Graduate Students in the Engineering Fields

The NY Times has a piece on the increasing percent of engineering graduate students who are foreign. They state:

At the undergraduate level, 80 percent are United States residents. At the graduate level, the number is reversed: About 80 percent hail from India, China, Korea, Turkey and other foreign countries.

True fact, but why? And who is paying?

Having spent an almost sixty year career in and out of Academia I can make the following observations.

1. In the late 1950s the US Government made a major push to create more engineers. There were scholarships and institutions were incentivized to follow through. There were scholarships and fellowships. My personal out of pocket fees were often low. If I recall, MIT annual tuition, both semesters, in 1960 was less than $1,000. Grad school was free since you had some form of fellowship. Today there is no such advantage for Americans.

2. Most of the grad students were first generation types. Lots of fellow New Yorkers, most had little "family money" and many were even married with families. No longer the case.

3. Jobs were available, especially for Graduate students with good degrees. Programmers were not in demand, solid state engineers, RF engineers, and the like. People who built things not social media types.

4. Silicon Valley was cheap. Lots of housing and at reasonable prices. Start ups made stuff, not software. Millionaires came from oil and the like, not Wall Street and software.

Now in today's world there are major observations:

1. Almost ll high tech grad students are funded by the Government. Yes, those 80% of the foreign students are funded by the taxpayers. Those Chinese, Iranian, Syrian, grad students are funded by US tax dollars. They finish on our dime and return home. In the case of the Chinese students they often bring this expertise back to Chinese companies and then directly compete with the US. That is true in both for commercial and military entities. One should always remember Yamamoto and Harvard and Pearl Harbor!

2. US undergrads are often broke when the finish undergrad and thus are pressured to work and pay back the loans as well as taxes. As a side note the new Trump Tax makes the student loan no longer deductible. The taxes will then go to support the 80% of the grad students who are foreign. This is the way Washington works.

So what can be done? Simple, look back to the 50s. Eisenhower may very well turn out to be our greatest President. Fund undergrad tech students. We really do not need more fine arts types. Political Science may be good but it just leads to more lawyers! Don't we have enough. Then make it a level playing field for US citizen students, if the taxpayer is footing the bill, the taxpayer should have preference. Put a finger on the scale for US students.