Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs
I have serious reservations about empowering universities to bestow green cards or residency upon would-be immigrants. I highly value the good people who will come to the US, but I don&#x27;t trust universities to handle this responsibility, as PhD programs have clearly become very abusive of their students.<p>Low participation among US citizens in graduate (especially doctoral) level STEM PhD programs is often attributed to poor math and science preparation in K-12 or college level education in the US. While there is some support for this explanation, a RAND study of US citizens with STEM undergraduate degrees and high GRE scores found that the aversion to PhD programs is rational and market based. In short, the aversion to PhD programs makes sense - even for those who are capable and prepared to enter them - when those students have other options. Professional school programs, including Law, MBA, and professional health care doctorates (MD, DDS, PharmD) have shorter completion times, standardized and consistent completion schedules, vastly lower attrition rates, better employment prospects, and higher salaries.<p>I&#x27;d like to draw a bit more attention to attrition rates. I was a doctoral student at UC Berkeley in Industrial Engineering - I mastered out to a good hob in industry, but it was not entirely voluntarily. The doctoral attrition rate was around 50% for my cohort. This is pretty typical, attrition rates are 35-50% for PhDs in science and engineering. By contrast, the attrition rate for the MD program at UCSF medical school is less than one half of one percent. This is pretty standard for elite law schools as well. It&#x27;s not an exaggeration to say that elite PhD programs in STEM have an attrition rate 70-100 times higher.<p>Now, every time I bring this up on HN, someone does point out (reasonably) that dropping out (especially mastering out) of a PhD program in, say, computer science is very different from dropping out of med school. Someone with a BS and MS in computer science from Berkeley faces a very different professional future in tech than someone who drops out of med school faces in medicine. However, these attrition rates are astoundingly high. They are so high that we need to ask these universities - if PhDs are in such critically short supply that we must grant you the power to bestow US residency on those who receive them from you, why are your attrition rates 100 times higher than a comparably elite law or medical school?<p>These programs <i>should</i> face a reckoning. When a job gets lousy, when a program gets abusive, the market tends to correct itself. Talented people abandon the field in favor of other paths, a shortage emerges, and employers (including universities) need to sweeten the deal to draw people back into the field. The RAND institute recommended several ways universities could make STEM doctoral degrees competitive with professional degrees. But as long as they can offer aa path to residency and citizenship that is denied through other paths, there&#x27;s no need to attract people with that choice. There&#x27;s no need for a market correction when the government will fix this by giving you control over the degrees people who would like to live and work in the United States are allowed to have.<p>In closing, I want to be clear I support a system for skilled immigration - the US needs this. However, I remain skeptical of the need to specifically privilege graduates of US stem programs, especially at the doctoral level. If we take this approach, expect people with choice to show even greater aversion to STEM PhDs.