in the world; those opportunities will just spring up elsewhere instead. I have a theory that a society cannot maintain leading world standings without also leading in science and technology, and it's not long before the U.S. loses this (if it hasn't already). Most of the greatest recent technological advances are already driven by people born outside the U.S. that work within the country; it wouldn't surprise me if they decide that coming to the U.S. is just no longer worth the hassle.

SpicyLemonZest• 6 years ago

Some Americans definitely argue that the US should invest less time and effort into maintaining its international image.

WillPostForFood• 6 years ago

Or they think it is ultimately better for the US international image to educate its own people.

scarface74• 6 years ago

The long history of fear of “them” in this country is all about prioritizing prejudices over economics.

dylan604• 6 years ago

It's not just this country though. Every society has used some sort of "them" to cast blame on. Even subsets of society have their own "them". I'm not a head shrinker, but just like religion helps certain people feel okay about unknowable/non-understood parts of life, some people are just more comfortable being able to blame their ills on "them" even if it's unfounded blame.

ralph84• 6 years ago

the best and hardest working people in the world

That's not the majority of international students in the US. It's those whose parents can afford to pay for them to study abroad.

solveit• 6 years ago

But a good proportion of the best and hardest working people in the world are international students in the US.

jmeister• 6 years ago

US pulled ahead of the rest of the world in STEM during the wars. The brain drain of scientists fleeing Europe - exemplified by Einstein and Von Neumann joining IAS in Princeton - set up US in a dominant position that has only gotten stronger over time.

So it will take some time to lose that lead, and there will be push back from the immediate beneficiaries: DoD, national science labs, Tech sector. In fact some drastic parts of the recent immigration restriction plans were removed due to pressure from tech CEOs.

In the meantime this is a golden opportunity for Canada. Toronto and Montreal already have world-class CS research cluster which they can build on, and attract scientists frustrated with anti-immigrant sentiments in the US and EU.

jerrya3• 6 years ago

The highly successful model of using tax and tuition dollars to subsidize and plant the seeds for thriving local economies is getting hit from all directions at once.

Maybe schools can pay competitive wages to their researchers while state schools focus admissions on state students?

MattGaiser3• 6 years ago

That would mean a decline in revenues and an increase in costs. Where does the money come from?

pkaye• 6 years ago

Get rid of the excessive high paid administrators.

michaelbrave• 6 years ago

Football coaches have a rather large salary.

jerrya3• 6 years ago

Taxpayers are paying for the schools, the schools do contribute to the economy in a big way, but are also massive externalities on the communities. Perhaps by scaling back a big on admin and other costs the people will get a better bang for their buck -- as well as having their own kids gain the instruction.

I am not sure why state schools exist if not to teach the state students, esp. if taxpayers have to fund them. Is it strictly a jobs program then, to feed local profs, staff, restaurants and so therefore they have a duty to the taxpayer to just bring in the most income?

Simulacra• 6 years ago

It always bugged me that both universities I graduated from took in large numbers of high paying international students, in order to prop up huge salaries for administrators.

bilbo0s• 6 years ago

Just to point out what may not be so obvious, the vast majority of the non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "administrators".

For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically, it's the department for all of the IT people at the University. It's enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that's just one of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. There's Facilities. There's Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW these days. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on.

These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. (Or were necessary prior to covid, now? who knows?) Be that as it may, honest people can debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the overall cost structure being discussed. At Wisconsin, due to a multi year campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20.

Just pointing out that if you want to bring costs under control, getting rid of some dean and a professor is not gonna get you there when you have 20 or 30 systems analysts, programmers, db admins, or campus cops on that same payroll.

JamesBarney2• 6 years ago

These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary.

If tomorrow the government decided that every university would have to fund itself on half its current budget would universities cease to exist or would they just be different.

I'd say the latter. I'd agree they're necessary to how a college functions today, but not necessary to what we think of as the core functions that make a university a university.

Animats2• 6 years ago

the vast majority of the non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "administrators".

Stanford has a bureaucracy so big that it has its own campus, in Redwood City. 35 acres, 2700 staff, a gym, a pool, a bus line, an auditorium, and an art collection. That's only Phase I. It's growing.

This campus has no students. No professors. No labs. It's all support staff.

Stanford has only 2,276 faculty.

[1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/departments

1123581321• 6 years ago

Many of those departments are not necessary, at least not at their current sizes. Not everything university admin has tasked itself to do needs done.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20

8 admin workers for each faculty member? Yeah that's a ridiculous number.

Maybe why US universities have ridiculous tuition as well.

But hey, you gotta convince the students that the 6 figures tuition and the "campus life" is worth it right? Oh and don't forget parking is not included nor are the "books" that require a "code" for you to pass the class.

Edit: University College London has 7700 academic staff and 5375 non-academic staff. (it's a bit annoying but the data is there) https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he...

trianglem2• 6 years ago

It also subsidizes the tuition you have to pay.

xenihn• 6 years ago

You mean the tuition that has increased in order to keep pace with administrator salaries?

deathgrips4• 6 years ago

Gee, this is what subsidized looks like? Must be a lot cheaper than the tuition in other countries that don't have nearly as many international students :)

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

Then why does tuition increase so much every year even though numbers of international students increases every year?

notaphilosopher• 6 years ago

It also subsidizes largess such as unnecessary buildings and retreats. University department managers treat budgets as signs of status, and try to build as large of org chart pyramids as possible.

Source: I worked at a top 5 US university as an employee, on both the business and academic sides, for 7 years.

IfOnlyYouKnew2• 6 years ago

There's like five comments with this "huge salaries for administrators" theme. Is that some political party's talking point? Did it feature in some Netflix hit?

Because I can't quite see how it's an actual factor? If we're talking deans and university presidents, the numbers are just too low to make a difference for universities with tens of thousands of students. Plus, obviously, some Dean of Harvard Law might be earning millions but would still be underpaid relative to what they could command in the private sector.

If it's "administrators" as in "lowly" bureaucrats, how do they have the power to be given salaries beyond what's needed to attract them in the marketplace? If we compare their relative level of education with your average San Francisco Javascript coder, are their salaries still too high?

Speaking of COBOL: University IT staff, which would seem to be among the categories of "administration", is almost stereotypically underpaid compared to the private sector. Staying within the PhD comics universe, graduate students, postdocs, and other non-tenured faculty often have to fudge the numbers to delude themselves into believing they make more than minimum wage. This would also seem to disprove any theory that universities are particularly generous or incompetent when it comes to labor exploitation.

Beyond that, it seems strange how you are linking these two issues, of administrative salaries and foreign students. There is absolutely no reason to believe that money coming in via these students is different in any way to, say, grants or patent royalties or donations from alumni or really any source of income.

Foreign students pay more than their relative share of costs. Thus, they lower costs for everyone else. They take nobody's spot, but allow for more (subsidised) US students to attend.

This holds as long as an additional $1,000 made from foreign students does not, on average, result in admin salaries rising >$1,000. That would seem to be a pretty safe assumption, and I doubt anyone can come up with a plausible mechanism for why it should not be the case.

It really seems to me like you have two rather specific grievances, the choice of which I can't really explain except that I have a tingling sense they might have distant roots within the same corner of the ideological spectrum. And because these are your associations when the topic of universities comes up, or because you believe it helps to validate each, you've drawn some connection between the two.

But since neither is particularly well-tethered in reality, they really don't have much support to offer each other.

ggggtez• 6 years ago

You wrote a lot of text, but I think you are speaking from a position of ignorance or emotion, to be honest, on the topic of high salaries.

You seem to be arguing that it's impossible for anyone to be paid too much, because of the simple existence of the free market system.

But that way of thinking completely ignores the outcomes of that tuition spent. If other countries produce graduates that are the same or better, for less tuition, then you should be looking at that as a flaw in our system. That means the free market is not working efficiently, and more competition in the sector would drive prices down without loss of quality.

As for the questions about international students, I decline to comment, as I agree it's specious.

qu83rt• 6 years ago

Australia is quite different, but there's tax payer funded unis here paying their Deans over 1 million a year who claim they can't afford to pay people more than $40/hour casually to record video lectures for first year business statistic classes to be delivered to over 600 students/year across multiple countries. They've also spent millions upon millions moving their campus in to the city when they already own a really good campus 10 minutes drive from the city with lots of decent free parking around even for undergrads. They also announced this year that they're so poor they're going to cut 75% of either the classes or courses next year (not sure which). People who run tax payer funded institutions like that should be thrown in jail.

woofie11• 6 years ago

Both are well-grounded in reality.

Admin salaries aren't enough to raise tuition much for everyone. If a university president makes a megabuck, and the school has 5000 students, that's $200/student. If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student.

But that's not the point. Megabuck salaries draw in the wrong people for the wrong reasons. That dean of HLS you talk about: Should it be someone who retired from a high-profile law firm or government job and took a pay cut to help make sure a new generation of lawyers get mentored RIGHT? Plenty of people would do that. Or should it be someone looking to maximize quarterly KPIs and find ways to leverage that position for personal political/career/financial growth? That's the change which happened in elite academia in the past 25 years, with megabuck salaries.

And yes, universities do try to attract foreign students, especially into Master's programs, as cash cows. I'm not sure what's wrong with that -- people need educations, immigrants of this type grow economies, and universities need money. It seems like a win-win-win all around.

But there does get to be a problem when that money is managed by admins of the type described in the previous paragraph. More money doesn't make for better schools if it goes into spending hundreds of millions on fancy buildings, faculty clubs, and similar. General funds don't come with even the minimal financial controls of grants and donations.

michaelt• 6 years ago

That would be sources like https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...

More broadly, there seems to be a lot of money coming in as student fees, and very little going out in academics' salaries. If things in-classroom are so profitable, there must be a heck of a lot of out-of-classroom expenses going on.

yowlingcat• 6 years ago

This holds as long as an additional $1,000 made from foreign students does not, on average, result in admin salaries rising >$1,000. That would seem to be a pretty safe assumption, and I doubt anyone can come up with a plausible mechanism for why it should not be the case.

That's exactly what is happening, and the mechanism is simple. It's the original bundle and upsell model. It doesn't take terribly much imagination to consider why this might be the case:

- second largest purchase (maybe single largest purchase) most Americans now make in their life

- purchased when prefrontal cortices haven't fully developed (~18yo in most cases)

- sold as an "investment" to parents (you "need a bachelor's degree to get a good job")

- purchased as an investment by students (I want a career after college) but also as an "experience" (I need to party, mingle, socialize with the opposite sex for the only 4 year span of your life where I will ever experience actual freedom)

- financed with debt products guaranteed by the government

- .. but which often cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (!!)

Why wouldn't such a "product" balloon in breadth, depth and average cost given that it's an enormous industry? The US student debt market alone is ~$1.6T. To give a benchmark for comparison, the US mortgage market is $11T, and those consists of bonds securitized by assets.

There's like five comments with this "huge salaries for administrators" theme. Is that some political party's talking point? Did it feature in some Netflix hit?

Your argument boils down to "I can't haven't researched any of the details here and I can't come up with any off the top of my head so it must be the result of ideological astroturfing." In doing so, you completely ignore one of most insidious modern forms of legalized debt slavery. Don't reduce and flatten arguments you don't agree with. It's not just wrong, but it conditions you into ignorance and against engaging in a basic investigation of the details.

bluedino• 6 years ago

> stereotypically underpaid compared to the private sector.

Even if you aren't making the salary you could elsewhere, universities usually have pretty good working environments and benefits.

Free tuition, great retirement plans, good health insurance, lots of holidays, relaxed work schedules and dress codes.

OnlyOneCannolo• 6 years ago

I read my public university's annual finance reports, and there's been a shift away from steady general funds towards less secure non-general funds.

My take-away is that as the formerly safe and relatively simple general state funds dried up, universities invested more in securing funding through various creative means. Which requires more and better administration.

International student tuition is a big source of general funds. But attracting and supporting them takes some investment. So universities grow and they pay more for people who can better balance the books.

University finance is very diversified now. You can't directly see most of it. But you can see a bunch of foreigners walking around campus, and you can look up state employee salaries online. They're symptoms.

The problem is that finance is getting more complicated.

I think. This is just my layman's understanding.

chrisin2d• 6 years ago

My alma mater, the University of Illinois, made a uniquely astute and prophetic move in 2017: it purchased a 3-year $60m policy to insure against a drop in Chinese student enrolment in case of a political or health event. They foresaw trouble and hubris from the current administration. Lo and behold...

RickJWagner• 6 years ago

Wow. Great move for U of I, poor move on the insurance company's part.

axxl• 6 years ago

So, slightly more specifically it was the College of Business and College of Engineering only that did this. And since the policy expires June 1st of 2020 unless it got extended (couldn’t find any announcement that it did), I don’t know if the impact will have hit yet.

tnecniv• 6 years ago

The graduate student analysis doesn't seem right. I don't think the article understands the incentives of graduate students. Yes, there are lots of foreign graduate students, especially masters students. One big motivator for them studying in the US is that they want to work for a US company and / or immigrate. Moreover, the ones that want to pursue a PhD often choose institutions based on potential advisors. It seems very unlikely that these things are going to change in the next year or so. Schools might miss out on prospective students with a time table, but I'd be surprised if the situation in 2025 is significantly different from today.

I do see academic towns really hurting from the lack of undergrads. That's a big decrease in population, and even if most businesses are allowed to open in the fall, lots of universities will take conservative measures and not let undergrads back on campus --- dorms etc. being an ideal transmission environment.

addicted• 6 years ago

Those things have already changed though.

Students graduating this year will not be able to remain and work in the US because the US has stopped processing work visas and are explicitly preventing immigrants from getting new jobs.

This is in addition to the fact that international student numbers had already dropped over the past couple of years thanks to US hostility towards immigrants.

unishark2• 6 years ago

Students graduating this year will not be able to remain and work in the US because the US has stopped processing work visas and are explicitly preventing immigrants from getting new jobs.

What story are you referring to? I've seen stories around the edges of this kind of thing for H1B's, but nothing so definite.

A student graduating now wouldn't need one yet anyone because they get two years of OPT if they were in STEM.

mordymoop• 6 years ago

Perhaps the lack of foreign graduate students willing to do high skilled labor for $12k/year will incentivize universities to begin to pay rational wages to graduate student researchers. Then American students might actually find it economically appealing to get graduate degrees.

StillBored2• 6 years ago

I think both Austin and Raleigh have grown large enough that the "college town" effect is in the noise. In both cases the underlying economy is doing more to drive itself than the college is at this point. In those cases 40 years ago it would have made a big difference, but today better examples would have been places like College Station TX, or Gainsville FL, where the college remains the primary employer. UT Austin is the 10th largest employer in a town with a pretty self reinforcing tech economy, and a very long tail of national brand SMBs.

https://www.austinchamber.com/economic-development/austin-pr...

ramraj07• 6 years ago

Bryan/College Station is already growing beyond A&M for sure, even outsourcing companies like Cognizant are opening offices there, not to mention the oil (that might be a big if now of course) jobs around.

vuldin• 6 years ago

I don't see this at all. Bryan/College Station exist entirely because of A&M, and these towns would do the same as almost every other small town in that area if it weren't for A&M.

lsiebert• 6 years ago

Aren't Austin and Raleigh state capitals too?

ashtonkem2• 6 years ago

Sometimes state capitals aren’t economically that powerful. Denver and Columbus are certainly positive cases, but Springfield and Albany are pretty middling compared to the biggest cities in the same state.

strict9• 6 years ago

Raleigh is a college town around the college (Western Blvd to Hillsborough St) for sure, but there are enough tech jobs (Citrix, Red Hat, many smaller shops) and state government to keep things going regardless of how universities are affected.

This is to say nothing of RTP and other areas outside of downtown.

Raleigh is well-positioned to handle this and while NC State is a huge draw, not the only game in town.

eggsnbacon13• 6 years ago

In both of those cities the colleges have become feeder schools to the tech industry. And they're both desirable places to live on their own.

Austin is gorgeous. Semi-arid but the big river gorge running through it means downtown is lush. Big hills/mountains a mile west. Tons of nature, water. Colorful history. Great downtown thats a regional vacation destination. Within 3 hours of Houston, Dallas, the ocean, and only 45 mins from San Antonio. That means 50 million people within a few hours, densest area you can find besides east and west coast. And of course the capital, which means a lot more in Texas than elsewhere due to secessional tendencies (ex the TX state capitol is taller than US capitol)

Tech triangle is again in a gorgeous area. A few hours from NC coast and Blue Ridge mountains. Weather is an interesting hybrid between cold-winter northeast and humid deep south. It doesn't get very hot or cold. Probably the closest you can get to west coast weather in the east, and the nearby coast and mountains heighten the illusion. Nicely positioned for business, Miami and NYC are less than 2 hours by plane.

They're both safe with great weather and a low cost of living (for tech hotspots). I have deeply considered living in both.

ghaff4• 6 years ago

Depends on what you like in terms of "great weather." They're both pretty hot and humid in the summer. (Not as bad as some places but...) So long as you're OK with that sort of weather though, they're two pretty nice areas.

SomeoneFromCA• 6 years ago

I found Austin insufferably boring and hipster. San Antonio and Dallas felt much more authentic and fun.

seanmcdirmid4• 6 years ago

Austin is not semi arid. Salt Lake City and maybe Denver are semi arid, but Austin is humid in the summer and almost swampy in overall climate. You aren’t going to see a hint of beige until you get way into west Texas.

fredophile3• 6 years ago

Out of the three cities in the research triangle I'd say Raleigh is the least like a college town. I'd expect Chapel Hill to be much more affected by this with the impact on Durham being somewhere between the other two cities.

immy• 6 years ago

Champaign-Urbana IL, pictured in the article but not named, is characteristic of a campus that I think will be impacted. 32,000 undergrads, 14,000 graduate students, tons of research departments, and increasing (til now) corporate satellites.

bayesian_horse• 6 years ago

Even if remote learning MAY (it may not) become the norm for higher education, parents who can afford it will still send their children someplace where children who engage in higher educationing congegrate. Probably college towns.

rvz• 6 years ago

The generation from the swine flu pandemic of 2009 would like to have a word with this author.

buf• 6 years ago

Zoom and YouTube weren't as big, mate.

gerland• 6 years ago

This is a very hard situation for the affected, but I cannot look at it any other way than a positive change. My own opinion is that modern universities are a mix of ponzi scheme with stockholm syndrom. It's a bubble that should have burst a long time ago. From institutions of education and widening of perspecitve they morphed into thought-culling money making machines. I think we underestiumate just how many things changed for the better thanks to the virus.

drunkpotato• 6 years ago

From institutions of education and widening of perspecitve (sic) they morphed into thought-culling money making machines.

How did you come to that conclusion? I would agree on the money-making machine part, but I had rather a different and mostly positive college experience on the education side, both in undergrad and graduate school.

saiya-jin• 6 years ago

You can't bag all higher education just because you don't like some narrow part of it (ie IT-related). Any white collar job with legal responsibility, or doctors have some good reasons to be as they are (maybe not in ideal state, but that's another topic).

Would you trust an architect who aced some online course with a building that you will live in? Or doctor to perform your surgery?

thrower123• 6 years ago

It's really just accelerating what was going to happen in a decade or so anyway when the demographic bulge passed. Colleges are to some extent wildly overprovisioned, as well as overextended, and many were starting to fail before SHTF.

EGreg• 6 years ago

People are thinking about this the wrong way.

Masks reduce R0 so much that in Austria the infection rate plummeted after Apr 6 when masks were required.

The lockdowns are a last resort, the result of a public policy failure to contain the virus.

The entire US establishment including the CDC, Fauci even Mike Pence said until mid March not to wear or buy masks. Mind you, not even the cheap surgical ones that are 50 in a box.

I have pamphlets in NYC written by the city’s health agency Feb 26th that insist there are no confirmed cases in NYC and the risk to new yorkers remains low.

NO ONE was willing to get ahead of this thing and look silly requiring masks when there was no emergency.

So the outbreaks were swift and led to exactly the lockdowns we were in now.

We will face this situation again as we emerge from the lockdowns.

We can’t rely on government to create a clear framework for businesses to follow. We need businesses to step up and sell a standardized solution.

At Qbix we are doing our part. Contact me if you want to help in your community.

Even the most staunch libertarian can’t say no when a private building enforces a mask policy in their lobby and in public areas like elevators. No amount of social distancing will help in elevators - only masks can.

But the stupid attitude is “a mask can’t protect me, so why bother?” No!! The masks are to prevent everyone from spewing virus particulates into the air.

Seriously this is the 21st century and several months after China got the epidemic, the richest countries in the world are still complaining about not enough masks.

Meanwhile in Taiwan the buildings are handing them out and you can drop them off. That’s how it should be.

gruez• 6 years ago

NO ONE was willing to get ahead of this thing and look silly requiring masks when there was no emergency.

AFAIK it was because there was a mask shortage and giving masks to healthcare workers provided greater utility than giving them to everyone else.

tech-historian2• 6 years ago

According to the chart in the article, >75% of grad students in EE and computer science at American colleges are international students.

That is a shocking number to me. Entire grad programs are in serious jeopardy if the worst case scenario plays out.

nine_zeros• 6 years ago

That is a shocking number to me. Entire grad programs are in serious jeopardy if the worst case scenario plays out.

Wait till you realize how much young engineering and sciences talent would remain outside the US and how much investment they will attract.

JPKab• 6 years ago

Those grad programs are too large. The main draw for international students is often the visa, and the universities treat them as cash cows, often providing poor quality product.

A friend of mine in a graduate physics program recently told me that he felt that 90 percent of the students lacked the aptitude to capitalize on the program at all, but that the university was financially incentivized to keep them in.

Obviously, this applies to both foreign and domestic students, but the point is that these programs are grossly inflated.

ecopoesis• 6 years ago

This so much. I live in Boston so I end up interviewing a lot of new Northeastern grads. Foreign Masters students are the absolute worst cohort of candidates I deal with. The vast majority cannot write fizz buzz without help. A Northeastern Masters in CS seems to be nothing more then a way to buy a visa.

This is doubly sad because Northeastern BS in CS grads are probably the most successful group I interview and hire.

vmchale• 6 years ago

That is a shocking number to me.

Makes sense. American universities are top-tier and lots of talent is abroad!

CS and EE in particular carry over in another country.

smm2000• 6 years ago

Many foreigners treat PhD and especially Masters program as a way to get visa and access to USA - doing actual research is secondary goal. $30k/year is poverty wage in US but solid pay for somebody from eastern europe, India or China. Programs will be in jeopardy because they won’t be able to do visa/salary arbitrage which could positive thing and lead to more Americans in those programs.

tsycho• 6 years ago

Doing a Master's/PhD from a good university isn't a cakewalk for these foreign students. It's not something you just buy and forget with your parents' money - you have to work quite hard, compensate for language and other educational gaps, and then succeed in landing a good job and the H1B lottery. It's a risky investment.

America must ask itself why its students are not interested in grad school. Unaffordability (especially after an expensive undergrad) is absolutely a major issue, but from my experience at an Ivy, very few Americans were interested in grad school. And maybe that's fine, because doing research* is probably something that makes sense only for a small percentage of students. So there may not be a problem here, unless increasing this is an actual goal.

Without explicit measures, and with a more globally accessible approach to admissions, it stands to reason that the PhD demographics would move towards global population ratios, adjusted for access and affordability. And that's been the secular trend of the past 20 years.

*Master's is not research, and is primarily a way for universities to make money.

norswap• 6 years ago

It's funny to me how wrong all of the answers of this thread are: These programs are too broad. / The talent is abroad. / This is a ticket for a Visa.

Those may all be more or less true, but the broader issue of why these programs are mostly populated by foreigners is that they're too expensive (for master degrees) and vastly underpaid compared to market rates for PhD degrees. (Consider the strike at UC Santa Cruz by PhD students for a wage that would allow them to cover their living expenses without having to commute hours to campus.)

US students, which most likely have already contracted debt to finance their undergraduate degree will simply go get a job that both pays better and may boost their carreers more, and may come with more social status, given the current wave of anti-academic sentiment.

andonisus• 6 years ago

The programs are so expensive because there is such a large supply (or rather demand) from wealthy international students, even if they college or university is far less prestigious than this cost would otherwise suggest.

chias• 6 years ago

Having gone through a PhD program myself, this smacks of truth.

In the PhD program I went through, it was predominantly populated by foreign students and Americans whose parents paid for their undergrad (like me). Unlike in the United States, foreign college graduates typically don't have a massive amount of debt to pay off. When you graduate college and owe $35-120k in student loans, deciding between "lets get a job with actual pay" versus "lets make essentially no money for another 4-8 years" is a very easy question to answer, and it doesn't favor going to grad school.

If you're American, your options are (1) very cheap undergrad, which makes it more difficult to go to grad school, (2) large amounts of debt, which makes it infeasible to go to grad school, or (3) have had your undergrad paid for, which is inaccessible to most.

qppo• 6 years ago

Idk about everyone else but personally, the opportunity cost of a graduate degree makes it unlikely I'll ever go back and get one.

siberianbear• 6 years ago

I was very active in the university recruiting effort at large Silicon Valley for many years. I went to tons of university career fairs. This statement is wholly true. At the undergraduate, the majority of students were US citizens (but there were still a lot of foreigners). But at the master's and PhD levels, virtually everyone was a foreigner.

hakfoo• 6 years ago

It does seem like there'd be an obvious pivot from student visas. "Loved your college experiencem? Stay in the US! Here's a two year work permit, and if you get a position in your field, maintain it for 12 months, and show you're paying down any student debt you've accrued, you can convert it to a green card.

rapjr9• 6 years ago

One of the reasons many foreign grad students come to the US now is because there are so many foreign grad students they can find a community of fellow nationals which makes them feel less isolated and helps them in coping with a new culture. As the number of foreign students declines there will be less community which will make coming to the US less desirable. I worked at Dartmouth in CS and most of the grad students were foreign, at first mainly from China, but later many from India also.

My understanding is that a big part of the economic hit for universities is the profit from providing housing. If undergrads are not on campus, the profit vanishes. Dartmouth has historically cut staff and expenses rather than use it's endowment to weather crisis. They say it's because much of the endowment is tied to specific purposes, like building new buildings with the donors names affixed there-on. So a big endowment may not be of much value in weathering the current crisis if you can't spend it and your cash flow dries up.

sneeuwpopsneeuw• 6 years ago

Side Note: Can we all appreciated that this website requires 112 of its 349 requests to load javascript from 47 different domains.

leonroy• 6 years ago

Good grief, you weren't kidding.

Page size is 11.64MB without any ad blocking and 3.91MB with. For a 3 image article with ~600 words 3.91MB is still a bit much.

blaser-waffle• 6 years ago

"appreciate"

dkryptr• 6 years ago

I'm not familiar with website development to know whether you're being sarcastic or not. Is it actually a good thing?

stjo• 6 years ago

Not at all. You can design a beautiful “modern” site with orders of magnitude less resource requirements with ease.

tomatotomato37• 6 years ago

I find news sites to be consistently horrid in terms of bloat. One of the reasons I switched from NoScript to uMatrix is the latter has a scrollbar because using NoScript on CNN would end up with the menu literally blowing past the bottom of my screen.

alpineidyll3• 6 years ago

These articles claiming new normal ignore the fact that having a pandemic per century is normal. America of four months ago is an America after many pandemics, and that includes college towns.

Journalists just want things to say they think people might read.

Coronavirus will end the golden age for college towns

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