Denial of H1-B visas to India’s largest IT services exporters at all-time high
A lot of folks are -- often justly -- saying that we should be training more Americans for some of these jobs.<p>I worked for some time in a professional masters program that mostly has non-US enrollment, despite being in flyover land. To complete it costs a fair bit, though it&#x27;s lower-priced than similar such programs on the coasts, and when you get out especially if you&#x27;re an American student you&#x27;re often looking at $90k+ for starting salary (depends on a few factors). It&#x27;s a very remunerative field.<p>But we just can&#x27;t get many US students in! We&#x27;ve been trying to figure it out. US students mainly come in when they&#x27;ve reached a point at their company where they have a manager who says, You need these additional skills -- go to school to get them, and we&#x27;ll pay. I&#x27;m not talking &quot;learn JavaScript library blah&quot;, I&#x27;m talking stochastic calculus. The school part really is helpful because there&#x27;s a ton of theory that you don&#x27;t learn by doing the practical applications.<p>US citizen grads are placed so fast. There&#x27;s no such thing as a sure bet, but this grad program is a high-expected-value bet. And yet we just... can&#x27;t... get... Americans.<p>I think it&#x27;s the math. So many Americans are just scared of math. Some of our Chinese students &quot;know&quot; they&#x27;re &quot;just bad at math&quot; but they don&#x27;t see that as a particular obstacle; just need to study harder. Americans tend to see it as an inborn anatomical characteristic or something. But also it&#x27;s the cost of a master&#x27;s after taking on the crushing load of undergrad debt. Some of our students got their bachelors degrees for free in their home countries &amp; then just had to float the cost of this masters, which is less tuition-wise than 3 years of state college.<p>There are more structural problems than just &quot;companies, you should grow your own talent&quot;. I agree companies should do more: but if we really wanted a US society that fostered technical excellence, we could make sure our schools did that. We&#x27;ve made sure our schools foster football excellence, for instance.<p>And to get back to the direct topic: we&#x27;re seeing a ton of RFEs for our grads, and there is no other masters&#x27; program that does this stuff within a state and a half of us. You&#x27;ve got to drive 8 hours to get to the next one.