The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association.
A lot of American people have been raised with an in-built "success ideology". This "success ideology" is not actually based on current best practices but on the best practices and traditions of the elder generations. A lot of these best practices made sense in the 1950s-1960s but today do they still measure up?
The script to success in the 1950s was to stay out of trouble, go to college, get married, buy a home, have children, and save for retirement. Life was simpler back then where there only needed to be one breadwinner of the family (so only one had to go to college), and usually this would be the male. They called this approach the"nuclear family".
Today the families look very different. Women are now more likely to graduate from college than men (although women are a lot less likely to graduate with a degree in STEM). Women today make just as many career sacrifices as men once did yet the cost of living has gone up and instead of only one breadwinner being required now there are two breadwinners required to meet the same standard of living from the 1950s.
In the 1950s if a person graduated with a highschool diploma they were almost guaranteed a job. If a person graduated with a bachelors degree they could get a white collar professional job with a middle class life almost guaranteed. This led minorities, immigrants and others seeking integration to develop a culture of academic achievement, and in many cases obtaining a bachelors degree was a means of integrating into society.
By the 1980s and 1990s a bachelors degree became the new highschool diploma. The cost of education became so high that some of the smartest people in society didn't bother going to college. Those who did were told a bachelors degree isn't good enough anymore and the masters is the new bachelors, the new ticket to the middle class.
And here we are now in 2017 where even with a masters degree you can still be left homeless during a recession. No amount of education guarantees a job and now students are told it's all about STEM (science, technology, engineering, math). In other words people are told today that the ticket to the middle class is to be as technical as possible.
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.
What if there is no script? What if everything we were taught about "ticket to the middle class" were just propaganda? The same sort of propaganda that immigrants are told about streets of gold and "American dream"? What if by following the script it dooms the ordinary student to possibly hundreds of thousands in loan debt, bad credit,a mortgage they cannot afford, etc? And if they get married and have kids does it get any easier or happier?
A lot can be learned in graduate school and it is a status upgrade to have a degree, but is it worth the cost of a house? Could the same person start a business, or do something else with their time? Is graduate school still worth it for Americans? In some other countries college is free so the cost to benefit is different.
Disclosure: I obtained a graduate education in the US.